Narrative Texts: Exploring the Novel as a Genre

Posted on Oct 5, 2024 in Language

Narrative Texts: The Novel as a Genre

The narrative, or epic, is a literary genre where the writer focuses on external events, striving for objectivity. It stands alongside other genres like lyric, dramatic, and didactic, each with unique characteristics that classify literary works.

The epic or narrative typically uses prose (with exceptions like verse-written romances or epic poems), especially in modern times.

Prose Narrative Subgenres

The most important subgenres are:

The Story: A story is usually short, featuring few characters, a single setting, and less complexity than a novel. Its exact length is debatable, but generally shorter than a novel. A hybrid subgenre, the novella, bridges the length gap between a short story and a novel. Traditionally, stories were passed down orally through generations. These folktales often had didactic or moralizing purposes (e.g., Count Lucanor by Don Juan Manuel, 14th century). From the 19th century onward, authors began writing short stories with artistic intentions, moving away from moralizing. Most of these literary stories (not from popular tradition) target adult audiences and have concentrated action and characters (e.g., stories by Edgar Allan Poe or Legends by Gustavo Adolfo Becquer).
The Novel: Novels often have greater length and narrative complexity. Characterized by freedom, this subgenre has no set boundaries and can include dialogues, dramatic or theatrical fragments, lyrical or descriptive passages. Novelistic subgenres abound: historical fiction, adventure, romance, detective, action, noir, psychological, chivalry, love, thesis, social, etc. The only requirement is that it’s written in prose and involves characters whose stories are told. Currently, the novel is the dominant literary subgenre. Most readers primarily read novels, fueled by a powerful publishing market that has recently focused on this type of literature.

The novel is a significant and complete narrative event, where someone tells a story about a person or people in a varying degree of closeness. As a narrative, the novel has the following features:

1. The Narrator and the Point of View

The Narrator:

The narrator should not be confused with the ‘author’ or the real writer of the text. The narrator is the ‘voice’ that organizes and presents the facts from a specific ‘perspective’ (point of view) and sometimes adds commentary.

Based on the point of view, the narrator can be:

Internal Narrator:

A character within the story narrates. It has two variants: Protagonist Narrator and Witness or Secondary Character Narrator.

External Narrator:

The story is told from an outside perspective, as the narrator doesn’t participate in the events and narrates in the third person. The external narrator can be:

Omniscient: Acts as if they know all the details of the story, including the characters’ feelings, thoughts, and dreams.
Objective Observer: An impartial or objective narrator who acts like a film camera.
Editor Narrator: The writer pretends that they didn’t write the work but found and edited a manuscript. Sometimes they pretend it’s a collection of letters that the author claims to be publishing.

2. The Story Being Told

This constitutes the narrative elements, which are primarily four: action (what happens), time (when it happens), characters (who perform the actions), and setting (the environment where the story takes place):

Action:

The set of events presented in a specific order, which may not coincide with the actual order. We usually distinguish between plot (the sequence of events as narrated), understood as a narrator’s recreation of real or imaginary events, and story, or the sequence of events in their actual order. Events can be ordered chronologically and causally (cause > events > effects), or this sequence can be broken. The first form of narration is called linear structure, the second, free or artistic structure. In the free structure, several schemes are possible: starting from the middle or the end, or in a zigzag pattern, narrating several actions happening simultaneously.

Characters:

Those who cause or experience the events. Based on their psychological depth, characters include:

Stereotypes: Embody a pre-established behavior pattern (the hero, the antihero, the lover, etc.). A variant is the allegorical figure, embodying abstract ideas or principles: death, freedom, night, etc.
Types: Represent a social group that the audience recognizes: the beggar, the prostitute, the servant, the soldier, etc.
Individual Characters: Possess their own psychological complexity, differentiating them from other characters in the story.

Setting:

In relation to reality, the setting can be:

Real Space: Corresponds to real and identifiable places (e.g., Madrid, Barcelona, New York).
Imaginary Space: Doesn’t exist in reality but is created based on similar real places. Although not authentic, it contains real or potential elements (e.g., Vetusta in La Regenta by Clarín).
Fantastic Space: Has no relation to real space (e.g., settings in science fiction novels or works like “The Lord of the Rings”).

Time:

The described events occur in a temporal sequence. We distinguish two types of narrative time: external time and internal time.

External Time is the time when the action unfolds.

Internal Time is how events are chronologically arranged and presented in the story. The most common is the linear order, but not always. The current narrative action often starts at a specific point in the story and then includes past events (flashback), or anticipates events that haven’t happened yet (flashforward). Sometimes, events are arranged in a non-linear way, for example, starting from the end, as Gabriel García Márquez does in Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

Besides the linear or chronological order, the narrator can start the narration following other guidelines:

In media res (“in the middle of things”): The narrative begins at the climax or central point of the story, then goes back to the beginning, and continues linearly when it reaches the central point again.
In extremis res: The narrative starts at the very end or outcome of the story.
Counterpoint: Juxtaposition of various narrative situations that develop in alternating sequences.

3. Discourse Patterns in Narrative

A characteristic of narrative is its discursive plurality. It can include descriptive fragments to show the setting or the characters, narrative fragments to tell what the characters do, and dialogue to reproduce their conversations. Leaving aside description, the following discursive modes can be found in a story:

Narrative Text: The narrator refers to the characters’ actions in their own words, without directly showing what they say.
Indirect Speech: The narrator introduces what the characters say but doesn’t let them speak directly. They use the conjunction “that” preceded by a verb of verbal communication (e.g., shout, murmur, confess).
Direct Speech: The narrator transcribes the characters’ conversation literally, using their exact words and indicating who is speaking with appropriate verbs and dialogue tags.
Monologue: Presents the character’s voice and perspective, but the narrator is still present, organizing the logical discourse. The reader can still detect the narrator’s presence.