2.6. Composition and content organization. Types of narration. Voice and focalisation

As a narrative a work of fiction employs certain techniques creating a vivid character, setting a scene, developing a plot, arranging events to have a relation to one another. In order to establish significance in narrative, to raise the level of generality, to extend or complicate the meaning, there will often be coincidence, parallel or contrasting episodes, repetitions of various sorts, including the repetition of challenges, crises, conciliations, episodes, symbols, motifs.

The traditional narrative-compositional forms are narration about events (narrative proper), description, dialogue, argumentation.

1. Narrative proper exists as:

   • The author’s narrative supplies the reader with direct information about the author’s preferences and objections, beliefs and contradictions, i.e. serves the major source of shaping up the author’s image (the unfolding of the plot is mainly concentrated here, personages are given characteristics, the time and the place of action are also described here, as the author sees them) In Charles Dickens’ book A Tale of Two Cities the author’s narrative describes the setting of the novel – England and France of 1775 – the way he sees it: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some authorities insisted on its being received for good or for evil in the superlative degree of comparison only”.

   • The figural narrative situation has no visible narrator and presents events through a character’s perspective. The entrusted narrative takes place when the author’s function is entrusted to one of the personages. It makes the writing more plausible, impresses with the effect of authenticity of the described events. Thus, in H. Melville’s Moby Dick the entrusted narrative is presented in the first person singular. The narrator tells the story of mono-maniac Captain Ahab, who swears vengeance on the White Whale that has crippled him. Ishmael is the only participant of the hunt who survives to describe the tragedy firsthand: “Call me Ishmael. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world”.

   • Represented inner speech conveys feelings and thoughts of the character that remain unuttered. Study how Susan Hill represents the inner speech in A Bit of Singing and Dancing: “She thought, I can stay out here just as long as I like. I can do anything I choose, anything at all, for now I am answerable only to myself”. It is characteristic of J. Galsworthy to include represented speech into the author’s narration without any perceptible transition from one to the other: “He became suddenly conscious that he was doing an indelicate thing. To have brought Fleur down openly – yes! But to sneak her in like this!” – the episode from To Let reveals the shock the main character got coming unexpectedly on his mother when he was meeting a girl secretly – “Something like despair ravaged the heart of his watching Fleur. If she left him for Winfrid! But surely – no – her father, her house, her dog, her friends, her – her collection of – of – she wouldn’t – could not give them up!” Sometimes a third-person narrative shifts into adopting the point of view of one of the characters. Unless you read carefully, you may assume that it is still the narrator’s voice. There are two techniques for representing consciousness in prose fiction. One is interior monologue, in which the grammatical subject of the discourse is an “I”, and we, as it were, overhear the character verbalizing his or her thoughts as they occur. The free direct representation of an “ordinary” stream-of-consciousness in interior monologue quotes the character’s thoughts. Narrative mediation gives way to the character’s psychological association. Being half asleep in bed, Molly Bloom (James Joyce, Ulysses) thinks about her first encounter with her husband: …all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and thejessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes then I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls use or shall I wear red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to again yes and then he asked me…

The other method renders thought as reported speech (in the third person, past tense) but keeps to the kind of vocabulary that is appropriate to the character, and deletes some of the tags, like “she thought”, “she asked herself” etc. that a more formal narrative would require. This technique in which the narrator’s voice merges with the voice of a character or characters is sometimes called free indirect speech. It gives the illusion of intimate access to a character’s mind, but without totally surrendering authorial participation in the discourse. E.g. “ Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning – fresh as if issued to children on a beach.” (Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)). The first sentence is a statement of an authorial narrator, but an impersonal one without explanations who Mrs Dalloway is. The next sentence moves the focus of the narrative into the character’s mind adopting free indirect style.

II. Description gives a mental picture of something that can be seen or perceived through the other senses. Description is used to depict scenery (landscape, seascape, townscape), premises (interior), appearance (portrait), things of material world. The order of writing description can be spatial or the order of importance. The emphasis is usually laid on attributes. Pay attention to the vivid description given by Tony Parsons in Man and Boy:

The car smelled like somebody else’s life. Like freedom. It was parked right in the window of the showroom, a wedge-shaped sports car which, even with its top off, looked as sleek and compact as a muscle. Naturally it was red – a flaming, testosterone – stuffed red. (…) I just liked the way it looked. And that smell. Above all, that smell. What was it about that smell? Amidst the perfume of leather, rubber and all those yards of freshly sprayed steel, you could smell a heartbreaking newness so shocking that it almost overwhelmed me. (…) I knew that smell from somewhere and I recognised the way it made me feel. Funny enough, it reminded me of that feeling you get when you hold a newborn baby. The analogy was far from perfect -–the car couldn’t squint up at me with eyes that had just started to see, or grasp one of my fingers in a tiny, tiny fist, or give me a gummy little smile. But for a moment there it felt like it just might.

