Narrative - Literary Theory

Literary Theory

There is a distinction between first-person and third-person narrative, which Gérard Genette refers to as homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrative, respectively. A homodiegetic narrator describes own personal experiences as a character in the story. Such a narrator cannot know more about other characters than what their actions reveal. A heterodiegetic narrator, in contrast, describes the experiences of the characters that appear in the story. A narrative wherein events are seen through the eyes of a third-person internal focaliser is said to be figural. In some stories, the author may be omniscient and employ multiple points of view as well and comment on events as they occur.

"Narratology" is a term coined by Tzvetan Todorov in 1969, and generally refers to the structuralist analysis of narrative. In this process, the narrative is divided into its constituent parts in order to determine their function(s) and relationships. Here "story" refers to what is narrated (usually a chronological sequence of events) and "plot" refers to the logical and causal structure of a story, explaining why its events occur. The term discourse is used to describe the stylistic choices that determine how the narrative text or performance finally appears to the audience.