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Chapter-2
Theory of Narratology

. . . Narratology is not a ‘once-and-for-all’ closed theory, but

a mode of theorizing that is open, dynamic, never-ending.

--Rimmon-Kenan

The study of narrative is called narratology. It would be important to define the

term narrative before discussing the subject of narratology. Narrative means anything

that tells a story. It may be a novel, a fictional book, a painting, a picture, a newspaper,

an advertisement, a movie and even a prayer. Rimmon-Kenan observes: “Newspaper,

reports, history, books, novels, films, comic strips, pantomime, dance, gossip and

psychoanalytic sessions are only some of the narratives which permeate our lives” (01).

Literature is not the only medium through which stories are told, but they are told on

other different spheres of life—individual, social, cultural etc. Stories are told while

sharing our experiences, biographic data, reciting hymns and folk songs and telling

folklores. Stories are made even while making jokes or designing a menu card. Thus

narratives are everywhere, in all kind of activities, all pervasive and all pervading.

Narratives can be verbal or written. They can be true or false, realistic or non-realistic,

fictional or non-fictional and literary or non-literary.

Narrative is constructed of two basic elements ‘the tale’ and ‘the teller’. This is

integral to any narrative whatever the form may be. If we consider ‘the teller’ we will

find that ‘the teller’ can adopt different roles in the telling of the tale. At the basic level

he may be very much visible and his presence will be felt and recognized in spite of the

tale which engrosses us with events, settings and characters, e.g. ‘The Duke’ in

Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’. Sometimes ‘the teller’ is completely unseen and

withdrawing as it were and letting the characters speak and take over ‘the telling’ as in
 32

Virginia Woolf’s To the Light House. What is important here is that it leads to dual focus

which brings into play spatial and temporal distance which may keep shifting between

different levels of narration in the narrative.

Narratives tell us stories about spatio-temporally distant things. They involve ‘the

teller’ who is placed in the present by virtue of his position as a teller, and ‘the tale’

which is placed in the distant past, making the teller the mediator between the tale and

the listener. The teller’s visibility can vary from being present to being completely

invisible. The narrator is trusted by the addressee who in a sense becomes a subject even

before he commences the reading of a text. Narrator has the authority to tell, ‘To narrate

is to make a bid for a kind of power’ (Toolan Narrative 03). Toolan says that narratives

can and many times do crucially affect the lives of people. The narratives are told by

politicians, journalists, employees, celebrities, friends, enemies, parents, leaders or

anyone from whom power originates and this gives authority or influence to the teller

over the addressee and can affect the lives of those who are addressed through the

narratives.

The present thesis is concerned with the fictional narrative. The word ‘fiction’ is

thus of great importance. Rimmon-Kenan uses the words ‘narrative fiction’ for it. Lothe

says, “Fiction comes from the Latin fingere (original meaning: to make by shaping) – to

invent, to think up, to make up” (Narrative 04). Here the word ‘fiction’ is interpreted as a

‘made up’ story, but a narratologist is also concerned with the other part of the definition

that is ‘by shaping’. It is clear that fictional narratives are not merely concerned with the

making of stories, but they are also ‘shaped’. Thus, the important subject of the study is

to understand the narrative form and the organizing and placing of the events in time and

space.

Theorists have tried to interpret and theorize narrative in various ways. Prince

gives the definition of narrative as “the recounting (as product and process, object and
 33

act, structured and structuration) of one or more real or fictitious events communicated

by one, two or several (more or less overt) narrators to one, two or several (more or less

overt) narratees ” (58). According to this statement, narrative being related to the act of

narration of the events requires two participants—the speaker and the listener. This

means only one person or a group of persons may tell a story and it can be told to one

person or a group of persons. So narrative can be for single person at one time or for a

group of people or the whole community.

Here we can easily say that the term narrative refers to a set event or events

narrated by a narrator or narrators to a narratee or more narratees. There are debates by

the theorists about what constructs a narrative – a set of events form a narrative or only a

single event is sufficient to form a narrative. Different narratologists have different views

in this regard. Gerard Genette advocates that in the formation of a narrative, only a single

event is required. For Gerald Prince, three events are mandatory to form a narrative and

these events should be related to one another through “chronology, causality and

closure”. According to Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, to make a narrative there should be at

least two events. She calls narrative to be “a succession of events in order to suggest that

a narrative usually consists of more than one” (03). Michael. J. Toolan quotes Tzvetan

Todorov who has a view that “transformation” or “change of events” are of great

importance in a narrative and opines that simple delineation of successive facts presented

chronologically does not form a narrative:

These facts must be organized, which is to say, ultimately, that they must

have elements in common. But if all the elements are in common there is

no longer a narrative; for there is no longer anything to recount. Now,

transformation represents precisely a synthesis of differences and

resemblance – it links two facts without their being able to be identified.

(Todorov 233, quoted by Toolan, Narrative 07)

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According to Toolan, change of position and state of events is the important

aspect in a narrative. It means that single event in a narrative is not sufficient in itself.

Toolan defines narrative as “a perceived sequence of non-randomly connected events”

implied that narrative is not merely an unstructured amalgamation of events, but a well

managed set of events.

Scholes and Kellog define narrative as: “. . . all those literary works which are

distinguished by two characteristics: the presence of a story and a story teller” (The

Nature 04). Talking about narratives, Roland Barthes says:

. . . the narratives of the world are numberless . . . . Able to be carried by

articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures

and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in

myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy,

mime, painting stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news items,

conversation . . . . Narrative is present in every age, in every place, in

every society. . . . Caring nothing for the division between good and bad

literature, narrative is international, trans-historical, trans-cultural: it is

simply there, like life itself. (Image 79)

These lines underline the importance of narrative as a vehicle for the expression

of human experience. Defining narrative, Toolan says it might be ‘. . . a perceived

sequence of non-randomly connected events’ (Narrative 07). Toolan brings out the

importance of sequencing or inter connecting: “Narratives are seen to have a sequence of

events which are interconnected. They are not randomly connected as in a collage, but

have some kind of sequential arrangement, which creates the story” (Narrative 07).

For the first time, Tzvetan Todorov used the term narratology in 1969 “to

designate a systematic study of narrative firmly anchored in the tradition of the Russian
 35

and Czech formalism of the early 20th century and French structuralism and semiotics of

the sixties” (O’ Neil 13). Prince states that though the term can be used in a broader

sense for all “theoretical persuasions” of narrative theory, “it refers specifically to the

theories of narrative structure” (04). Gerald Prince also defines narrative as “the study of

form and functioning of narrative” (04) and says that the “term narratology may be new

but not the discipline . . . and in the Western tradition, it goes back at least to Plato and

Aristotle” (Barry 224). Since the outgrowth of structuralism, there was great study done

in narrative. O’Neil observes: “The current boom in narrative theories (and in books

about narrative theory) has by now reached something close to epidemic proportions”

(12). The other theories of narrative are Russian formalists’ Bakhtian or dialogical

theory, Chicago School, Hermeneutic and Phenomenological theories, etc.

The story of narratology has its base in Aristotle’s Poetics where Aristotle has

stated that ‘character’ and ‘action’ are the major components of a tragedy and ‘character

is revealed through action’. He has given the idea of hamartia, anagnorisis and

peripeteia. Though, Aristotle here talks about mainly drama, but these elements are

present in all kinds of narrative forms, irrespective of their mode of communication.

