Introduction

You start reading the first book in the Harry Potter series and, instantly, you’re hooked. How long does it take? Ten pages? Two? Twenty? And what’s the attraction? Is it the writing—J.K. Rowling’s unique way of telling a story? Is it the character of Harry, boy wizard in a land of Muggles (aka non-wizards)? Is it the setting, the captivating world of Hogwarts? Is it the threat of dark forces, the zany details of Quidditch, the way Harry’s life struggles parallel your own life struggles, even if you’ve never thought of yourself as magic?

The elements of a narrative work in tandem to create a compelling story. It can be difficult to disentangle these elements’ impact on you, the reader, because part of the magic of fiction is the complex interplay of character on plot, setting on theme.

Elements of a Narrative

Narrative Events in Prose Fiction

Any narrative is made up of a series of events or incidents, arranged in a particular way. This can be defined as the plot of the story. Consider, as an example, Ernest Hemingway’s appropriately entitled ‘A Very Short Story’ (Hemingway, 1944, pp. 135–6). Different readers will summarise the story in different ways, allocating different levels of significance to various narrative events. If you can access a copy of the story, you might like to try and summarise it yourself and compare it with my summary in the box below. When preparing that summary, I had to think about the crucial narrative events and how they are arranged, so the box includes at least some of the key events. You or other readers might include others.

In reading any story we have to evaluate for ourselves which are the key moments. There are many events I have left out of my summary: the opening, in which the soldier is carried onto the roof to look out over the town; the couple praying in the Duomo; the fact that it was agreed that he would not drink or see his friends in America; the loneliness of Luz’s life in Pordenone. I have omitted these events or descriptions because it could be argued that they are not crucial to the main narrative incidents. In that case, why would the author have included them?

An unnamed soldier, hospitalised with an unspecified injury meets and falls in love with a nurse called Luz. They try to marry before he returns to the front but are unable to do so. Luz writes to the soldier frequently to declare her continuing love for him. After the armistice they decide that the soldier should return home to get a job and that Luz will then join him and they will marry. However, they quarrel before parting. After the soldier returns home Luz meets and falls in love with an Italian major who promises to marry her. She writes to the soldier to end their affair. He does not reply, and she does not marry the Italian major. The story ends with the soldier contracting a sexually transmitted disease from a casual fling.

If you have read the story, you may disagree with the choices I’ve made. Nevertheless, whether or not another reader agrees with my analysis of the main events in this narrative, I hope you can see that it is possible to differentiate between the major and minor incidents in any story. What we judge as major or minor affects our interpretation of the narrative. As Seymour Chatman has argued ‘narrative events have not only a logic of connection, but also a logic of hierarchy’ (1978, p. 53, Chatman’s italics). Certain narrative incidents have a direct influence on the direction of events. They are crucial to the maintenance of narrative logic. Others can be deleted from the narrative without affecting the outcome. What did you decide was the purpose of such narrative moments? Chatman contends that such events perform the function of ‘filling in, elaborating […]; they form the flesh on the skeleton’ (p. 54). Narratives without such elements would be much less interesting to read, indeed, would give us little incentive to read on.

Narrative events are arranged in such a way as to encourage us to read on to find out what happens next.

Approaching Prose Fiction. Licensed under CC BY SA 4.0 http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/culture/literature-and-creative-writing/literature/approaching-prose-fiction/content-section-2.1

Narrative Perspectives

Two of the most fundamental choices that face the author of a fictional narrative is to decide who is to be the narrator and how the story is to be narrated.

Click to read the attached extract from the opening of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818). Who is the narrator? How would you characterise the narrative ‘voice’?

This is what is known as third-person narration. The voice does not belong to a particular character in the novel, and in the extract it does not assume the perspective of any of the characters, merely describing their physical appearance, social status and relationships, and, in Catherine’s case, her likes and dislikes, her accomplishments and pastimes. You will probably have noticed that this extract comprises a single, extremely long paragraph and is mostly concerned with describing the young Catherine Morland. This amount of detail at the start of the novel suggests to us that Catherine is likely to be the central character, and so it proves.

