NARRATIVE
• Alasdair McIntyre: “Man is in his
actions and practice, as well as in his
fictions, essentially a story-telling
animal.”
• Terry Pratchett: “Stories, great, flapping
ribbons of shaped space-time, have been
blowing and uncoiling around the universe
since the beginning of time. And they have
evolved. The weakest have died and the
strongest have survived and they have
grown fat on the retelling.
Stories don’t care who takes part in them.
All that matters is that the story gets told,
that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer,
stories are a parasitical life form, warping
lives in the service of only the story itself.
Servant girls have to marry the prince.
That’s what life is all about. You can’t fight
a Happy Ending.”
Two aspects of narrative:
• STORY (TALE) –
• ‘what’
–
TELLING/SHOWING
‘how’
Properties of narrative
Story/tale:
1. plot
2. character
3. setting
Telling/showing:
4. point of view
5. voice (narrator)
Plot
“There was an old man
And he had a calf
And that’s half
He took him out of the stall
And put him on the wall
And that’s all”
action vs. plot
• Action: events one after another (annals)
• Plot: arrangement
• Aristotle: plot (mythos) is action (praxis)
arranged artistically
• E. M. Forster’s example: the king died the queen died;
• the king died - the queen died of grief; (as
it turned out, the bishop killed them both)
• Causality
Teleology (telos)
Peter Brooks:
“Plot is the design and intention of narrative,
what shapes a story and gives it a certain
direction or intent of meaning.”
Plot= ‘conspiracy’
(French for plot: ‘intrigue’)
Character
• Hero – protagonist
• Protagonist – minor character
• Protagonist – antagonist
(Antigone – Creon)
Hero – villain
(Richard III, Krisztyán Tódor)
Hero – antihero
(Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
chinovnik; Oblomov, Gregor Samsa
Vladimir and Estragon, Nyúl Béla
The double
• doppelgänger, alter ego
• Hidden aspects of the self (repressed
desires, fears)
• E. A. Poe: „William Wilson”
• R. L. Stevenson: Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde
• Chuck Palahniuk: The Fight Club
(Tyler Durden)
Babits Mihály: A gólyakalifa
THE STUDY OF NARRATIVE
• (Structuralist) Narratology
• (Vladimir Propp; Tzvetan Todorov; Roland
Barthes; Gérard Genette)
• Narratives are translatable (bw languages, bw.
different media)
aim: universal, timeless structure
Roland Barthes: “a narrative is a long sentence
just as every constative sentence is in a way the
rough outline of a short narrative”
(1) deep structure - surface
structure
Snow White~Sleeping Beauty~Little Red
Riding Hood
• Vladimir Propp (Russian ethnographist)
• Russian folktales
• 7 character types or Roles (hero, enemy,
helper, etc.) and
• 32 plot elements or Functions (doing
damage, questing, setting up a prohibition,
etc.)
•
Propp
• Individual tales:
• variations and combinations of functions,
roles (eg ‘doing damage’: kidnapping,
stealing, magic spell, killing)
• → grammar of all possible tales
• Western films
• Hero – society – villain – helper
• What about more complex narratives?
(2) fabula and sjuzet (fabula,
szüzsé): the tale and the telling
• fabula: the action considered separately
from the text (without the plotting, the
‘telling’)
• sjuzet: the actual text; the ‘how’, the way in
which the fabula is constructed,
actualised, told, worked (much more than
plotting)
Fabula/sjuzet
• E.g. the sjuzet of Onegin:
• not the story of Onegin ad Tatjana
(narrative voice, irony, parallel story of
Lensky and Olga)
• Faulkner, Jane Austen, Bridget Jones
• Film: point of view, colour or b/w, slowmotion, fast-tracking, editing, soundtrack,
voice-over,
temporal organisation of narrative
(fabula and sjuzet in the handling of time)
Order (Memento, Faulkner, Pulp Fiction)
Frequency (Hitchcock)
Duration
„many years passed” (acceleration); cuts in
film
descriptions (pause: zero time, much text)
The Function of Storytelling
Why do we need stories?
The cultural significance of stories
1. Narrative (as) knowledge
Aristotle: “We need stories because we
hav not lived enough”
Sanskrit gna: “know” and “narrate” - myths
Narrative in myth, history and natural history
(the origin of death, the neck of the giraffe)
3. Narrative as identity
• Tengelyi László: „The time we live in is
woven through by stories. Our place in the
world – even before we are conscious 
indeed, perhaps before we are born – is
staked out by family narratives. Then we
add our ... story to the stories we inherit.”
Narrative and identity
• Creating and maintaining selfhood;
continuity
• Trauma → gaps in self-stories
• (‘I can’t make it into a story’)
• Individual – collective identity (national)
• Ambiguity of self-stories: honesty and
fraudulence, clarification and selfmythologisation
3. Narrative as act(ion)
Old English spell (enchantment) ‘story’
Telling a story: an act
the point of the story: why? To whom?
Biblical parables
• psychoanalysis: understanding, healing
• confession: absolution
• courts of law, testimonies: judgement
Narrative as action
• La Fontaine’s tale about Athens
(the swallow, the egg and the eel)
• Arabian Nights: Sheherezade and Prince
Shahryar
• (narrative as seduction, spell)
Shakespeare: Othello
•
[Brabantio believes that Othello seduced Desdemona with the help of some magic
potion or spell]
• “Yet, by your gracious patience,
I will a round unvarnish’d tale deliver
Of my whole course of love; what drugs, what charms,
What conjuration and what mighty magic,
For such proceeding I am charged withal,
I won his daughter. …
• Her father loved me; oft invited me;
Still question’d me the story of my life,
From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes,
That I have passed.
I ran it through, even from my boyish days,
To the very moment that he bade me tell it;
Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field
Of hair-breadth scapes i’ the imminent deadly breach …
Othello/2
• … This to hear
Would Desdemona seriously incline:
But still the house-affairs would draw her
thence:
Which ever as she could with haste dispatch,
She'ld come again, and with a greedy ear
Devour up my discourse: which I observing,
Took once a pliant hour, and found good means
To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart
That I would all my pilgrimage dilate,
Whereof by parcels she had something heard,
But not intentively: I did consent,
And often did beguile her of her tears,
When I did speak of some distressful stroke
That my youth suffer'd. My story being done,
She gave me for my pains a world of sighs:
Othello/3
• She swore, in faith, 'twas strange, 'twas passing
strange,
'Twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful:
She wish'd she had not heard it, yet she wish'd
That heaven had made her such a man: she
thank'd me,
And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her,
I should but teach him how to tell my story.
And that would woo her. Upon this hint I spake:
She loved me for the dangers I had pass'd,
And I loved her that she did pity them.
This only is the witchcraft I have used:
Here comes the lady; let her witness it.”