Topic 32: The Narrative Text. Its Structure and Characteristics

INTRODUCTION

As Roland Bathers sensibly outlines, a language supposes "essentially a collective contract which one must accept in its entirety if one wishes to communicate" (Barthes, 1964, p. 14). Therefore, to master a language it is required, not only to know how to form sentences, but to hold a profound knowledge of the facets and fields a language is connected to, such as its context (history, society and culture), production (literature and communication) and development (linguistics). Dealing with the development of a language, linguistics provides a deeper understanding on how a language is originated and structured (phonetics, morphology, pragmatics, semantics, syntax, discourse analysis, etc.) and its evolution, which serves as a great asset to apply in the Foreign Language Teaching to become communicatively competent and be able to mediate in activities. Accordingly, this topic is concerned with the discipline of linguistics related to narratology, the structural study of narration, which widens the teacher's perspective on narration and its components, knowledge that functions as an excellent tool to incorporate to the teaching environment with learners who will approach to different methods and learning situations as mentioned in LOMLOE 3/2020, Royal Decree 217/2022, Decree 102/2023 and Order of May 30th, 2023. This paper will first provide an approximation to the narrative structures and how are they framed. Then, it will be followed by a recollection of the narrative elements along with their definitions and hierarchization. Subsequently, this essay will continue with a brief description of the different characteristics of narrative texts, both general and specific, wrapping up with a conclusion about, on the one hand, a summary regarding what have been discussed throughout this paper and, on the other hand, a didactic application of the topic discussed with Foreign Language Teaching methodology and our curriculum.2. NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND THEIR ELEMENTS

NARRATIVE STRUCTURES

There have been many attempts to try to define narrative structures. William Labov's definition of natural narratives is one of the most elementary ways. From his analysis of the oral narratives consisting of the speaker's recollection of personal experiences, he concluded that certain linguistic strategies can be related to certain narrative functions. His theory introduced two interrelated structures:

• The event structure is based on the temporally ordered distribution of information, which allows the recipient to stablish a cause-effect relation among the events. This ordered sequence of events is called the plot, whereas the resulting image of the sequence has been identified as the story. A narrative may contain more than one plot in a single story.
• The evaluative structure results from the activation of specific strategies of evaluation that propose a certain point of view. This may be explicit through the narrator's commentaries, or it may be less explicit and need to be extracted from attitudinal markers.

According to Labov's definition of narratives, these two structures are framed within specific discursive markers that tells the recipient the narrative is about to begin (abstract) or has come to its end (coda). In between them, the traditional organisation of stories can be found: the orientation (the beginning), the complication (the development) and the resolution (the conclusion). Narratives usually narrates past events in a more or less chronological order and the narrator will be the one who controls the timing. In this sense, there are two interrelated concepts to consider:

• The scope refers to the timespan covered by the narrated events. In James Joyce's Ulysses, the scope is just one day (16th June 1904)
• The scale refers to the space of these events on the pages of the text and the time spent by the narrator in their presentation. Laurence Sterne's Tristan Shandy takes nine volumes, and he has so much to say that he does not get himself born until the third volume.

Now that the general narrative structures have been presented and briefly analysed, this essay will continue with the elements that conforms these structures.

ELEMENTS OF NARRATIVE STRUCTURES

These are the fundamental scaffolding that structures all narratives, and they are the narrator, the characters, the setting and the discourse.

NARRATOR

First of all, we should distinguish between the author, the person who wrote the text, and the narrator, the person who tells the story to the readers as a fictional creation.Since the narrator is the one who controls the narrative, two main aspects in the development of this control are discerned: the narrative peace and the point of view from which the story is told. Then, we must determine the narrator's role in the report of events and the effects that this role may have from the perspective of the reader-text interaction. Subsequently, the narratorial presence in the events narrated refers to how the narrator will report a story. In this sense, there is a First-Person Narrator, where the narrator reports her/his own personal experiences (e.g. Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye). In addition, there is a Third-Person Narrator, omnipresent, all-knowing and all-seeing but without a personality or opinion of his own (e.g. Jane Austen's works). Furthermore, there is a less common Second- Person Narrator in a small number of narratives where there is a feeling that the reader is blind, and the plot is leading her/him along (e.g. Choose Your Own Adventure children's books). This narratorial presence can provide us with two very general categories which include several subtypes: As far as the level of knowledge, as the amount of information given to the readers, is concerned, we find the Omniscient narrator (a reporter who knows all about the events narrated), the Equiscent narrator (gives as much information as any character) and the Deficient narrator (provides less information than the rest of the characters). The level of intrusion of the narrator's or a character's thoughts in the narrative can leads us to the Limited Ominiscient narrator (has access to the mind of a character or the central character), the Limited Equiscent narrator (only reports his/her thoughts and what can be inferred from the character's behaviour) and the Camera- eye narrator (only reports what he/she sees). Continuing with the level of intrusion, thoughts are generally organized coherently to constitute a comprehensive message. This organization of thoughts can be arranged as if they were uttered, or be included as part of the narrator's intention, and in contemporary fiction, we find the interior monologue, in which there are an unmeditated reproduction of thoughts, and the stream of consciousness, which is a chaotic expression of them. To conclude, narratives are the result of the effects produced by the narrator's voice, which tells a story for us to interpret. So, the reader accepts the narrator's words as truthful, but more subjective unreliable narrators emerge. To some extent, all narrators are unreliable, varying in the degree (e.g. Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby or Ishmael in Moby Dick). Additionally, any attempt to try to explain the development of a narrative must also include an analysis of the roles played by the different participants or characters.

CHARACTERS

Characters are participating entities, and it is essential to analyse how they are constructed and represented in narratives. To begin with, they are constructed out of what they do or say, or descriptions and comments made by the narrator. We ought to assume that the amount of data about them is potentially biased, meditated, limited and fragmentary, and in need of our implementation. To continue, there have been many attempts to classify how the role of the characters is represented. Here are going to be distinguished four groups: According to how are they functionally related to one another and with the action, they may be agents (doers of actions and emotions) and patients (recipient of actions and emotions) According to the relevance of their roles, they may be central characters or secondary characters. Then, inside these roles the are some contrapositions: the protagonist and the antagonist. Both are agents on a relation of opposition, but if that relation also depends on the effects of their actions or nature of their goals, then we find the hero and the villain. In this sense, the characters who benefit from the hero's actions are the beneficiaries, and the ones affected by the villain's actions are the victims. According to the modification of codes of values or expected standards, which the narrator and the reader supposedly share, we find the anti-hero (a hero who takes values expected in villains) or villains who don't really possess any negative qualities and only confronts the hero. Something to be considered is that the expression of more passive emotional experiences and patient roles has been traditionally ascribed to female characters. This has been taken to such an extreme that distinction between hero and heroine is not based on grammatical gender: she is the passive goal of the hero's actions and in most traditional narratives she will be rescued and probably married to him. The female alternative of the hero has been given the name of female hero. In Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber collection of stories, she does a postmodernist revision of the traditional tale Little Red Riding Hood, turning the protagonist into a female hero with agency and initiative to defend herself. E.M. Foster proposes another classification distinguishing between flat characters, constructed around a single idea or conventional qualities or whose features are subordinated to the needs of the plot, and the round characters, which have personality of their own. Our image of the fictional world in which events take place and participants act would not be complete without a setting in which these participants and their actions are located.

SETTING