Narrative Situation: Who’s Who and What’s Its Function

Abstract

This chapter introduces the basic elements of narrative situation, the combination of narrator, perspective (point of view), and narrative level involved in first-person and third-person fictional narration. 1 A separate final section treats second-person narration and points readers to the growing bibliography on this unusual kind of narrative situation. This chapter deals exclusively with prose fiction, since the extent to which films have narrative situations, implied by the gaze of the camera, operates by rough analogies to the possibilities in prose fiction. Most films adopt the equivalent of third-person omniscience. 2 Though characters and narrative levels are treated in depth in their own chapters (Chapters 4 and 8 respectively), they appear here first as ingredients of narrative situation. Briefly, characters, the active agents represented within narratives, may possess perspectives or points of view, or they may be depicted externally through reports of their speech and actions. Narrators, who are responsible for acts of telling, can be characters when they are positioned inside the story world, but often narrators are located outside the story world. A narrator positioned outside the story world can convey sufficient information to assume the status of a character, but unless the writer has a frame-breaking surprise up her sleeve, that kind of overt narrator still usually isn't a character within the story. These distinctions reflect the basic conception of narrative level, as comprised of (at least) a discourse level, a realm of narrated words-in-order, and the story level, a realm of imagined actions and agents. Narrative situation describes where the narrator is located, how overtly or covertly the narrator makes his or her presence felt, and what relationship the narrator has to the characters, in one or more of whom perspective may be invested. In other words, narrative situation describes the nature of the 30 S. Keen, Narrative Form