Understanding Narrative Genre: Key Elements & Techniques
Understanding the Narrative Genre
The narrative genre aims to represent facts, whether real or fictitious, featuring characters and events within a specific space and time. This genre encompasses description, narration, and dialogue. The narrative is primarily defined by the author’s approach to the various elements that constitute the story.
Key Elements of Narrative
These elements include:
Author’s Position
The author’s viewpoint within the narrative is fundamental. The author may directly address the reader or employ a narrator, who can be internal or external to the story. The most common external narrator is the omniscient narrator, who knows everything about the characters. This narrator typically uses the third person. Different perspectives can enrich the interpretation of events, such as perspectivism, which presents the story from multiple characters’ viewpoints.
Structure
Types of narrative structures:
- Closed: Clear beginning, middle, and end, often following a classical pattern of presentation, climax, and resolution. Typically associated with an omniscient narrator.
- Open: Narratives without a defined end, concluding when the characters’ lives end.
- Circular: Ends as it began, sometimes with the same words.
Space
The setting where the action takes place. It can be:
- Real: A place that exists in a specific physical setting (e.g., a real city).
- Unreal: A place that does not exist and is a product of the author’s imagination.
- Ideal: Imagined as a perfect place.
- Fantastic: Places with nonexistent or impossible elements.
Time
The time at which events occur. Traditional novels often use a linear treatment, narrating events in chronological order. However, techniques such as:
- Chronological Disorder: Breaks the temporal linearity, exchanging past and present due to the non-orderly operation of memory.
- Flashback: A cut in the present to recall past events.
- Counterpoints: Simultaneity of times, places, and characters, where various actions taken by different characters in different places occur at one time.
Narrative Techniques
Ways of approaching narrative. Key techniques include:
- Stream of Consciousness: The author expresses a character’s thoughts on any matter. This monologue often lacks logical organization, blending ideas and thoughts as they arrive in the mind.
- Free Indirect Style: A literary technique to reproduce the words and thoughts of oneself and others. It uses indirect speech without an introductory verb. This style is characteristic of interior monologues in novels, allowing direct access to a character’s thoughts by suppressing binding ties.
Characters
Characters are developed by balancing physical and psychological traits. Often, the characters are presented descriptively. However, characters should reveal themselves as the story unfolds. Depending on their importance, characters are classified as major or minor. Some novels feature collective characters where all are equally important.
Narrative Subgenres
An important narrative form is the short story, which typically has a simple plot and sometimes a didactic purpose. Different types of novels (historical, psychological, noir, fantastic, etc.) should not be confused as subgenres of the narrative.