Structuralist Narratology

Structuralist Narratology

A narrative is a telling of some true or fictitious event or connected sequence of events, sometimes recounted by a narrator to an audience.A narrative is usually a story in prose or verse that includes characters, events,action and dialogue. A narrative communicates certain events through the experience of the characters.

Narrative text includes any type of writing that relates a series of events and includes both fiction (novels, short stories, poems) and nonfiction (memoirs, biographies, news stories). 

Narratology, the study of narratives and narrative structure, is the science of narratives. Narratology, as a discipline, has been traveling nearly for 50 years since Tzvetan Todorov invented the term “narratology” in 1969. Todorov coined the term “narratology”, in his work, the Grammar of Decameron,

Aristole states that the plot should have a beginning, a middle, and an end in a dramatic structure . And also talks about five stages of narration; exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution/denouement. Which are the structure of narrative proposed by Aristotle in his poetics.

Structuralist Narratology is instigated from Russian formalism and French structuralism.Tzvetan Todorov and Roland Barthes espoused this approach to analyze the work of art within the overall structure rather than the isolated individual stories.

Structuralist Narratology illustrates how a story’s meaning develops from its overall structure (the langue) rather than from each individual story’s isolated theme (the parole).

Genette goes on to distinguish three aspects of narrative reality — the story (the narrative content or the signified), the narrative (the signifier, discourse or the narrative text) and narrating (the narrating act itself).

In Structural Semantics (1966), A.J. Griemas (1917-1992) proposes his model of narrative analysis. He mentions that all elements and their combinations in narrative employ two aspects: actants and actors, which are similar to Saussure’s

langue and parole. While the actants function like langue, the

deep structure, the actors are similar to parole, the surface

structure. Hence, actants are abstract entities that organise the

narrative in its concrete form and actors are visible and concrete

elements of a narrative.

Gerard Genette proposes three levels of narratives;

* Story(histoire), Which is narrated

*the narrative(recit)

*the way the narrative is narrated

(narration).

These levels interact with each other so that narrative can progress. The interaction is based on  three aspects: 

Tense

Mood

Voice

Tense is the arrangement of events in the narrative that work within the frameworks of order, duration and time.

Mood creates the atmosphere of the narrative, which depends on

distance and perspective.

Voice refers to the voice of the

narrator. Voice helps understand the narrator’s relationship to the

story being narrated and the way it is being told.

Vladimir Propp was a Russian philologist and structuralist who analyzed the basic plot components of Russian folktales in order to identify their simplest irreducible narrative elements.

Based on his sample of 100 Russian folk stories, Propp believed that there have 31 narratemes and 7  types.

Seven dramatic personae

• Villain.
• The Donor (provider)
• The Helper.
• The Princess (a sought-for person)
• Dispatcher.
• The Hero.
• The False Hero.

In short,narratology is based on the idea of a common literary language, or a universal pattern of codes that operates within the text of a work.

 Structuralist narratology is the illustrates how a story's meaning develops from its overall structure (the langue) rather than from each individual story's isolated theme (the parole).