Exploring Differences in Story and Discourse
If the novel is a work of art, the story forms its raw material. As suggested by Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, “story designates the narrated events, abstracted from their disposition in the text and reconstructed in their chronological order.” (3) The author takes a story and manipulates it so that the reader comes to learn the story in a specific way. Where story is a sequence of events, located in a place in space and time, discourse is the medium through which the author transmits this story to the reader. Just as witnesses to a crime can describe the incident in many ways, authors have nearly limitless options in telling a story.
Joseph Conrad, in his novel The Secret Agent, alters the order in which we read the text presented to us. The author has the liberty to start at any point in the original time line of the story. Through discourse the narrative can jump back and forth between the past, present, and future, placing more emphasis on a single moment than on an entire week. The sequence of events and the way chronological time is manipulated is important to understanding the author’s intentions. In The Secret Agent, Conrad places the reader in a detective role where he or she must piece together the pieces of a jumbled sequence of events to figure out who bombed the Greenwich Observatory.
An author can also choose the voice of the story. The narrator’s voice can fall under two major categories: first-person narration and third-person narration. In first-person narration, the narrator is a part of the plot; thus, the narrative is focalized through the perspective of a single character. The reader can be led to question the narrator’s motives behind telling the story due to the way in which events and characters are portrayed. Ford Madox Ford’s novel, The Good Soldier, is told through an unreliable first-person narrator who gleans most of his information from other characters after most of the dramatic action in the novel has taken place. Because Ford’s narrator is a key member in the drama, it is difficult for the reader to completely trust his portrayal of this story.
In third-person narration, the narrator is not a part of the story but rather a voice apart from the characters. In the novel Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's narrator seems to morph from the consciousness of one character to another, exposing the reader to the various perspectives and biases of each character. It is up to the reader to piece together these various points of view in order to understand the story as a whole.
One final, less popular type of narration is second-person narration where the reader becomes the main subject of the action. Where first-person narration primarily uses the pronoun “I,” and third-person narration uses the pronouns "he, she, or they", second-person narration uses the pronoun “you.” For each of the three categories of narration, the narrator can be limited, where he or she knows what only what he or she experiences, or omniscient, and therefore all knowing.
Narrators not only convey the actions of the story, but also the inner thoughts of the characters. One way of communicating the thoughts of a character is through stream of consciousness narration. This type of narration is a literary technique which arose at the beginning of the 20th century; due in part to the development of psychology at the time. The technique strives to represent a person's consciousness by mimicking the way in which thoughts are triggered by outside stimuli and showing the natural tendency of the mind to jump around to different ideas based on these stimuli. Stream of consciousness narration tries to record the way brains react to the bombardment of perceptions and impressions it receives. This narration often lacks the grammatical structure, such as punctuation and sentences, that readers often expect in a conventional narrative.
As previously mentioned, the narrator is a persona created by the author; therefore, it is important to consider who narrators are - their gender, socioeconomic status, motivation, advantages, and limitations. Through the voice of the narrator, the author may make a social commentary or highlight a certain theme in the novel. In Rebecca West’s novel The Return of The Soldier, aspects of Jenny’s narration, such as her jealousy and her relation to other characters in the novel, make the reader question the veracity of her account.
Critics have developed competing opinions about the “correct” way to narrate a story. Temporality and voice become intertwined in Dorrit Cohn's discussion of the "problematic presentation." Cohn argues that the discrepancy between temporality and voice is most easily solved by using a first-person narrator, because he or she can determine the order of events in the novel through associative memory. He or she can choose to present events in a certain sequence in order to show cause and effect. Rimmon-Kenan maintains that the real story-time, in which everything is told in chronological order, is ideal. He is against using time-shifts because he considers such shifts to be deceiving to readers. Rimmon-Kenan also argues that keeping the real story-timeline is only possible in a story with only one character; as soon as there are multiple characters, the “events become simultaneous and the story is often multilinear” (Rimmon-Kenan 17). Wayne Booth rejects distinctions between different types of narrators entirely in The Rhetoric of Fiction, maintaining that criteria reserved to first and third-person narrators can apply to all different types. Instead, unspoken thoughts, feelings, and perceptions are conveyed through the "universal" narrator’s writings.
The story in itself is intangible; it is a construct and an abstraction of the text. When we read a text, we must construct the story and the characters from text through the narrative discourse. As characters are merely an assimilation of personality traits, the author must be careful to assemble various character indicators that can be inferred by the reader. Sometimes the author explicitly labels traits to characters through direct definition--adjectives, abstract nouns, and other types of nouns to characterize this type of definition. Other times , authors characterize through indirect presentation, where actions, speeches, and appearances must then be interpreted by the reader. Reader inference can cause some disagreement between readers as to how one should assess a certain character and become a source of rich discussion. Authors thoughtfully use discourse to convey their message and transform a story into a masterpiece. Therefore, we - as readers - should pay careful attention to how the authors present the story through narrative discourse.
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Works Cited
Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. The University of Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1961. Print.
Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978. Print.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative fiction contemporary poetics. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2002. Print.
Stein, Ray. Photo. 13 Apr. 2010. <http://wings.buffalo.edu/cas/english/faculty/conte/syllabi/377/Images/Ray_Stein.jpg>.
Mark's Comments are here.
wollaege Notes for 2nd round: 1) clarify in 2nd paragraph the discussion of discourse. It implies that chronological dislocation of the story in narrative discourse takes places only in first-person narration, but what about *The Secret Agent*? 2) in 4th paragraph, clarify the sentence "Just as Cohn argues that . . ." -- I don't think there's enough context for understanding that first clause. 3) add italics for all book titles (a few are missing). 2010-02-20 10:05:12