Structuralism begins with the writings of Russian Formalists like Propp and

Schlovsky. Their contribution to the development of narratology—the study of narratives

is acknowledged to a great extent. Narratives are now no longer perceived and

comprehended as restricted to certain cultures. They are viewed as representation of

fundamental aspects of human life. A.J. Greimas and Todorov concern themselves with

the way the social being is constructed through narratives and they try to describe the

constitutive elements of narrative. Rather than being concerned with individual texts,

Greimas looks at the grammar of narratives—a grammar that generates narratives. Just as

language has a finite grammar, but infinite possibilities of generating sentences, similarly

narratives also have a finite grammar which generates narrative representations.

 36

Vladimir Propp, a Russian theorist, became famous for defining the constant

“deep structure” or common elements in many narratives. In The Morphology of Folk

Tales in 1928, he studied closely the Russian folk tales and their form. After their close

observation, he presented a set of thirty-one key functions. He further asserted that each

tale may or may not have thirty-one functions. It may have less than thirty-one functions,

but these would be taken from the selected thirty-one functions and would always come

in the same sequence as defined by Propp.

The criticism raised against this kind of analysis is that, it resorts to reductivism

and does not take cultural context into consideration. Another objection is to the number

of functions. Why the number is 31 and why not 30 or 32 functions or some other

number? The justification offered is that only 31 functions are needed to describe the

action structure of the stories in his (Propp’s) corpus of the Russian Fairytales. The

division into only 31 functions becomes more a matter of intuition or perception than a

matter of logical explanation. Yet, it is possible to say that most readers come to an

agreement over what is essential / non-essential to the development of a story. It is this

agreement which justifies the Proppian or Barthesian analysis and observation.

Roland Barthes, in his essay “Introduction to Structural Analysis of Narrative”,

stresses on deductive method. He justifies his argument by saying that deductive method

is “obliged first to device a hypothetical model of description what American linguist

call a ‘theory’ and then gradually to work down from his model towards different

narrative species” (Image 81). Further, he says ‘. . . either a narrative is merely a

rambling collection of events, in which case nothing can be said about it . . . or else it

shares with other narratives a common structure which is open to analysis’(Image 81).

The question—which approach is to be adopted in this procedure is answered and

finalized by Barthes who believes that in analyzing a narrative the deductive approach
 37

would be more suitable. As there are millions of narratives, it is impractical to try an

inductive approach.

The focus here is on importance of evolving a theory or model for description of

narratives. Once the theory is evolved the study of narrative can be taken up, to analyze

in what ways individual works conform or diverge / depart from the model. Barthes

gives the following levels of a narrative analysis:

1) Functions 2) Actions 3) Narration

‘Functions’ are central to the progression of the narrative. It is through them that

the writer achieves an overall coherence of structure. Barthes says ‘functions’ are of two

types:

a) Functions Proper b) Indices

‘Functions proper’ are distributional in nature. They are sequential and can be completed

later on in the story. ‘Functions proper’ are also syntagmatic in nature. Indices give

characters’ psychological information or about background or environment of the

narrative. Barthes says that the narratives like folk-tales are mainly determined by

functions and those like psychological novels are by indices. Functions proper are further

divided into ‘cardinal functions or nuclei’ and ‘catalysers’. The cardinal functions

constitute the ‘hinge points’ in narrative allowing it to move either way. For a ‘function’

to be ‘nucleic’ or ‘cardinal’, it must either open up alternatives or continue or close them.

Between two cardinals there are a number of underline activities which may or may not

alter the cardinals. These are petty or small incidents or descriptions called ‘catalysers’.

Here Barthes doesn’t call the catalysers to be unimportant as he thinks that if cardinals

cannot be erased without modifying the story, catalysers are necessary for the discourse

of the narrative. Catalysers are the elements that help to fill up the narrative space with

‘areas of safety’ and ‘rest’. The catalysers may perform a weak function, but they are

integral to the story. They perform a ‘phatic’ function according to Jakobson, as they
 38

help to keep the addresser (narrator) and the addressee in touch. Indices are further

subdivided into ‘indices proper’ and ‘informants’.

Indices proper is related to the character of the narrative agent, involves an act of

making sense or trying to decipher or understand—a character, an atmosphere, a feeling

or a philosophy. The informants help to identify, to locate in time and space. The

‘informants’ assist to ground the fiction in reality by giving facts like dates, time, places,

etc. As compared to ‘indices proper’, they may lack depth, may be transparent or merely

consist of data, yet they serve a useful purpose. They give a sense of reality to the

narrative.

Gerard Genette, another prominent theorist of narratology, has his main focus on

‘story’ and ‘how it is told’. Narratology in modern era is basically related to the

difference between ‘what’ is told (story) and ‘how’ it is told (discourse). Though the

concept has its roots in its ancestry that traces as back as far Aristotle, who gave the

terms ‘logos’ and ‘mythos’ which now stand for ‘story’ and ‘plot’ or ‘arrangement’ or

‘discourse’ respectively. To examine the relation between ‘what is told’ and ‘how it is

told’, Seymour Chatman gives two level model or terms ‘story’ and ‘discourse’

respectively. ‘Story’ determines ‘what’ is told, ‘discourse’ determines ‘how’ the story is

told. Narrative, in this sense, is related to ‘what’ (content) and ‘how’ (expression). The

Russian formalist of the 1920, Victor Shklovsky presents two term—‘fabula’ and

‘sjuzhet’ in his two level models. Gerald Prince also believes in two-level model.

Chatman’s ‘story’ is termed as ‘narrated’ by Prince and Prince’s ‘narrating’ is equal to

Chatman’s ‘discourse’.

Further, the narratologists like Bal, Gerard Genette, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan and

Michael. J. Toolan are among those theorists who have evolved a three level model of

‘story’ ‘narrative’ and ‘narrating’ while disapproving the two level model—‘story’ and

‘discourse’. “. . . analysis of narrative discourse will thus for me, essentially a study of
 39

relationship between narrative and narrating and (to the extent that they are inscribed in

the narrative discourse) between story and narrating” (Genette 29).

Genette observes that events that are told is ‘narrative’ and the activity that “gives

birth” (29) to it is ‘narrating’. He states, “Story and narrating thus exist for me only by

means of the intermediary of the narrative” (Genette 29). For better understanding, a

comprehensive and comparative study of the terms used by major theorists is given by

Patrick O’Neil in the following manner:

Aristotle logos mythos

Shklovsky(1921/1965) fabula sjuzhet

Todorov(1966) histoire discourse

Genette (1972) histoire recit narration

Bal (1977) histoire recit text narration

Chatman(1978) story discourse narrating

Genette (1980) story narrative narrating

Prince (1982) narrated narrating

Rimmon-Kenan(1993) story text narration

Bal (1985) fabula story text

Cohan / Shires(1988) story narration

Toolan (1988) story text narration

Table 1.1 Sources. O’Neil, Patrick, Fiction of Discourse: Reading Narrative Theory

(21).

This may be quite intricate to use different terms for almost similar concepts.

According to Mieke Bal, story is related to ‘sequential arrangement’, ‘frequency’,

‘rhythm’, and ‘focalization’ while text is concerned with ‘narration, ‘levels of narration’

and other such issues related to narrative. On the other hand Genette gives three level
 40

modals and places all of those concepts under the titles of ‘order’, ‘duration’,

‘frequency’, ‘mood’ and ‘voice’, each dealing with different narrative aspects. It may be

mentioned that when Bal uses the term ‘text’ for the narration part, she means here

‘narrative text’ only “in which an agent relates (tells) a story in a particular medium such

as language, imagery, some combination thereof.” Initially the study of narrative was

divided into two levels:

1 2

fabula sjuzhet ----- Propp

histoire discourse ----- Benveniste and Barthes

story discourse ----- Chatman

The terms in the first group are roughly equivalent terms used by different

structuralists. They refer to the basic story structure or framework and constitute the

events of the story in a linear chronological order along with the actants or characters of

the story. The second group of terms refers to all the techniques that the author uses to

present the story.

