narrative

Narrative

Welcome to narrative, a section in which, hard to believe but true, I do not berate Bordwell and Thompson, who, as we have all seen, have really let me down with the 6th edition of their book (whose principal purpose, other than making me irate, seems to be funding the purchase of a week-end summer home).

Principles of Narrative Construction

B&T begin this discussion by noting two important observations

• The prevalence of narrative in our culture--we are continually surrounded by it
• Narrative is so prevalent it might just be a fundamental mode of making sense (indeed, some theorists have argued it is the ONLY mode of making sense)

DEFINITION:
A narrative is a chain of events in cause and effect relationships occuring in space and time.

CHARACTERISTICS:

• A narrative beigns with one situation; a series of changes occurs according to a pattern of cause and effect, that brings about a new situation (that new situation ends the story).

• Causality and Time are central components--they link spaces and events.

NON-Bordwell observation:

The element that drives a pattern of cause and effect forward is desire: the desire of a character to restablish the initial situation, or effect a better situation by obtaining the object of his/her desire.  Desire is the motor force of narrative.
 

• Presentation and Construction of narrative are distinct from each other.

Presentation can be considered as plot: everything visibly and audibly present.

• story events that are directly depicted
• also contains material extraneous to the story world (credits & music)

Construction can be considered as story: the set of all events in a narrative, explicitly presented and those inferred.

From the spectator's perspective, the relationship between plot and story is that story is a construction of plot material in chronological order.

The way that the plot presents or implies story information is called narration.

Narration is the plot's way of distributing story information in order to achieve specific effects.

There are two fundamental components of narration:

• Range:the amount of information the narration imparts to the spectator in relation to character's knowledge.
• Omniscient: where the spectator knows more than any or all characters.  Can function to create suspense.
• Restricted: were the spectator knows only as much as one or all characters.  Can function to create surprise.
• Depth:how deeply the narrative delves into the character's psychological states.