III. Dialogue (the neutral scenic narrative) reports the conversation of two or more people; the speaker’s exact words are reported or imagined. Dialogue is the main component of drama, but it also can be encounted in the emotive prose. Writers use dialogues to give their readers a sense of immediacy and involvement. In the story An Encounter with an Inerviewer Mark Twain shows a parody on the American press resorting to dialogue:

Q. Well, it was only a suggestion; nothing more. How did you happen to meet Burr?

A. Well, I happened to be at his funeral one day, and he asked me to make less noise, and –

Q. But, good heavens! If you were at his funeral, he must have been dead, how could he care whether you made a noise or not?

A. I don’t know. He was always a particular kind of a man that way.

Q. Still, I don’t understand it at all. You say he spoke to you, and that he was dead.

A. I didn’t say he was dead.

Q. But wasn’t he dead?

A. Well, some said he was, some said he wasn’t.

Q. What did you think?

A. Oh, it was not of my business! It wasn’t any of my funeral.

IV. Argumentation can be in the form of expository writing (or reasoning) and lyrical digressions. In XVIII-XIX century prose authors could appear as a commentators and moralists, philosophers and publicists.

The events in the narrative are arranged with respect to time. That arrangement involves the notions of order, duration, and frequency. Order refers to the relationship between the chronology of the story (the order in which the events of the story occur in the fictional world) and the chronology of the narrative (the order in which the narrative presents those events). The events and things described in the text can be presented:

• In chronological order: in many types of writing – short stories, biographies, and historical accounts, for example – it is the most effective way of presenting a series of events. Notice how the following paragraph from a science fiction story uses chronological order to dramatize the hardship of the characters’ journey.

The summer was waning when Shann took his two sons and went ahead to explore the way. For three days they climbed, and for three nights slept as best they could on freezing rocks, and on the fourth morning there was nothing ahead but a gentle rise to a cairn of gray stones built by other travelers, centuries ago.

Arthur C. Clarke, “History Lesson”

A story may begin with a set-piece description of a landscape or townscape that is to be the primary setting of the story (for example, the sombre description of Egdon Heath at the beginning of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native). It may begin with a self-introduction by the narrator (“Call me Ishmael” in Heman Melville’s Moby Dick). A writer may begin with a philosophical reflection. Many novels begin with a “frame-story” (Henry Jame’s The Turn of the Screw consists of a deceased woman’s memoir, which is read aloud to guests at a country-house party who have been entertaining themselves with ghost stories. Traditional beginnings of fairy-tales – ab ovo.

• In non-chronological order: the story can be anachronic with a combination of diverse stories. Through time-shift, narrative avoids presenting life as just one thing after another, it allows the reader to make connections of causality and irony between widely separated events. The writer may start the story in medias res: for example, begin a mystery story with a murder and then circle back to the events that led up to the murder. The narrative of the Odyssey begins halfway through the hero’s hazardous voyage home from the Troyan War, loops back to describe his earlier adventures, then follows the story to its conclusion in Ithaca.

A flashback (analepsis) takes the reader to the event that happened prior to the present and clarifying it. It changes the interpretation of something which happened much later in the chronology of the story:

My feelings about Garfield are further bedevilled by what Garfield has become. He has shrunk - almost literally – from the strong, commanding figure he once was to the slighter, more tentative person that old age and illness have rendered him (…) He has a variety of cancer – I’m not sure which – and has only about two years to live. Just after a strange request, stranger perhaps because he made it of me. He asked me to take a photograph from my father’s bedroom window, looking down towards the river. He wanted a photo that would show the path by the side of the field, the trees, the big pool and the fields and farms beyond. I agreed of course, but never got round to it. So here is the beginning of a feeling of guilt which is mixed in with all the other feelings making the whole lot more confused than before.

D.S. Mackenzie, “The Language of Water”

A flashforward (prolepsis) interrupts the present chronology of the story and connects it to the future. Foreshadowing occurs when the writer hints about something that may happen in the future, it can help build suspense or arouse curiosity:

With the reindeer it was more complicated. They were always nervous, but it wasn’t just fear of Noah, it was something deeper. You know how some of us animals have powers of foresight? (…) The reindeer were troubled with something deeper than Noah – angst, stranger than storm-nerves; something… long-term. (…) And it was something beyond what we than knew. As it was something beyond what we then knew. As if they were saying, “You think this is the worst? Don’t count on it”. Still, whatever it was, even the reindeer couldn’t be specific about it. Something distant, major… Long-term.