“A fabula (story) is a series of logically and chronologically related events that

are caused or experienced by actors” (Bal 5). Toolan observes that story appears to stress

on the ‘pre-artistic elements’ (Narrative 10), i.e. the basic events and character pattern in

the narrative. ‘Discourse’ is the ‘artistic’ working out of the basic story pattern which is

distinctive in its style or manner. ‘Discourse’ is the individualized or personalized

working out of a story within a specific genre, which is marked by its individualistic

style and point of view or voice. It is important to see that the study of narrative has now

been complicated by giving a third level. The third level is in fact a division of the

second level – discourse. Genette (1980), Bal (1985) and Rimmon-Kenan (1983) have

given a third level. If level one consists of ‘story / fabula’, then level two– ‘discourse’
 41

according to them consists of two levels which can be termed as the levels of ‘text’ and

‘narration’.

The level of ‘text’ is related to choices of sequencing of events, the time and

space to be imparted in the text to present them. It also includes the details and their

(events) ordering of the text, the perspective / viewpoint to be chosen as also the

focalizing lens through which the things are viewed and observed. The third level is the

level of ‘narration’, the relation of narrator and narrative. There may be a first person

account or a third person account. There may be a narrative which unfolds as a result of

the interactions of characters or it includes the strategies of speech and thought

presentation. So instead of two levels:

Story – Discourse

We now have three levels:

Story – Text – Narration (Rimmon-Kenan, 1983)

Fabula – Text – Story (Bal 1985)

The present study will be based on mainly Rimmon-Kenan’s Story-Text-

Narration division to analyze the novels in the study which is briefly discussed below.

Story: According to Rimmon-Kenan the ‘story’ is the same as it was in the earlier

division. It consists of the events in their chronological order along with the characters

(participants) and setting. The ‘text’ signifies a spoken or written discourse which is

listened to or read. It is different from ‘story’ in that the events in the ‘text’ may not be in

a straightforward chronological order. The events are viewed and observed through some

‘focalizer’ or ‘prism’. The reality that the ‘text’ is spoken or written implies the presence

of a speaker or writer who narrates.

‘Text’ in narrative analysis is related to the spatial and temporal arrangements of

events. It is generally believed that the events in a ‘text’ are narrated according to the

sequence or chronology they might have occurred in the story. But in a text, events are
 42

arranged and exhibited in a particular order. This provides the different ways through

which the same story may construct different narratives. Gerard Genette relates this

method to study the order, duration and frequency of the events. "To study the temporal

order of narrative is to compare the order in which events or temporal sections are

arranged in the narrative discourse with the order of succession of these same events or

temporal segment have in the story” (Genette 35). Mieke Bal too observes rhythms,

relation between place and space and focalization.

As narrative is created and is a construct, its constitution makes it different from

reality which in fact justifies the study of narrative. Spatial and temporal arrangement of

events cannot be studied in isolation from one another as they are very closely related to

each other. Successive narratologists have tried many times to extract the grammar of

narratives from discourse. As mentioned earlier, this is done by breaking up the text into

smaller units. Thus one of the units in which ‘narration’ depends is—‘story’. Almost

every narratologist agrees with Propp’s idea of a ‘story’, which exists in abstraction and

it has been claimed that an ‘immanent’ story can be abstracted from the text at least for

the sake of description, Bremond asserts:

The subject of a tale may serve as an argument for a Ballet that of a novel

may be carried over to the stage or to the screen; a movie may be told to

those who have not seen it. It is words one reads, it is images one sees, it

is gestures one deciphers, but through them it is a story one follows; and it

may be the same story. (04)

Discourse: The next part of the narrative analysis, according to Chatman is “expression

plane or discourse”. It deals with the questions like: How stories are told? Who tells

them? To whom they are told? Rimmon-Kenan has given two levels of discourse–‘text’

level and ‘narration’ level. The level of ‘text’ is complicated by the fact that it

encompasses many factors, which are crucial to the development of the text. Further
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Rimmon-Kenan gives two principles of combination along which events are combined.

One of them is the time related principle—‘and then’ and the other is the causality

principle, i.e. ‘that’s why’ or ‘therefore’. E.M. Forster (1927) has given a distinction

between story and plot on the basis of these two principles (even though both are

narration of events)—a story is defined as events arranged in time sequence where as in a

plot the causality factor became prominent. Prince (1973) has given three principles of

formation and arrangement: 1) temporal succession (2) causality (3) inversion. The

principle of inversion implies a change in the state of affairs due to some action.

Rimmon-Kenan (2002) is different from Prince in this. She argues that the

temporal succession is enough to label a group of events as a story. Rimmon-Kenan’s

contention is that, were such a threefold scale applied to a group of events to make them

qualify as a story, many stories (which are perceived as stories) would perforce or by

necessity have to be excluded from the category, because all three scales may not

necessarily apply to all stories. Some stories may not lend themselves to the analysis of

causal connections and in others, though some change may be observed in the state of

affairs, yet a clear inversion (happy / unhappy, lost / found) may not take place.

Rimmon-Kenan’s argument therefore recognizes only one essential requirement

in a story which is temporal sequence, the other two may or may not be present. In the

context of these differences among narratologists and the way they perceive a story, one

thing still stands out as common to them all – the time sequence. All agree that one of the

essential and indispensable indications of a story is the chronological element which

takes care of the ‘and then . . .’ factor.

Text: At the level of text, the narrator takes decisions about mainly the following things:

How are the events going to be sequenced? How is time going to be presented? How is

the text going to be seen? Through which medium does it come? Who is the narrator?

Who is the focalizer? To add more, there are questions related to characters as how they
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are going to be presented and in what detail; what settings are going to be used for the

narrative to give it actualization by providing spatial indications and relating them to the

temporal elements in the text.

Narration: The third level (a division of discourse) is ‘narration’. It is associated with

speech representation. This level is the level at which the relations between the narrator

and the narrative are explored along with speech representation which may be pure

dialogue or may take the form of free indirect discourse, free indirect speech or free

indirect thought.

Time: The second factor, important in textual study, is the concept of time. Time has an

important place in human life. Time is an integral factor in all happenings and activities

whether there are the happenings of an event or events or remembering of events or their

cognition. Individual and personal experiences are also arranged in some temporal

relation with each other. In fact, the way the events are positioned in temporal relation to

each other in text, is different from the actual way events appear in story. This makes

text-time and story-time altogether different entities. It implies certain complexities to

say that “time in a narrative fiction can be defined as the relations of chronology”

between story and text (Rimmon-Kenan 44). Generally everybody “tends to think of time

as uni-directional and irreversible flow” (Rimmon-Kenan 44)—a forward movement,

which does not allow a reversal—a going back in time. This flow of time is made

measurable by ‘imposing repetitive patterns’ on it whether natural (day / night, year) or

mechanical as measured by clocks (Rimmon-Kenan 44) and such a conception of time

was given metaphoric shape by Heraclitus: “You cannot step into same river for other

waters and yet another water go over flowing on” (Rimmon-Kenan 44).