At first sight the narrative voice seems to be fairly neutral and undemonstrative, like that at the beginning of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. But a closer inspection reveals greater subtleties. Indeed, it appears that the narrative voice is doing everything in its power to undermine our possible interest, while also drawing our attention to the kinds of expectations and conventions that often attend the process of reading particular kinds of fiction. Everything about Catherine seems to militate against the possibility of her being an interesting central character. According to the narrator, she was no-one’s idea of a heroine, and her social and family connections are of little assistance in this respect too. Austen is poking fun here at the idea of the tragic heroine. The narrator sounds almost disappointed at the fact that Catherine is not a motherless waif whose plight can tug at our heartstrings:

Her mother was a woman of useful plain sense, with a good temper, and, what is more remarkable, with a good constitution. She had three sons before Catherine was born; and instead of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as anybody might expect, she still lived on – lived to have six children more – to see them growing up around her, and to enjoy excellent health herself.

Neither does Catherine have the classical beauty of the novelistic heroine, her unprepossessing looks in themselves rendering her ‘unpropitious’ for such a role. Furthermore, she clearly lacks aptitude and enthusiasm for the kind of accomplishments which young girls of this time were expected to acquire.

The overriding tone of this extract could perhaps be best described as coolly detached and above all ironic. As you will discover from reading further in Austen, irony was invariably the main feature of her narrative voices. In the case of the opening to Northanger Abbey, would you agree that this ironic strategy of seeming to deflate our enthusiasm is in fact a subtle device to heighten the reader’s interest? If Catherine is such unlikely heroine material, what kind of narrative will it be that can feature her as its central character?

Third-Person Narrators

This would perhaps be a good point at which to say a little more about third-person narrators. These are often known as an ‘omniscient’ narrators. An omniscient narrator is one that exhibits full knowledge of the actions, thoughts and feelings of each of the characters in the story. Austen invariably used this omniscient perspective, and it remains a popular means of narration amongst contemporary writers. Indeed, more recent authors have made great play of drawing attention to the narrator’s role as an all-powerful figure, an embodiment of the author who has full control of the characters at his or her mercy. The beginning of Martin Amis’ novel London Fields demonstrates this well:

This is a true story but I can’t believe it’s really happening.

It’s a murder story, too. I can’t believe my luck.

And a love story (I think), of all strange things, so late in the century, so late in the goddamned day.

This is the story of a murder. It hasn’t happened yet. But it will. (It had better.) I know the murderer, I know the murderee. I know the time, I know the place. I know the motive (her motive) and I know the means. I know who will be the foil, the fool, the poor foal, also utterly destroyed. And I couldn’t stop them, I don’t think, even if I wanted to. The girl will die. It’s what she always wanted. You can’t stop people, once they start creating.

What a gift. This page is briefly stained by my tears of gratitude. Novelists don’t usually have it so good, do they, when something real happens (something unified, dramatic and pretty saleable), and they just write it down?
(1989, p. 1)

We might be forgiven for thinking that this is the direct voice of Martin Amis himself. After all, he is the author of the novel, the manipulator of events and characters. But as we read on we realise that this narrator is another character, an American writer called Samson Young, who is living in London in the flat of yet another fictional writer, Mark Asprey (note the initials). To further confuse matters a writer called Martin Amis also makes a cameo appearance in the novel! London Fields uses a variety of narrative perspectives. When Samson Young is actually present at the events described first-person narration is used; when he is not we have something akin to the omniscient narrator of the Austen extract, but we also have the sense that that narrator has a name and a role in the novel.

Approaching Prose Fiction. Licensed under CC BY SA 4.0 http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/culture/literature-and-creative-writing/literature/approaching-prose-fiction/content-section-2.1

Summary

A narrative is more than just a sequence of events. Think, for example, of what would happen if your favorite novel was purged of all its specific detail. Imagine if Harry Potter were only a boy, a boy without hopes or dreams or goals. Imagine if Hogwarts was never described.
Think of the last time you found yourself laughing while you read a novel; think of the last time you found yourself struck by the beauty of a writer’s prose. Imagine what would happen if those elements were struck from a text.

Yes, narrative is at the heart of fiction, but short stories and novels are far more than narratives. Narratives undergird the imaginative tales writers tell.

Remember: narratives are present, regardless of what kinds of stories writers tell. Fiction involves things happening, even if those things happening are actions as simple as thinking or riding an escalator (as is the premise of Nicholson Baker’s novel The Mezzanine).