PATTERNS OF A NARRATIVE TEXT

Spheres in an epical text:

1. the sphere of the fictional world or the presented world

2. the sphere of the narration.

On the level of the fictional reality we have the characters, who participate in particular events, that are set in particular time and space. The temporal and spatial background for the events is called the setting. The events themselves are ordered in cause and effect sequences, which we are going to call sub-plots, and these on their part form the action of the novel of the story.

On the level of the narration we have the narrator, the addressee of the narration, the time of narration, the place of narration (or narrative space), and the narration itself. The four first elements form what we will call the narrative situation.

Action - the sequence of events as they are presented in a text (a textual phenomenon).

Plot - a rearrangement of the events told by the narrator so that they form chronological and cause-and-effect sequences.

Stages of action

1. The initial stage would be called the Vorgeschichte (przedakcja). It consists in a very general information about the events that took place before the beginning of the action proper. Usually the Vorgeschichte is presented in the prologue of the novel, but sometimes the information about the „past events” (past from the point of view of the characters) may be transmitted in another way, for example in retrospections. Thus the Vorgeschichte does not have to be the initial fragment of the text.

2. The exposition is the presentation of the setting in which the events are going to take place, of the main characters, their general conditions etc. Very often it is a description and not any kind of narrative.

3. The first event which is the starting point for the action is called the inciting moment (zawi¹zanie akcji).

4. Then there follows the action proper, which includes an number of turning points, the most important events for the development of action.

5. The last turning point is called the climax (punkt kulminacyjny). It is the event that is the goal of the whole sequence of events of the action, starting with the inciting moment.

6. After the climax there follows the denouement (rozwi¹zanie akcji), being the immediate effect of the climax.

7. The Nachgeschite (poakcja) contains the information about what happened after the denouement, passed very briefly, in the same way as that of the Vorgeschichte. In many novels this stage of action has been abstracted as the epilogue.

a first person narrator - a third person narrator; a hidden narrator - an intrusive narrator;

an omniscient and omnipresent narrator - a naive narrator

a reliable narrator - an unreliable narrator

Modes of discourse: character's speech and description and narrative (proper, informative, actualizing), the two latter being two modes of discourse of the narration.

Seemingly indirect speech:a hidden quotation of a particular utterance that can be ascribed to a given character. On the one hand it is a kind of a quotation - it is not preceded by the „he said” type of a phrase. On the other hand it is not separated from the narrative by the conventional graphic signs.

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