J. Barnes, “A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters”

Descriptions can be presented in the following way:

• In order of impression: the writer begins with the image that creates the most powerful impact and then describes the peripheral or less compelling images.

• In spatial order organizing physical descriptions of people and places. Notice how the following description uses both top-down and bottom-up spatial order:

“The sky too has its changes, but they are less marked than those of the vegetation and the river. Clouds map it up at times, but it is normally a dome of blending tints, and the main tint blue. By day the blue will pale down into white where it touches the white of the land, after sunset it has a new circumference – orange, melting upwards into tenderest purple.”

E.M.Forster, “A Passage to India”

• Zoom in and zoom out techniques bring along a panoramic view then focusing on progressively finer and finer details and ending with a close-up description of one aspect of the scene or vice verse, these are two camera techniques used in writing:

The lawn started at the beach and ran towards the front door a quarter of a mile, jumping over sundials and brick walks and burning gardens – finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.

F.Scott Fitzgerald, “The Great Gatsby”

Duration refers to the relationship between the length of time over which a given event occurs in the story and the number of pages of narrative devoted to describing it. Thus, duration is what produces the sense of narrative speed.

Frequency involves the relationship between the ways in which events may be repeated in the story (the same event may occur more than once) and in the narrative (a single event may be described more than once).

The plot is the chain of events which are gradually unfolded in accordance with the author’s conception and the way the novel is arranged. A long story or a novel may have several lines of the plot, interwoven, sometimes whimsically entangled. The following elements are distinguished:

• exposition sets the scene giving the revealing description of the main character or introducing the central conflict, it may contain a short presentation of time and place;

• knot (the starting point and the subsequent unfolding of the main line of the plot);

• complication (separate incident helping to unfold the action, it might involve thoughts and feelings as well);

• climax (the highest intensive point in a story, the decisive moment on which the fate of the character and the final action depend);

• Denouement [dei'nu:maŋ] (“the untying of a knot”) - subsequent events after the climax).

The plot is based on the conflict as a driving force in literature. A realistic fictional disagreement must rise naturally out of the personalities and attitudes of the characters.

The point of view in a piece of writing is the perspective from which a story is told: the first-person point of view – narrator participates in the action and uses the pronoun “I” to refer to himself/herself; the second-person point of view – the narrator uses the imperative mood and the pronoun “you” to refer to the reader; the third-person point of view – the narrator does not participate in the action, instead, the action is described as happening to some he, she, or it.

In fiction, the first-person point of view can be very powerful. In this kind of narrative, everything is presented through the narrator’s eyes. This means that the only access we have to other characters is through the narrator’s perception of them. It also means that you should be aware that the narrators’ own characters will affect their judgement. The use of a first-person narrator can create a range of effects, including tension, irony and humour. The speaker is not the writer, but rather a character created by the writer’s imagination. The gap between the narrator’s awareness and the reader’s awareness is a major factor in many novels. A writer will choose to write in the first person to let readers know that the personal experiences or ideas expressed are one’s own. Everything is seen from the perspective of the character, who is also the narrator. By inhabiting the world of one character fully, a writer creates intimate and moving portrayals of individuals and their stories. In the following passage, the narrator is Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon who describes his adventures in an imaginary land.

The Queen, giving great allowance for my defectiveness in speaking, was however surprised at so much wit and good sense in so diminutive an animal. She took me in her own hand, and carried me to the King, who was then retired to his cabinet.

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

The first-person narrator is involved in the world of the story. The extent and variation of the temporal and cognitive distance between the narrating I and the experiencing I determines the quality of the narrative. Robinson (Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe) forms the centre of his own story (I-as-protagonist). This leads to a greater illusion of reality, as well as the sence of immediacy and credibility. The first major English woman author Aphra Behn uses the first person as a minor character and observer (I-as-witness) in her exotic narrative Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave (1688). She comments on the natural limits of awareness without direct access to others’ feelings and thoughts: “I was myself an eye-witness to a great part of what you will find here set down; and what I could not be witness of, I receiv’d from the mouth of the chief actor in this history, the hero himself”.

In addition, adventure novels (R.L. Stevenson, Treasure Island), diaries, letters, essays, memoirs and autobiographies as well as epistolary novels offer models of writing in the first person, which are connected to the central position of the individual.

