Abstract
This chapter introduces the basic elements of narrative situation, the combination of narrator, perspective (point of view), and narrative level involved in first-person and third-person fictional narration.1 A separate final section treats second-person narration and points readers to the growing bibliography on this unusual kind of narrative situation. This chapter deals exclusively with prose fiction, since the extent to which films have narrative situations, implied by the gaze of the camera, operates by rough analogies to the possibilities in prose fiction. Most films adopt the equivalent of third-person omniscience.2
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Further reading
Bakhtin, Mikhail. ‘Discourse in the Novel.’ The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. and Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. University of Texas Press, 1981. 259–422. See this essay for dialogic form and heteroglossia.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Doestoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson. University of Minnesota Press, 1984. See this book for polyphony and dialogism.
Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Storyteller.’ Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. 1955. Trans. 1968. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. Schocken Books, 1969. 83–109.
Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd ed. University of Chicago Press, 1983. See Booth for discussions of implied author and reliable/unreliable narrators.
Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Cornell University Press, 1978. A comprehensive and readable handbook on narrative theory. Caution: Many theorists find Chatman’s idea of a ‘nonnarrated’ prose narrative unconvincing, and prefer the alternative he proffers, of ‘minimally narrated’ texts.
Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton University Press, 1978. On consonance and dissonance in first-person narration, see especially 145–72.
Cohn, Dorrit. ‘The Encirclement of Narrative: On Franz Stanzel’s Theorie des Erzählens.’ Poetics Today 2.2 (1981): 157–82.
Cohn, Dorrit. ‘Discordant Narration,’ Style 34.2 (2000): 307–16.
Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cornell University Press, 1980. 212–62. Genette’s chapter on ‘Voice’ is the classic narratological treatment of narrative situation. Genette makes the case that his precise terminology of extra-or intra-, heterodiegetic or homodiegetic narration should replace the looser terms ‘first’ and ‘third person.’ He views all narration as at least potentially in first person, since any narrator could refer to himself or herself as ‘I,’ though many do not.
Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. University of Nebraska Press, 2002. An exemplary reconsideration of central precepts of narrative theory in light of cognitive science.
Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.
Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
Keen, Suzanne. ‘Intersectional Narratology: Queer, Feminist, Cognitive, and Affective Crossings.’ Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions. Ed. Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser. Ohio State University Press, 2015. 123–46.
Lanser, Susan Snaider. The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction. Princeton University Press, 1981. Lanser argues that in addition to authorial and ‘personal’ narration, a ‘communal’ narrative situation representing collective voices should be recognized. Her treatment of the philosophy of point of view is also very useful.
Lanser, Susan Snaider. ‘Toward a Feminist Narratology.’ (1986) Feminisms, rev. ed. Ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. Rutgers University Press, 1997. 674–93. Here Lanser demonstrates the need for a comprehensive theory of voice, including tone and rhetorical contexts as determinants of meaning.
Nünning, Vera. ‘Unreliable Narration and the Historical Variability of Values and Norms: The Vicar of Wakefield as Test-case for a Cultural-Historical Narratology,’ Style 38.2 (2004): 236–52.
Prince, Gerald. ‘Introduction to the Study of the Narratee.’ Reader-Response Criticism. Ed. Jane Tompkins. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. 7–25.
Rabinowitz, Peter J. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. Cornell University Press, 1987. Rabinowitz’s work advances a nuanced view of the different kinds of narrative audiences, beyond the implied reader of Booth and Chatman.
Stanzel, F. K. A Theory of Narrative. 1979. Trans. Charlotte Goedsche. Cambridge University Press, 1984. My source for authorial and figural narrative situation.
Tompkins, Jane. Reader-Response Criticism. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. A now classic collection of essays.
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© 2015 Suzanne Keen
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Keen, S. (2015). Narrative Situation: Who’s Who and What’s Its Function. In: Narrative Form. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137439598_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137439598_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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