Thus the time dimension is related to the arrangement of events within a certain

time frame. Time is paradoxically repetition within ‘irreversible change’. “Thus time in

narrative fiction can be defined as the relations of chronology between story and text”

(Rimmon-Kenan 44). ‘Story-time’ as observed earlier, is the linear chronological

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arrangement of events. ‘Text-time’ is actually thought to be spatial as it is the

arrangement of language on a surface. It may be so, yet it is possible to use ‘text-time’

as an important construct to study narrative. ‘Text-time’ may be linear, but it may not

correspond on a one to one basis to ‘story-time’. It can, and often does, deviate from it,

creating different effects. Gerard Genette’s (1980) discussion of time in story and text is

considered as the most elaborated, exhaustive and influential work. He presents three

main aspects of temporal movement in a text or story—order, duration and frequency.

Order is related to the presentation of the sequence of events as presented in the text and

their relation to the chronological order of events in the story. Duration is related to the

relations between the time taken up by events when they occurred and the sum of total

text taken for their presentation. Frequency is related to how often any event takes place

in a story and how often it is narrated.

The differences in order of events in the text from the order in which events

actually occur in the story are referred to as ‘anachronies’ by Genette. Anachrony may be

understood as the narration of an event at a point in the text which does not match with

the story-time. It may have occurred before or after that point in the story sequence.

Toolan’s example of anachrony within a sentence is cited here:

The king died of grief because the queen had died. (Narrative 50)

In the sentence, the reason–‘the queen had died’ comes later though she died

before the king. The reason given in the subordinate clause becomes an anachrony

because it happened at an earlier time. Bal asserts:

. . . playing with sequential ordering is not just a literary convention, it is

also a means of drawing attention to certain things to emphasize, to bring

about aesthetic or psychological effects, to show various interpretations of

an event, to indicate the subtle difference between expectation and

realization, and much else besides. (82)

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These discrepancies between the presentation of events in the text and

chronology of story are known as chronological distortions or anachronies. This is a

simple example of anachrony which operates in a more complex way in the text. It can

be categorized as flashbacks or flash forward. Genette terms them as ‘analepsis’ and

‘prolepses’. A movement back in time is called an ‘analepsis’, for it relates an event

which happened ‘earlier’, but chronologically is presented or narrated at a later stage in

the text. Toolan calls it a ‘delayed disclosure’. A prolepsis in this sense would be a

‘premature disclosure’. It means that something which happens later on (chronologically)

is brought forward in time. Bal uses the terms ‘retroversions’ and ‘anticipations’ for the

two types of anachronies. An analepsis can be ‘homodiegetic’ or ‘heterodiegetic’

depending on whom the information relates to. It is homodiegetic when there is

information about the same character or event and it is heterodiegetic when the

information it gives, is about some different character or event in the story. Bal calls

these anachronies, as mentioned before—flash forward or anticipation. Michael. J.

Toolan presents the whole argument in the following manner:

An analepsis is an achronological movement back in time, so that a

chronologically earlier incident is related later in the text, a prolepsis is an

achronological movement forward in time , so that a future event is

elated textually ‘before its time’, before the presentation of

chronologically intermediate event. (Narrative 50)

As an anachrony interrupts the chronology in a narrative and its linearity, it takes

a significant place in the narrative. “Every anachrony constitutes ‘with respect to the

narrative into which it is grafted’, a narrative that is temporally second” (Gennette 48).

Gennette calls this engrafted or embedded narrative as second narrative. The first

narrative is the narrative into which the second narrative is embedded. The third narrative
 47

is embedded in that of the second narrative. In a hypothetical situation, there will be

limitless numbers of narratives if this procedure goes on. There can be more than one

second narrative in the same manner. Analepsis and prolepsis are of different types

according to Genette. Analepsis are divided into the following three categories: external,

internal and mixed.

This division is on the basis of story told in analepsis in relation to story-line of

first narrative. The part of story or the past which preceded the commencement of the

first narrative is external analepsis. “This means the narrative jumps back to a point in

the story before the main narrative starts” (Lothe 54). The event or events that occurred

after the starting point of the first narrative, but could not be narrated when they were

due are related to internal analepsis. Internal analepsis compensates the delay in narrative

of an event or events that have occurred because of ellipsis. Mixed analepsis almost

creates confusion. It is named so because it has the features of both external and internal

analepsis. It starts from a point that is external to first narrative, but later at some point

either joins it or goes beyond the beginning of first narrative. Jakob Lothe has given the

diagrammatical presentation of the external, internal and mixed analepsis:

Figure: 1.2, Source: Lothe, Jakob, Narrative in Fiction and Film an Introduction. (55)
 48

The anachronies, Genette observes, are:

. . . not as useless as it might seem at first sight. In effect external

analepsis and internal analepsis (or the internal part of mixed analepsis)

functions for the purpose of narrative analysis in totally different ways, at

least on one point that seems to be essential. External analepsis, by the

very fact that they are external, never at any point risk interfering with the

first narrative for their only function is to fill out the first narrative by

enlightening the reader on one or another ‘antecedent’. (49-50)

Analepsis are further divided into two more categories by Genette: homodiegetic

and heterodiegetic analepsis. Analepsis that “provides past information either about the

character, event, or story line mentioned at that point in the text “is called homodiegetic

(Rimmon-Kenan 49). Heterodiegetic analepsis is an “analepsis dealing with character

(and thus with diegetic content) different from the content (or contents) of the first

narrative” (Genette 50). About the function of heterodiegetic analepsis, Gentte says that

these “analepsis deals, classically, with a character recently introduced whose

‘antecedents’ the narrator wants to shed light on . . . or they deal with a character who

has been out of sight for some time and whose recent past we must catch up with” ( 50).

‘Prolepsis’ or flash forward to which Bal calls ‘anticipations’. It is the next type of

anachrony. It tells about an event or events that will happen into the future of the

narrative (fabula or story) from the point of intervening in the narrative. Genette says:

Anticipation or temporal prolepsis is clearly much less frequent than the

inverse figure, at least in the Western narrative tradition—although each

of the three great epics, the Iliad the Odyssey and the Aenied, begins with

a sort of anticipatory summary that to a certain extent justifies the formula

Todorov applied to Homeric narrative: “Plot of Predestination”. (67)

Just like analepsis, Toolan says, prolepsis may be “homodiegetic and

heterodiegetic, depending on whether they entail a switch of focus to a different

character, event or storyline; and internal, external or mixed, depending on their

 49

chorological relation to the end point of the basic narrative” (Narrative 54). Genette

further divides heterodiegetic prolepsis into two categories: “completing prolepsis and

repeating prolepsis” while the former “fills in later gaps resulting from ellipsis in the

narrative” (Prince 77) and the latter recounts “ahead of time events that will be counted

later” (Prince77). An omniscient narrator mostly gives the proleptic statements though

not very frequent. He gives information about future event happenings in the narrative in

very small phrases. Such information plays an important role in the narrative. Barthes

calls it “weaving” of narrative. An expectation or supposition is framed in reader’s mind

through such constructions like “we shall find” or “one will see later”. The expectation

that is created may be fulfilled sooner or later. Another type of gap is called paralepsis,

which according Genette, is not created by bringing a temporal gap, but by hiding some

information or “by omission of one of the constituent elements of narrative” (52).

Genette has given two concepts in relation to anachrony, ‘Reach’ and ‘Extent’.