Using the second-person point of view, a writer often tries to elicit a personal response or action from individuals in the audience. You can find the example in the extract from Tony Parsons’ Man and Boy:

By thirty you have finally realised that you are not going to live forever, of course. But surely that should only make the laughing, latte-drinking present taste even sweeter? You shouldn’t let your inevitable death put a damper on things. Don’t let the long, slow slide to the grave get in the way of good time.

Writers use the third-person point of view when the emphasis on the message rather than on the message-giver. When writing fiction from a third-person perspective, a writer must decide whether to use a limited or omniscient point of view. In writing from the third-person limited point of view, the narrator speaks from the perspective of one character. For example, the point of view in the following passage is limited to the perspective of Louise Mallard as she anticipates the news that her husband has been killed in a train accident.

There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it She did not know; it was too subtle and allusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the colour that filled the air.

Kate Chopin, “The Story of an Hour”

In writing from the third-person omniscient point of view, the narrator is able to reveal the unspoken thoughts of all the characters. Omniscient means “knowing everything”. Being omnipresent and omniscient, the authorial narrator can see into the future, read various characters’ thoughts and even their subconscious. An omniscient narrator will have a distinctive tone and voice, and an attitude to the characters and events described. Sometimes the narrator’s opinion will be made clear in a direct address to the reader; sometimes it will emerge through the tone of the narrative. Omniscient narrators can move backwards and forwards in time, can move from one setting to another, can reveal what characters are thinking and feeling, can put in or leave whatever they wish. In the following passage, three brothers and their sister discuss their plans for the future.

But the consultation amounted to nothing. There was a strange air of ineffectuality about the three men, as they sprawled at table, smoking and reflecting vaguely on their own condition. The girl was alone, rather short, sullen-looking young woman of twenty-seven. She did not share the same life as her brothers. She would have been good-looking save for the impressive fixity of her face, “bulldog” as her brothers called it.

D.H. Lawrence, “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter”

Multiple narrators. Sometimes a story is told by more than one narrator. When you read a novel told in this way, look for how different narrators’ views of people and events differ from each other, and consider the effects that are created by the reader being drawn into separate yet complementary worlds. In Wuthering Heights, for example, a series of narrators take over the story at different points, contributing to the novel’s dense, multi-layered effect. Bleak House by Charles Dickens has two distinct narrative voices, the character Esther Summerson, and a third-person narrator who presents the parts of the narrative in which Esther does not feature.

Dramatic point of view presents the story objectivesly, mostly through dialogues. Ernest Heminhway’s novels…

The physical location from which a writer views a subject is called the vantage point. In the essay Shooting an Elephant, George Orwell recalls when he was called upon to deal with a rampaging elephant. By the time he arrived, the elephant was gazing placidly. Orwell uses the vantage point of the narrator surrounded by two thousand hostile villagers. Telling the story from this vantage point helps the reader gain greater appreciation of the pressures and circumstances that led Orwell to shoot the elephant.

But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of… faces above the garish clothes – faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hand I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I would have to shoot the elephant. …The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two-thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly.

George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant”

Vantage point can also refer to a distancing in time. For example, George Orwell wrote Shooting an Elephant long after the incident took place. Looking back at the event from the vantage point of time contributes to the ironic tone and sense of shame that permeate the essay.

Distance is created when the narrator is one of the characters in the narrative, a “go-between” through whose consciousness the story is filtered. The more intrusive the narrator, the greater the distance between narration and story. Conversely, the least distance is created when we are unaware of the narrator’s presence, when a tale seems to “tell itself”. Distance is also created by the absence of descriptive detail. Thus, the least distance, or the greatest imitation of life, is produced by maximum information and minimum presence of the narrator.

Perspective refers to point of view, or the eyes through which we see any given part of narrative. Although the narrator may be speaking, the point of view may be that of one of the other characters, and the feeling of a point-of-view character may be different from those of the narrator telling that character’s story.

Voice refers to the voice of the narrator. The voice we hear (the narrator’s) may not be the same as the eyes we see through (the perspective). When we analyze voice, we analyze the relationship of the narrator (the act of narration) to the story being told and to the narrative (the way the story is being told). Voice helps us to determine the narrator’s attitude toward the story and reliability. The voice of the story-teller may be anonymous (like in folk tale – “Once upon a time…”), the voice of the epic bard (Virgil’s “Arms and the man I sing”), the confinding, sententious, intrusive authorial voice of classic fiction. After the turn of the XXth century the intrusive authorial voice has tended to be suppressed or eliminated, the action is presented through the consciousness of the characters or by handing over to them the narrative task.

