Narrative Elements and Expressive Resources
Narrative: Definition and Key Elements
Narrative, a literary specialty, is dedicated to telling stories, events, and happenings in different modalities.
Basic Narrative Elements of a Work
- The Story: This consists of the various events that are recounted. We know it not only through the word of the narrator but also by the action of the characters.
- The Speech: This is the word of the narrator, i.e., the different procedures that a narrator uses to convey what happens in a narrative.
Types of Narrator Perspective
- First-person protagonist
- Third-person omniscient
- First-person witness
Speech Registers
Description
It consists in publicizing the characteristics.
Types of Description
- Timeline: Describes a time, a moment.
- Topography: Describes a place, a landscape, a country.
- Prosopography: Highlights external physical traits of a person.
- Ethopoeia: Highlights moral characteristics.
- Portrait: Combines physical and moral characteristics.
Dialogue
The written representation of a real or physical conversation.
Types of Dialogue
- Direct: Faithfully transcribes what characters say.
- Indirect: The narrator seeks to identify partners.
Monologue
The character holding a conversation with himself speaks as if thinking aloud.
Narration
The story is a clear, simple, and fun account of a real or fictitious event.
Types of Content
- Sensory content
- Mood content
- Conceptual content
Sensory Images
- Visual images: Captured through sight and classified into chromatic (color), kinetic (movement). They may also suggest shape, size, and dimension.
- Auditory images: Suggest sensations of sounds: bass, treble, rhythmic, pleasant, loud, and others.
- Tactile images: Impress touch, suggest texture: smooth, rough, cold, hot, warm, soft, hard, and others.
- Olfactory Images: Suggest odors: pleasant, unpleasant, deep, soft, strange, and others.
- Gustatory Images: Refer to taste, suggest flavors: sweet, salty, bitter, and others.
Expressive Resources
- Simile or Comparison: Establishes a descriptive relationship. It establishes a similarity between two images: a suggestive one (the compared) and a suggested one (the compared with) through a nexus or link.
- Metaphor: Conveys the meaning of a word and applies it to another due to the similarity that exists. Only the suggested image is presented.
- Personification: Attributes human qualities and actions to animals and things.
- Onomatopoeia: Consists in the imitation of sounds of nature, animals, and things, through words.
- Exaggeration: Enlarges or belittles the merits or faults of a person, animal, object, or situation.
- Synesthesia: The combination of several sensory images or sensory images with emotional content.
Story Elements
- Reason: An element that drives the action in the story.
- Sequences: Each of the parts into which a story can be divided.
- Character: Beings who perform various actions within a story.
- Characters who appear from the beginning to the end of the narrative (main characters).
- Characters that complement the actions of other characters (secondary characters).
- Circumstantial characters appear occasionally.
- Referential characters are known through other characters.
- Physical space: The place where the events occur in a literary work.
- Time: Indicates the various times that events occur. In time management, the following must be considered:
- Chronological time: Follows a linearity (yesterday, today, tomorrow), which allows you to read the story in a sequential form.
- Break in time: Breaking the linear order, it may be shown as follows:
- Retrospection: A look back to the past.
- Anticipation: Goes toward something that will happen in the future.