These are termed as ‘Distance’ and ‘Span’ respectively by Bal. These two concepts are

related to the temporal distance that is covered whenever an anachrony occurs in a

narrative. Genette says that “an anachrony can reach into the past or the future, either

more or less far from the ‘present’ movement (that is, from the moment in the story when

the narrative was interrupted to make room from anachrony); this temporal distance, we

will name the anachrony’s reach” (48). The anachrony itself covers a duration which

Genette calls ‘Extent’ and Bal calls ‘Span’. For example, if an analepsis narrates an event

of two months that happened ten years ago, the ‘reach’ of this analepsis will be ten years

and the ‘extent’ will be of two months in the narrative.

In most of the narratives, traces of prolepsis are found more easily rather than

full-fledged shift in temporal orientation as compared to analepsis which is generally

used by writers to fill gaps in stories which may intentionally have been left by the
 50

author and may not have been recognized as such till the analepsis appears. Order helps

to establish relations between different parts of the text.

Rhythm is foremost aspect in relation to time and duration. In music, dance or

any other performance it is linked with time aspect. The event or performance that

happens fast or slow in time has fast rhythm and slow rhythm accordingly. Rhythm of a

narrative text is determined by duration of time given to different events. If there is

constant rhythm in the narratives, it is called “steadiness in pace” (Genette 87). If

different events are given different time duration, it will either decelerate or accelerate

the narrative. The rhythm of a narrative thus corresponds to relation between duration of

the story or text time and it is very difficult to have any scientific yardstick or scale to

measure text or discourse time. Mieke Bal comments here:

Is it the time taken up by the writing of the narrative, as has been

proposed? Not only is it impossible to discover what period of time was

involved in writing, but also this time is of little importance for the effect

of the text on the reader. Should we take as a standard of measurement the

time it takes to read the narrative? This varies. (Bal 100)

The readers with different linguistic and cultural background will take different

time period in reading the same text. Different persons will have different time to read

the same text. A performance in a movie or a drama may have a concept of same

discourse time, but it is almost impossible to have such a notion like discourse time or

text time for reading a novel. Genette says that it is possible to find the speed at which

events are presented in a narrative and number of sentences, paragraphs or passages

assigned to an event. Thus the speed can be measured in the novel in the manner as

Genette says:

. . . as by speed we mean the spatial relationship between a temporal and

spatial dimensions (so many meters per second, so many seconds per

meter): the speed of a narrative will be defined by the relationship

between a duration (that of the story, measured in seconds, minutes,

 51

hours, days, months and years) and a length (that of the text, measured in

lines and pages). The isochronous narrative, our hypothetical reference

zero, would thus be here a narrative with unchanging speed, without

accelerations or slow down, where the relationship duration of

story / length of time would always remain steady. (Genette 87-88)

Genette observes that the isochronous narrative with constant speed is just a

suppositious situation. We cannot find such narratives in reality or they “cannot exist

except as a laboratory experiment (Genette 88). In fact, what determines the rhythm in

the text, is the relation between the temporal length of an event in an actual story and the

temporal / spatial length given to it in a narrative or text. To have a narrative with stable

pace is just inconceivable. Lothe observes:

‘Constant speed’ means that the ratio between how long the story lasts

and how long the text remains stable and unchanged, for example in the

case of a novel which consistently uses one page to present each year in a

character’s life. On the basis of this norm the ‘speed’ may increase or

decrease. (Lothe 57)

After observing different possibilities in details, Genette finally fixes four types

of speeds in a narrative: scene, descriptive pause, ellipsis and summary. Shlomith

Rimmon-Kenan and Jakob Lothe also agree with this four levels model that deals with

story-time (fabula-time) and narrative time and the relation between the two which Lothe

presents diagrammatically in the following manner:

Figure: 1.3 Source: Lothe Jakob, Narrative in Fiction and Film: an Introduction (60).
 52

The terms ellipsis and descriptive pause are used for maximum speed and

minimum speed respectively in a narrative. Rimmon-Kanan states that “theoretically,

between these two poles there is infinity of possible paces” (Rimmon-Kanan 53). Ellipsis

is the maximum pace in the narrative when certain story time is imparted no text time.

Here the narrative leaps into another sequence of time, representing another

chronological sequence without narrating those events that might have happened in the

intermediate time period. That particular story time is skipped and not given any space in

the narrative. According to Bal ellipsis occurs when TF (fabula time) is n, that is any

number and TS (story time) is 0, i.e. zero.

Another reason to observe ellipsis may be that the narrator wishes to give only

restricted facts and knowledge to the reader or some part of the information which has

been denied to the reader now, but would be unveiled later. The compulsions may be

artistic, thematic, political and cultural for hiding some important information or

delaying narrating it. But, Bal says that ellipsis “cannot be perceived” as in ellipsis,

nothing of the fabula time is mentioned in the story. If nothing has been mentioned, how

we can say what has not been mentioned, which should have been. “All we can do

sometimes is, logically deduce on the basis of certain information that something has

been omitted” (Bal 103). Genette has categorized ellipsis into three categories: explicit

ellipsis, implicit ellipsis and hypothetical ellipsis.

Explicit ellipsis is one in which text itself indicates how much story time it

skipped in overall. Implicit ellipsis indicates that no clear indication of the jump or story

time is shown in the text. Their very “presence is not announced in the text and which

the reader can infer only from some chronological lacuna or gap in narrative continuity”

(Genette 108). Implicit ellipsis is generally an outcome and result of reader’s observation

and inference who himself examines and understands how much time period has been

skipped in the ellipsis. But these ellipses form an important part of any kind of narrative
 53

whether classical linear or modern, where inner narrative time is given priority over

clock time. Even a classical linear realistic narrative cannot follow each movement spent

by its character. It has do decide which information is to be delivered and which is not.

Hypothetical ellipsis is the most implicit form of ellipsis “which is also very difficult to

localize” even sometimes too impossible to locate any spot at all and “revealed after the

event by analepsis” (Genette 109).

In summary some events of story are narrated in smaller duration of text time.

Thus according to Bal it is defined as TF>TS. Genette defines summary as “the narration

of a few paragraphs or a few pages of several days, months or years of existence, without

details of actions or speech” (95-96). The narrative pace is accelerated in summary

through a textual “condensation” or “compression” of a given story period into relatively

short statement of its main features (Rimmon-Kenan 53).

Bal defines scene in mathematical form as TF=TS, i.e. story time is equal or

almost equal to text time. The present form of scene is said to be a dialogue form as its

duration is supposed to be the maximum in correspondence with duration of the real

discourse or discourse in the fabula. “Consisting exclusively of dialogue and a few ‘stage

direction’ the passage looks more like a scene from a play than like a segment of a

narrative” (Rimmon-Kenan 54). Other narratologists observe that scene is not

constructed by just dialogue form, but “a detailed description of an event should also be

considered scenic” (Rimmon-Kenan 54).

It means that it is not only the presence of dialogues in the narrative discourse that

describes a scene, but temporal relationship between the information of fabula and time

devoted to that event in story is also characterized as a scene. Rimmon-Kenan defines it

to be a relation between “quantity of narrating information and the relative effacement of

the narrator” (54). Scenic description entails different narrative pace which invite further
 54

examination as it may be thematically important and an “indication of the marginality

(on the one hand) and centrality or importance (on the other) of what is being presented.

More important events and conversations are usually given in scenic details, less

important or background ones in summary précis” (Toolan, 58).

Slow down is a pace closest to descriptive pause. In scene, we find one to one

correspondence between story time and text time. In summary larger story time is

attributed to a very small text time. Slow down is a tempo in which text time is

lengthened to define an event in details which in actual may not take much time to

happen. The motive behind all this is to make audience aware of some important

happening or particular event.