We can also distinguish voice (who speaks) and focalisation (who perceives) of the work of literature. The invisible, covert narrator is merely a voice that reports information. The author passes on the task of evaluating the story to the reader. The overt narrator appears as a mediator in the discourse, introduces himself/herself and the stories to the reader, gives comments that guide the readers’ understanding. As to the narrator’s position the heterodiagetic narrator does not belong to the world of the characters, the homodiegetic narrator belongs to the story world and is called autodiegetic if telling the own life story.

The narrator’s presentation can be reliable or unreliable. The reader has basically three strategies to test the reliability of a narrative, to check its consistency, coherence and correspondence. A consistent narrative does not reveal contradictions between the narrator’s words and act, values and judgements, elf-image and images by others. A coherent narrative presents a story in which one event leads to another without significant logical gaps. There is no direct correspondence between reality and fiction, which creates its own world, but rather one between the fictional models of reality and the dominant view of the world at the time of writing. Strange characters and unreliable narrators defamiliarise the vision of the world and challenge our views.

The story is presented in the text through the mediation of some prism, perspective, angle of vision, verbalized by the narrator. Anglo-American term for this is point of view though focalisation is more preferable term as it includes not only grammatical parameter, but also cognitive and emotive one. For example in Timbuktu by Paul Auster the narrative is 3-d person, but the everything is perceived through the dog’s eyes. So the user of the 3-d person is the narrator and Mr. Bones is focalizer. Focalisation asks who perceives what in which way. Focalisation and narration are separate and distinct things. Types of focalisation depend upon two criteria used: position relative to the story, and degree of persistence.

• According to the position relative to the story focalisation can be external or internal. Internal focalisation locates the perspective within a character, limiting the information to his/her perceptual and conceptual grasp of the world. This type generally takes the form of a character focalizer. External focalisation presents information of characters’ external behaviour, such as speech and action, excluding feelings and thoughts. Its vehicle is narrator-focalizer. This type is predominant in Fielding’s Tom Jones, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to mention a few works.

• According to the degree of persistence focalisation can vary between fixed focalisation, which is restricted to one and the same perspective throughout the narrative (J.Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), variable focalisation, which presents different scenes through different perspectives (Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White), or muliple focalisation, which invites comparisons between several perspectives of the same event (Julian Barnes, Talking It Over and Love, etc.).

There are different facets of focalisation:

• The perceptual facet (space and time) concerns the sensual range of the focalizer. In spatial terms the external/internal position of the focalizer takes the form of a bird’s-eye view (panoramic view or simultaneous focalisation of things happening in different places) vs. that of a limited observer. In temporal terms, external focalization is panchronic in the case of an unpersonified focalizer, and retrospective in the case of a character focalizing his own past. On the other hand, internal focalisation is synchronous with the information regulated by the focalizer.

• The psychological facet deals with the focalizer’s mind and emotions. There are two components: cognitive (unrestricted/restricted knowledge) and emotive (uninvolved/involved).

• The ideological facet concerns the ideology of the focalizer that can be presented as authoritative, or there can be a juxtaposition of different views. The view can be presented in implicit or explicit way.

Questions: What is the plot structure of the story? How predictable are the events in the unfolding story? Are there events that seem similar or contrasting? What is the central conflict? Are there events that don’t relate to this conflict? Is the story told chronologically, or does it move backwards and forward in time? Is it important to know the plot of the novel, not just in terms of what happens, but in terms of how the plot provides a framework for the themes and ideas? Which episodes were given the greatest emphasis? Is the end clear-cut and conclusive or does it leave room for suggestion? Identify the voice. What does the voice have to do with what is happening in the text? How involved in the action or reflection is the voice? What is the perspective or 'point of view' of the speaker (social, intellectual, political, even physical)? Think about the narrative viewpoint. From whose point of view the story is told? Which narrative situation prevails? Why the author might have made that choice? Identify the narrator. How much the narrator knows? Is the narrative factual / dry / emotional / credible / melodramatic? Skim the text and underline references to the narrator. Is the gender clear from this extract? What kind of focalisation prvails? Where does the narrative begin (in medias res or ab ovo)? Does the narrative follow the chronological order of events or rearrange it? How does the objective, chronological time relate to the subjective, psychological time?

Language in use for analysis

The twists in the plot are surprising

A good narrative technique

A writer of great narrative power

The story is told from the point of view of…

The narrator speaks to us without any ironic intervention by the author

The voice of the narrator is immensely flexible. It ranges from reflective amusement to anger / resignation / tenderness / exasperation / fear and horror…

The voice of the central character has a distinct role, though it can always be modified by direct intervention of the narrator’s own voice

The art of the writer lies in his careful movement between the point of view of his protagonist and that of his watchful, linguistically exact, narrator

To enhance the expressiveness of the descripyion