Narrative

I

Introduction

Narrative, act of telling a story, either in verse or prose; the arrangement of characters, events, and the author's voice in a work of art. In verse, narratives occur in epic, romance, and some lyric poems. In prose, the novel and the short story are two fictional genres in which a story is made explicit, as opposed to drama, where the sequence of events is shown by enacting scenes. The literary figure who tells the story is called the narrator.

II

Verse Narratives

Early examples of verse narratives occur in the epic poetry of Homer and Virgil and, later, in the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf and in Milton's Paradise Lost (1667). The epic narrative was distinguished by the breadth of its canvas, vastness of its themes, and seriousness of its purpose: thus in Paradise Lost, the narrator famously sets out to do no less than “justify the ways of God to men”. Other long narrative poems include Dante's La Divina Commedia (c. 1307), the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, and Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596).

The verse romance emerged from France during the 12th century, and dealt largely with the values and problems of a courtly society; English examples are Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1370) and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1385). During the 18th century, the prominence of satire shaped the nature of narrative verse, with key works such as The Rape of the Lock (1712, 1714) by Alexander Pope and Henriade (1728) by Voltaire. In the Romantic period, poetry tended towards short lyric pieces, but there were many important narrative poems, including William Wordsworth's sustained piece of introspection, The Prelude (1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), in which the narrator is a troubled seaman who stops guests at a wedding in order to impart his story, and Lord Byron's picaresque Don Juan (1819-1824). From the Victorian era, Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning stand out as the most skilful exponents of narrative poetry. In the 20th century, W. H. Auden, John Betjeman, and Philip Larkin, among others, have written narrative poems.

III

Prose Narratives

In prose, the novel has been the dominant narrative form since its emergence and rise in Europe during the 17th century. Prose narratives existed in ancient Greece (in the form of romances such as Longus' Daphnis and Chloe) and Egypt, in 9th-century Japan, and in the Italian novella, such as Boccaccio's 14th-century Decameron. During the 16th and early 17th centuries, there are several examples of the picaresque novel, an episodic form based on the adventures and escapades that befall its chief character. Early examples are The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) by Thomas Nashe and, probably the most famous, Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615) by Miguel de Cervantes, which tells the story of a deluded nobleman intent on living the life of a crusading knight, and which contributed enormously to the development of the novel.

In England, Daniel Defoe adopted and refined the picaresque form with his novels Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722). The psychological dimension—the portrayal of characters' inner thoughts and lives—was added by Samuel Richardson, whose two novels Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) and Clarissa (1747-1748) focus on the moral struggles of two young women, and also demonstrate the epistolary form, in which the story is told through the characters' correspondence.

During the 19th century, the novel's prominence increased enormously in Britain, Europe, and America, with realism as its dominant mode. In particular, novelists were concerned to represent the complexity of human beings' interaction with the society and the age in which they lived; for example, an important theme in the novels of Charles Dickens is the predicament of the poor in mid-19th-century England, and Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, and George Eliot all address, albeit in very different contexts, the position and status of women. At the same time, romance novels and Gothic novels, which were largely inspired by the past and in particular the Middle Ages, also flourished; a particularly successful exponent of the romance form was Sir Walter Scott. In France, Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, and Gustave Flaubert were key figures in the development of the realist novel, whilst in Russia, the massive novels War and Peace (1863-1869) and Anna Karenina (1873-1877) by Leo Tolstoy deployed complex moral and political issues in a detailed framework of human relationships.

The 20th century has seen an explosion of the modes and techniques used by novelists to test the boundaries of narrative possibility. The emergence of modernism at the beginning of the century had radical implications for all forms of art; for the novel it largely constituted the development of the stream of consciousness, which attempted to convey the thoughts, impressions, and emotions of characters as immediately as possible. The most famous interpreters of stream-of-consciousness writing are Virginia Woolf and James Joyce; the latter's novel Ulysses (1922) represents the most extensive and remarkable display of the style. Experimentation with narrative style has also resulted in sub-genres such as the anti-novel, which attempts to subvert traditional elements, and the involuted novel, which refers to its own creation and nature.

IV

The Narrator

The narrator is responsible for the way a story is conveyed to its reader, or its point of view. There are a variety of ways that the author can manipulate the narrator and his or her point of view in order to gain maximum control over the work as a whole. The two basic modes of narration are first and third person (although some novelists also employ the second person, “you”, to create a particular sense of intimacy between author and reader). In a third person narrative, the narrator might be omniscient, that is, able to move between characters, situations, and locations at any point, and granted full access to characters' thoughts, feelings, and motivation. Some narrators might comment on the events taking place in the novel as they unfold, and even interpose their own views; the Victorian novelists such as Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope were adept at this manner of intervention. Alternatively, the author might limit the narrator's overt presence, and recount the narrative's events as directly as possible. A third-person narrator might have a limited point of view, confined to only one or a few characters, as in much of Flaubert's work.

A first-person narrative is limited entirely to the experience of one person, who is its voice and who acts as a filter for everything that happens in it. That narrator might only be a minor character or onlooker, as in some novels by Joseph Conrad, or might be the central figure. A first-person narrator can be concerned primarily with recounting the details of the plot, or also with conveying their own thoughts and feelings, or even with digressing from the apparent storyline and engaging in reflections on the fictionality of his or her enterprise. A famous example of this last type of narration is The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767) by Laurence Sterne, whose self-reflexive style arguably makes it a forerunner of stream-of-consciousness writing.

Finally, and particularly important for the study of the 20th-century novel, is the use of the fallible or unreliable narrator, a mouthpiece whose telling of the story diverges from the readers' impression of what is “really” going on, or who is later revealed to have been concealing vital information. A famous example is Pale Fire (1962) by Vladimir Nabokov, in which the delusions of a would-be academic and pederast who fancies himself to be the exiled king of a remote Eastern kingdom are presented as scholarly annotations to a long lyric poem. A popular use of this technique is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) by Agatha Christie, in which the narrator reveals himself at the last moment to be the murderer. In the Martin Amis novel Money (1984), the narrator John Self falls victim to an elaborate scam throughout the novel; the denouement is heralded by the appearance of Amis himself as a figure in the novel.