Descriptive pause is the minimum speed that a narrative can have. According to

Bal it happens when story time is ‘n’ and fabula time is ‘0’, i.e. TF=0 and TS=n. It

happens when some “segment of the text correspond to zero story duration” (Rimmon-

Kenan 54). Descriptive pauses are used in a narrative when detailed description is given

in text about setting, surrounding, and background of character and his appearance which

often bring suspension and deviation in the flow of the narrative. “The term includes all

narrative sections in which no movement of the fabula time is implied. A great deal of

attention is paid to one element and in the meantime, the fabula remains stationary” (Bal

108). The duration of a descriptive pause may vary from a paragraph to a page and from

a page to complete chapter. In the text, descriptive pauses are incorporated not only to

have deviation in the narrative rather they have a significant role in forming discourse.

They illumine author’s response and views on the environment and surroundings in

which the characters in the narrative exist.

Another integral part of narrative study is frequency. Genette defines it as “the

relation of frequency (or more simple, of repetition) between the narrative and the
 55

diegesis” (Genette 113). In a narrative sometimes an event is told more than once and

sometimes more than one event can be told just in one utterance. Genette says:

A system of relationship is established between these capacities for

‘repetition’ on the part of both the narrated events (of the story) and the

narrative statement (of the text) a system of relationships that can a priori

reduce to four virtual types, simply from the multiplication of the two

possibilities given on both sides: the event repeated or not, the statement

repeated or not. Schematically, we can say that a narrative, whatever it is,

may tell once what happened once, n times what happened n times, n

times what happened once and once what happened n times.

(Genette 114)

Gerard Genette describes them as follows:

1) Narrating once what happened once: It is the most common situation found in

most of the narratives when an event that happened once is told only once. This

is the form in which, according to Genette, “singularness of the narrated

statement corresponds to singularness of the narrated event” (114). Genette calls

it “singular narrative” and gives its mathematical formula 1N / 1S.

2) Narrating n times what happens n times: It means that in a narrative at the story

level, an event is reported n times which has happened n times in the fabula. It is

shown as nN / nS. Genette says, “From the point of view we are interested in here

that is relations of frequency between narrative and story, this anaphoric type is

still in fact singulative and thus reduces to the previous type” (115). Lothe and

Rimmon-Kenan define this aspect under the category of ‘singulative’.

3) Narrating n times what happened once: It is related to the event which happens

once in the fabula and is told many times in the narrative. Genette calls it
 56

repeating narratives and its mathematical representation is shown as nN / 1S.

Other theorists call it ‘repetitive’ narration.

4) Narrating once time what happened n time: It means that an event that happened

many times in fabula is reported once in the narrative. Genette calls it iterative

narrative. Its mathematical representation is IN/nS. Rimmon-Kenan, Toolan and

Lothe analyze frequency at three levels: singulative, iterative and repetitive.

Jakob Lothe has also given graphical illustration for the same as follows:

Iterative

Diagram: 1.4 Source: Lothe Jakob, Narrative in Fiction and Film: An Introduction (61).

Focalization: Focalization is the third factor which relates to narration of story rather

than its arrangement. The term narration means not only the act of narrating, but also the

presence of one or more narrator(s) and one or more narrate (s) in a narrative. There may

be one or more than one narrator that tells / tell the story in a narrative, though the degree

of narrator’s presence may vary from narrative to narrative. If the narrator narrates the

story, it becomes important to understand from whose point of view the story is told. It

may be from narrator’s point of view or he may be merely acting as a mouth piece to

somebody else’s point of view. These issues have been discussed in this part of narrative

analysis. It is quite clear that in the narrative, it is not necessary that the person who is

‘seeing’ must also ‘speak’ “Thus speaking and seeing, narration and focalization may but

need not be attributed to the same agent” (Bal 143).

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The story is usually filtered through one or more angles of vision; hence its

relation is mainly to narration. Genette has used the term ‘focalization’ in preference to

the Anglo-American term ‘point of view’. Many other words used are prism, perspective,

angle of vision and orientation. The preference and importance for the word

‘focalization’ by Genette and Rimmon-Kenan is given by a need to avoid the optical-

photographic connotation that ‘point of view’ carries with it. This does not mean that

focalization is completely free of this connotation, but what Genette means here is, the

angle from which things are seen in a broad sense (not the narrow visual sense). It covers

the ‘cognitive, emotive, and ideological perspectives’ in addition to the spatio – temporal

one. Toolan has used the term ‘orientation’. Focalization / orientation is different from

‘point of view’ in that it avoids the confusion between two different aspects of narrative

practice. These two separable aspects are related to narration and perspective which may

be summarized as:

1. Who sees? (A person)

2. Who speaks? (A narrative agent)

When both are dealt as one or as interchangeable then the confusion arises. No

doubt, it is possible that the person, who sees also speaks or alternatively speaking, the

one who speaks is also the person who sees. But it is also possible that the person or

narrative agent is telling what another has seen or sees. So, it becomes necessary to draw

a distinction between the two, at least on a theoretical level as stated by Rimmon-Kenan.

This can be best illustrated by giving the example of Pip in Charles Dicken’s Great

Expectations. Here the perception / focalization is of Pip, the child, where as the narrator

is Pip, the adult. The adult Pip, who is the narrative agent, recalls the events of his past

and his perception of them as a child. Rimmon-Kenan sums up the implications of this

distinction by formulating these points:

1 In principle, focalization and narration are distinct activities.

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2. In so-called ‘third person center of consciousness’ (Henry James’ The

Ambassadors, Joyce’s Portrait), the center of consciousness (or reflector) is the

focalizer, while the user of the third person markers is the narrator.

3. Focalization and narration are also separate in first person retrospective

narratives.

4. As far as focalization is concerned, there is no difference between third person

center of consciousness and first person retrospective narration. In both, the

focalizer is a character within the represented world. The only difference between

the two is the identity of the narrator.

5. However, focalization and narration may sometimes be combined. (75)

Thus Focalization has a subject, i.e. the focalizer; ‘the one dominant

consciousness’. There can also be more than one focalizer to create a multiple or

simultaneous view. Because, if there is a focalizer, it necessarily implies that there will

be something that is focalized (an object).

According to the position of the focalizer and its relations with the focalized

objects, focalization is of mainly three types:

Zero Focalization

External Focalization

Internal Focalization

Narratives with zero focalization are also called “non-focalized” according to

Genette (189). Gerald Prince defines zero focalization as one in which “the narrator is

presented in terms of a non-locatable, indeterminate perceptual position” (103), i.e. the

position related to omniscient narrators. In external focalization, focalizing position is

outside story and cannot be related with any character. Mieke Bal uses abbreviation EF

for “external and non character bound focalization” (148). “External focalization is felt
 59

to be close to the narrating agent” (Rimmon-Kenan 74) and the agent is also called

narrator focalizer. Here the difference between narrator and focalizer almost fades away.

External focalization narrates only the “visible phenomenon” what characters do and say

(Toolan 71). It can be found in first person narration, “either when the temporal and

psychological distance between narrator and character is minimal (as in Camus’

L’Etranger, 1957) or when the perception through which the story is rendered is that of

narrating self rather than that of experiencing self” (Rimmon-Kenan 74). About internal

focalization Toolan says that its place or locus is inside the narrated events or “inside the

setting of the events” (Toolan, Narrative 69). As it is always related with one or more

than one characters, Mieke Bal represents it through CF, i.e. character focalization.

Genette(Narrative) has given three sub-categories of internal focalization:

1) Fixed

2) Variable

3) Multiple

Fixed focalization is associated with only one focalizer in the narrative. Variable

focalization shifts from one character to another. In the narrative, the locus of

focalization either comes back to the first focalizer or it may shift to the other characters.

