Narrative Situation

Narrative situation

Pattern of narrative features such as voice and focalization. Helps analyze how a story is told and perceived.

Voice

The question of who speaks in a narrative (Genette's term).

Focalization

The question of who sees or perceives events in a narrative, i.e. the perspective the story is filtered through.

Gerard Genette

French structuralist theorist who focused on voice and mood. Wrote Narrative Discourse (1972), the founding text of modern narratology.

Franz Stanzel

Austrian literary theorist who proposed typological narrative models based on relationship, distance, knowledge, and voice/focalization.

Stanzel's narrative framework

Examines four factors: relationship or involvement, narrative distance, knowledge and reliability, and voice and focalization.

Authorial narration

Narrative situation defined by an "authorial narrator," a narrator who is not, and never was, a character within the story (heterodiegetic).

Heterodiegetic

Describes a narrator who exists outside the story world and is not one of its characters.

Olympian perspective

The god-like, all-seeing quality of an authorial narrator, who can enter every character's mind, know the past, and predict the future.

Narrative intervention

The authorial narrator stepping between reader and story, e.g. addressing the reader directly, giving moral reflections, or interrupting to add background.

Authorial "I"

Even when an authorial narrator says "I," they stay authorial, because that "I" tells the story from outside rather than living through the events (e.g. Henry Fielding in Tom Jones).

Typical authorial story pattern

Narrator acts as a moderator or instructor, common in 18th and 19th century novels of social criticism; the plot is usually tightly controlled since the narrator already knows where it is going.

First-person narration

Narrative situation where the narrator is also a character in the story world.

Narrating-I

In first-person narration, the present voice doing the telling, usually older and more reflective.

Experiencing-I

In first-person narration, the past self who lived through the events, directly involved and less aware of how things would turn out.

I-as-protagonist

First-person narrator type who is the main character and central focus of events.

I-as-witness

First-person narrator type who is a minor character observing the major events.

Retrospective narration

First-person mode told with hindsight, e.g. "Had I known then what I know now…"

Limited/naive narration

First-person mode told strictly from the experiencing-I's point of view, using only the knowledge available at that time.

Epistemological limitations of first-person narrators

Cannot witness events happening in different places at once, cannot know the future, cannot normally narrate their own death, and cannot know other characters' thoughts with certainty (the "problem of other minds").

Postmortem narration

Rare exception where a first-person narrator tells the story after dying (e.g. Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Sebold's The Lovely Bones).

Narrative distance

The temporal and psychological gap between the narrating-I and the experiencing-I. Usually the narrating-I is older and wiser, but exceptions like dementia narratives exist.

Story of initiation

Common first-person pattern showing a young person's move from ignorance to experience, often through a first sexual experience, ritual, journey, or trauma. Failure of initiation is also possible.

Skaz narrative

A literary form imitating oral storytelling, marked by conversational tone, oral syntax, an implied listener, and phatic/emotional language (e.g. Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye).

Susan Lanser's gradient of narrator involvement

Ranks narrators from least to most involved: uninvolved narrator, uninvolved eyewitness, witness-protagonist, minor character, co-protagonist, sole protagonist (autodiegesis).

Homodiegesis

Narration where the narrator is part of the story world, typically in first person.

Autodiegesis

Narration where the narrator is the story's protagonist.

Fictional autobiography

First-person narrative where the narrator recounts their own life or an episode of it (e.g. Jane Eyre, David Copperfield).

Figural narration

Narrative situation told through a third-person "reflector" character, also called an internal focalizer or figural medium, with a covert (hidden) narrative voice.

Reflector-mode narration

Broader term than figural narration; the story is filtered through either a third-person reflector character or a first-person internal focalizer.

Figural narrator, term to avoid

The phrase "figural narrator" should not be used. Stanzel calls that narrative agency a covert authorial narrator; Genette calls it a covert heterodiegetic narrator.

Typical figural story pattern

Shows action through a reflector figure's eyes, often begins in medias res with little exposition, and gives a psychologically realistic but distorted or restricted view of that character's perceptions and thoughts.

Referentless pronouns

Figural device where a story opens with a pronoun ("he," "she") before the character's identity is revealed, showing the narrator's hidden presence (e.g. Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls).

Familiarizing article

Figural device that presents new information as if the reader already knows it, creating instant immersion (e.g. Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, "She would buy the flowers herself").

Slice-of-life story

Figural narrative form that covers only a very short stretch of a character's life, sometimes just a single day (e.g. Woolf's Mrs Dalloway).

Epiphany

A sudden, intense insight, often triggered by an ordinary object or event, out of proportion to its logical significance. Term adapted by James Joyce in Stephen Hero.

Pseudo-epiphany

An epiphany that turns out to be deceptive, misguided, or wrong (e.g. Mansfield's "Bliss").

Mirror trick

Device that reveals a reflector figure's physical appearance indirectly, through their own reflection in a mirror, instead of direct narrator description.

We-narrative

Peripheral category where the narrator speaks as part of a collective group; the experiencing self belongs to a group of internal focalizers (e.g. Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily").

You-narrative (second-person)

Peripheral category where the protagonist is addressed as "you," either homodiegetically (narrator addressing their own past self or another character) or heterodiegetically (an outside narrator addressing a character or the reader).

Simultaneous narration

Peripheral category where the narrator tells the story exactly as it happens, in present tense, without knowing the ending (e.g. The Yellow Wallpaper).

Camera-eye narration

Purely external, behaviorist style that records only what can be seen or heard, with no access to characters' inner thoughts (e.g. Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin).

Authorial-figural narration

Mixed-mode situation where a text combines features of authorial and figural narration, creating borderline or transitional passages (e.g. Bradbury's "Composition," James's What Maisie Knew).

Nick Carraway (The Great Gatsby)

Example of I-as-co-protagonist; narrates while combining personal experience with observation of Gatsby.

The Signalman (Dickens)

Example of I-as-minor-character narration.

Madame Bovary

Example given in the text of I-as-witness-protagonist narration.

A Rose for Emily (Faulkner)

Example of I-as-uninvolved-eyewitness narration, and also the classic example of we-narrative.

Dr. Watson (Sherlock Holmes)

Example of I-as-witness narration.

Scout (To Kill a Mockingbird)

Example of I-as-protagonist narration.