Multiple focalization means when the same event is focalized and narrated by various

characters.

Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Bal and Toolan define external focalization and

internal focalization in more clear and simplified manner. According to Genette, zero

focalization and internal focalization are related to the position of the focalizer, while the

difference between external focalization and internal focalization is related to the

position of the focalized. But later narratologists define external focalization in a

narrative when focalizing agent is not present in the story or cannot be related to the

character while internal focalization is used if the focalizing agent may be related to any
 60

character in the narrative. Consequently, external focalization refers to someone who is

not in the story, but can have different degrees of perception of the focalized objects.

Thus external focalization is related to the situation when the focalization is from an

orientation outside the story and it is not associated with any character in the text. Here

the narrator and the character are not psychologically distanced. In fact they are close.

Internal focalization occurs inside the represented events or even inside the setting of the

events. This is mostly related to a character focalizer.

Just as there can be two types of focalizers, there are two types of focalized,

marked by the same distinction of being viewed from outside or within. When the

focalized is viewed from outside, just the visible, outer manifestation of a person or a

thing is reported. When something is internally focalized, there is such penetration of the

character as if it can report on its thoughts and feelings from within. The focalizer seems

to be in the mind of the focalized actually reporting the condition of the person’s mind.

Mieke Bal, who is mainly associated with the concept of focalization says:

The subject of focalization, the focalizer, is the point from which the

elements are viewed. That point can lie with a character, i.e. an element of

fabula or outside it. If the focalizer coincides with the character, that

character will have a technical advantage over other characters. The

reader watches with the character’s eyes and will, in principle be inclined

to accept the vision presented by the character. (104)

The advantage that the character focalizer enjoys is that it is able to coordinate

the reader’s view with its own. Rimmon-Kenan gives a detailed description of the types

of focalization which Bal does not. Rimmon-Kenan (1983) has given different ‘facets of

focalization, the major ones being perceptual, psychological and ideological. Toolan

(1988) says that there can be many variations in ‘the power or breath of the focalizing.’

If one is thinking in relation to the perceptual facet and there is an external focalizer then
 61

that focalizer can give a panoramic perspective to the reader. It can give holistic

descriptions of characters, scenes and settings not only individually, but also of separate

and simultaneous events or scenes. But when the focalizer is within the setting (a

character), it can only give a limited perspective. Even along the time dimension an

external focalizer can cover different time periods while an internal focalizer is limited to

retrospection.

In addition to making distinctions between these spatio-temporal orientations,

Rimmon-Kenan distinguishes the psychological facet into two types, consisting of the

cognitive and emotive components. Cognition comprises knowledge, belief memory, etc.

and an external focalizer from his omniscient perspective, has greater insight into the

characters (the focalized) as compared to an internal focalizer who can have only limited

knowledge. An internal focalizer is more involved with the events as compared to the

external that can be more neutral or detached. By virtue of this, the internal focalizer may

be more subjective and offer a coloured view. The focalized’s mind and emotions are

open to an external or internal treatment. Rimmon-Kenan writes:

When the focalized is seen from within especially by an external

focalizer, indications such as ‘he thought’, ‘he felt, 'it seemed to him’, ‘he

knew’, ‘he recognized’ often appear in the text. But when the inner states

of the focalized are left to be implied by external behaviour, modal

expressions—suggesting the speculative status of such implication –

often occur: ‘apparently’, ‘evidently’, ‘as if’, ‘it seemed’, etc. . . .

Uspensky calls these—‘words of estrangement’ (1973:83). (82)

The third facet of focalization is the ideological facet along which variation

occurs. When any kind of evaluation is made of the major categories of classification of

life in general like man/woman; husband/wife; child/adult; literate/illiterate;

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modern/traditional, etc., there is an inevitable ideological angle to the view. The

ideological facet consists of the way the world is conceptualized. This world view may

be of the external narrator focalizer in which case it becomes the dominant norm

(ideology) against which all others are measured. There may also be a juxtaposition of

ideological orientations without anyone gaining dominance thus leading itself to a

polyphonic effect.

The terminology used in the present study will follow Mieke Bal and Rimmon-

Kenan’s observation on focalization, that is the external focalization and internal

focalization will be related to the position of focalizer in the narrative.

It is clear that if focalization is related with ‘who sees.’ The other part is about

‘who speaks’ this is again integral to the issue ‘to whom it is spoken’. It deals with the

questions like: Who is the narrator? Who is the narratee? The important things to know

are—who tells the story or who is the teller of the narrative. If it is the writer or it may

be someone else in the story, whose presence we may or may not feel. Seymour Chatman

gives one model of narrative communication which is also used by Kenan.

Narrative Text

Diagram: 1.5 Source: Chatman, Seymour, Story and Discourse; Narrative Structure in

Fiction and Film (151).

Now it is clear that Chatman positions real author and real reader outside the box.

Time is indicative of the activity and crucial factor of narrative communication. The

words real author or historical authors do not refer to a particular historical person but

to the writer of the text. To understand the difference between author and narrator is an
 63

important element of narrative analysis. The agent who narrates the story in a narrative

text is the narrator whose presence may or may not be felt in the narrative; but the

author is that entity who has evolved the whole story, its narrator and hence a text

through language. Lothe says, “The author stands in principle outside the literary

universe he or she has created by means of language” (18).

It also becomes very important to understand the concept of implied author. He is

not like the real author. He does not exist or live in flesh and bone and also should not be

identified or confused with the narrator in the narrative. Chatman describes implied

author as:

. . . reconstructed by the reader from the narrative. He is not the narrator,

but rather the principle that invented the narrator, along with everything

else in the narrative . . . unlike the narrator, the implied author can tell us

nothing. He, or better, it has no voice, no direct means of communicating.

It instructs us silently, through the design of the whole, within all the

voices, by all the means it has chosen to let us learn. (148)

There is no doubt that the implied author remains silent and is “voiceless,” but it

has the ability and power to “instruct us” (the audience) silently. This builds its position,

in relation to real author, very important. It has significant role in constituting the

discourse of the narrative. Kenan asserts: “Its relations to the real author is admitted to

be of great psychological complexity and has barely analyzed except to suggest that

implied authors are often far superior in intelligence and moral standards to the actual

men and women who are real authors” (87).

Further, Kenan says that it is not compulsory that the implied author should be

identical with the real author. As far as implied reader is concerned it is also a construct

like an implied author. The way the real author is different from the narrator, the implied
 64

reader also differs from the narratee. The narrative may or may not have an overt narrator

or narratee, but surely has an implied author and implied reader. Lothe observes that the

conception of implied reader is related to the “broader areas between narrative theory

and theories of aesthetic respond . . .”

The implied reader plays an important role in forming the meaning in the

narrative. The implied reader should not be called passive like the implied author. Thus

“the author has, according to Iser, a certain control of the way in which we read, but this

form of control is indirect and based on shared conventions which have matured over

time – a repertoire of social, historical and cultural norms regulating the manner in which

fictional prose works and communicates” (Lothe 19).

Further Genette defines narration part at three levels:

1. Time of the narrating

2. Narrating level

3. Person

Time of the narrating is concerned with temporal relation between narration and

story. In verbal fiction, “. . . stories are generally told in present, past or future tense”

(Genette 215). “Most of the time events are told after they happen (‘ulterior narration’),

as in Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860 / 61) and

Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), to mention a few texts where this most frequent form of

narration is used” (Rimmon-Kenan 89).

Genette calls the second type “prior narrating” as “Much less frequent, for

obvious reasons is a narration which precedes the events (‘anterior narration’)”

(Rimmon-Kenan 90). Such narratives are usually written in future tense and are

predictive in nature. “Instead, this type of narration tends to appear in narratives with in

narratives in the form of prophecies, curses or dreams of fictional characters” (Rimmon-

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Kenan 90). These are “predictive in relation to the immediate narrating instance”

(Genette 220).

“Simultaneous narration”, the third type of narration is “in principle the simplest .

. . and narrating eliminates any sort of interference or temporal game” (Genette 218).

“When telling and acting are not simultaneous, but follow each other in alteration

narration is of fourth type namely ‘intercalated’” (Rimmon-Kenan 91). Genette defines it

as “interpolated”. This type of narration has an intricate and complicated structure. Here

the events are as Genette says:

. . . reported between the moments of action . . . story and narrating get

entangled in such a way that the latter has an effect on the former. This is

what happens particularly in an epistolary novel with several

correspondents, where we know, the letter is at the same time both a

medium of the narrative and an element in the plot. (Genette 217)

Here the narrative develops along with the development of the fabula. One story

is intertwined and intermingled into the other. If we remove or pull out one element, the

other gets disturbed. In the simultaneous narration, events are reported when they are

happening. Here narration and fabula don’t get entangled and mingle with each other.

Narration may be simultaneous, but events are being focalized and narrated by some

agency. In simultaneous narration, the temporal distance between fabula and narration is

almost zero. Here is Genette’s quote from Narrative Discourse to differentiate the terms

more clearly:

The extreme closeness of story to narrating produces here, most often, a

very subtle effect of friction (if I may call it that) between the slight

temporal displacement of the narrative of events (Here is what happened

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to me today) and the complete simultaneousness in the report of thoughts

and feelings (“Here is what I think about it this evening”). (217-18)

Narrating levels: As it is discussed earlier, sometimes there are other narratives within

the main narrative. The narratives that are positioned within the main narrative attribute

the main narrative various levels of narration. “Narrating instance of a first narrative”

(Genette 229) is ‘extradiegedic level’ of narration and “the narrating instance of second

narrative” is called ‘intradiegetic level’ of narration. The narration in “Chaucer’s The

Canterbury Tales” (Rimmon-Kenan 92) is the simplest example of extradiegetic and

intradiegetic level in which there is extradiegetic narration where the reader is introduced

to different pilgrims, but the pilgrims’ tales are told at intradiegetic levels. The different

pilgrims’ tale that constitutes the second level of narration are also termed as

‘hypodiegetic level’ that means a level below the level of diegesis in the narrative “. . .

thus the diegetic level is narrated by an extradiegetic narrator” (Rimmon-Kenan 92).

Rimmon-Kenan holds: “Hypodiegetic narratives may have various functions in relation

to the narrative with in which they are embedded. These functions are sometimes

presented separately, sometimes in combination” He defines these functions as follows:

1. Actional Function

2. Explicable Function

3. Thematic Functions.

According to Rimmon-Kenan, actional function refers to the function when the

narrative on intradiegetic level carries forward the action of the first narrative “by sheer

fact of being narrated, regardless (or almost regardless) of their content” (92). Rimmon-

Kenan has given the most classical example of this function, i.e. A Thousand and one

Night. Here Scheherezade’s life depends upon the embedded narratives she narrates.

Explicable function according Rimmon-Kenan refers to the function when the

embedded narrative “offers an explanation of the diegetic level, answering such question
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as ‘What were the events leading to the present situation?’”(92). Rimmon-Kenan

presents the example of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom. Here “Thomas Sutpen’s narration

of his childhood to General Compson, especially of the insulting confrontation with the

Negro servant (a hypo-hypodiegetic level), explains how Sutpen lost his innocence and

came to be the self-reliant, a-moral person he is” (92). Under thematic function Rimmon-

Kenan observes that “the relations established between hypodiegetic and the diegetic

levels are those of analogies, i.e. similarities and contrast. . . . an identity which verges

on identity, making the hypodiegetic level a mirror and reduplication of diegetic . . . .”

(93).

Narrators related to various levels of narration determine the typology of narrator.

Narrators related to the extradiegetic level are termed as extradiegetic narrators and those

related to intradiegetic level as intradiegetic narrators. Rimmon-Kenan defines the

narrators of third level as “hypodiegetic” narrators and of fourth level as “hypo-

hypodiegetic” narrators (95). Extradiegetic narrator and intradiegetic narrators can be

present or absent in the story they narrate. If they are present in the fabula they narrate,

they are called “homodiegetic”, if not then “heterodiegetic” (Genette 255-6).

“Like extradiegetic narrator, intradiegetic narrators can also be either

homodiegetic or heterodiegetic” (Rimmon-Kenan 97). Pardoner in The Canterbury Tales

narrates and also participates as character, he is therefore “intradiegetic and

homodiegetic narrator” (Rimmon-Kenan 97). These hypothetical positions present four

kinds of narrator’s status (Genette 248).

a. Extradiegetic heterodiegetic

b. Extradiegetic homodiegetic

c. Intradiegetic hetrodiegetic

d. Intradiegetic homodiegetic.
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Genette imparts five “functions” (255) to narrator:

1. Narrative function 2. Directing function

3. Narrating function 4. Emotive function

5. Ideological function

Narrator’s first and most important function is “narrative function, which no

narrator can turn away from without at the same time losing his status as narrator”

(Genette 255); the second “function is to some extent meta-linguistic (meta-narrative, in

this case) to mark articulations, connections, interrelation ship” (Genette 255). It is called

by Genette “directing function” in a narrative which is just like the function that is also

known as stage direction in drama. The next function is “narrating function” which is

related to the role of different characters as narrator and narratee. The fourth function is

“emotive” function (Genette 256). “This is one accounting for the part narrator as such

takes in the story he tells” (Genette 256). The narrator who participates also develops a

relationship. By such relationship the narrator may express and shows feelings and

emotions "which one or other episode awakens in him” (Genette 256). The last function

is “ideological function”. Sometimes when the narrator takes an overt teleological

position the “story can also take the more didactic form of an authorized commentary on

the action” (Genette 256). It is narrator’s ideological function. Here Genette also alarms

that these functions should not be taken very strictly as “none of the categories is

completely unadulterated and free of complicity with other” (Genette 257). The kind of

function a narrator plays in a particular situation also depends upon his “distance” from

the narrated text and his “perspective”. The functions performed by the narrator are of

great importance in deciding the ‘characterization’ and ‘discourse’ in the text.

In a narrative it is observed that various aspects are so tightly intermingled that

no aspect can be studied on its own—separately or independently. If a character narrator

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is introduced in a narration that begins with third person narration, not only the status of

the character gets changed, it also affects the temporal arrangement of events and also

the spatial setting of the narrative further resulting in the change in the overall structure

of the narrative which finally affects the discourse also. Thus the study of a narrative is a

holistic study that means studying all parts of narrative in context with one another and

this is what narratology and a narratogist do.

The thrust of the present discussion on narratology has been based on the

classification of its main aspects—story, text and narration. Based on an analysis done in

this chapter the study will limit itself to the examination and understanding of the

narrative strategies with reference to selected novels of Ghosh with a view to study the

narrative voice including focalization, types of narrator, modes of narration and speech

representation in the third chapter, the treatment of time and space in the fourth chapter

and the study of narratology in relation to history in River of Smoke in the fifth chapter

and finally the conclusion of the present study.