Narrative+Structure+Theory

The basic plot / narrative structures used in stories:

Reading short stories and films requires you to understand the structure of the narrative as well as appreciating how the writer / director has influenced your reaction to the story by manipulating the descriptions, the lighting and points of view of the characters, setting and action in the course of the story.

Researchers have identified three basic plot / narrative structures that, with subtle changes, provide the foundation for stories - fictional and non-fictional.


 * The basic plot narrative structures are:**


 * The Relationship:**

Two characters meet - the first decisive encounter will determine if there will be further meetings. Each subsequent meeting will create tensions, questions about the relationship and decisions taken. This plot can end in tragedy or in pleasure.

This plot structure explores what happens when a pre-existing group of people are affected by the arrival of a stranger. Will the stranger be benign, a threat, assimilated or rejected? What are the consequences of the arrival and the decisions taken by the characters.
 * The Invited / Uninvited guest.**


 * The Quest:**

This is a journey with a purpose. Goals are set as the characters attempt to make sense of their lives. Some a conscious (“ I want to buy that .... “) others are more powerful, subconscious ones. (“ I want my Dad to love me.”) Along the way there are ditches, hurdles and other obstacles that must be overcome as the character/s journey towards their goal.

//**Task: Here are a selection of short stories that illustrate the basic plot structures outlined above. You are to read the stories and then classify them according to the narrative structure used.

You must be able to explain why you have classified each story in a particular narrative structure.**//

Short Stories:

Boy - Frank Sargeson: http://english.unitecnology.ac.nz/resources/units/short_story/boy.html Don’t Cry for Billie. - Beverly Dunlop. Flies - Patrica Grace The Fat Boy - Owen Marshall The Child - Witi Ihimaera Big Brother - Little Sister. - Witi Ihimaera

Fairy Stories: Cinderella: http://www.familymanagement.com/literacy/grimms/grimms16.html Rumplestiltskin: http://www.familymanagement.com/literacy/grimms/grimms44.html The Bremen Town Musicians: http://www.familymanagement.com/literacy/grimms/grimms155.html Hansel & Gretel. http://www.familymanagement.com/literacy/grimms/grimms12.html

The Emperor’s New Clothes: http://www.literaturepage.com/read/andersen-fairy-tales-1.html

Try the exercise with a comic: Any Asterix comic e.g. Asterix & the Chieftain’s Shield Any Superman comic Any Spiderman comic

Now try the exercise with some short films:

http://www.nzshortfilm.com/

http://www.sundance.org/


 * The Structure of a narrative:

What Narrative means in Film:** In media terms, narrative is the coherence / organisation given to a series of facts. The human mind needs narrative to make sense of things. We connect events and make interpretations based on those connections. In everything we seek a beginning, a middle and an end. We understand and construct meaning using our experience of reality and of previous texts. Each text becomes part of the previous and the next through its relationship with the audience.


 * The difference between Story & Narrative:**

"Story is the irreducible substance of a story (A meets B, something happens, order returns), while narrative is the way the story is related (Once upon a time there was a princess...)" (Key Concepts in Communication - Fiske et al (1983))


 * Media Texts**

Reality is difficult to understand, and we struggle to construct meaning out of our everyday experience. Media texts are better organised; we need to be able to engage with them without too much effort. We have expectations of form, a foreknowledge of how that text will be constructed. Media texts can also be fictional constructs, with elements of prediction and fulfilment which are not present in reality. Basic elements of a narrative, according to Aristotle:

"...the most important is the plot, the ordering of the incidents; for tragedy is a representation, not of men, but of action and life, of happiness and unhappiness - and happiness and unhappiness are bound up with action. ...it is their characters indeed, that make men what they are, but it is by reason of their actions that they are happy or the reverse." (Poetics - Aristotle(Penguin Edition) p39-40 4th century BC )

Successful stories require actions which change the lives of the characters in the story. They also contain some sort of resolution, where that change is registered, and which creates a new equilibrium for the characters involved. Remember that narratives are not just those we encounter in fiction. Even news stories, advertisements and documentaries also have a constructed narrative which must be interpreted.

Narrative Conventions

When unpacking a narrative in order to find its meaning, there are a series of codes and conventions that need to be considered. When we look at a narrative we examine the conventions of


 * Genre
 * Character
 * Form
 * Time

and use knowledge of these conventions to help us interpret the text. In particular, Time is something that we understand as a convention - narratives do not take place in real time but may telescope out (the slow motion shot which replays a winning goal) or in (an 80 year life can be condensed into a two hour biopic). Therefore we consider "the time of the thing told and the time of the telling." (Christian Metz Notes Towards A Phenomenology of Narrative).

It is only because we are used to reading narratives from a very early age, and are able to compare texts with others that we understand these conventions. A narrative in its most basic sense is a series of events, but in order to construct meaning from the narrative those events must be linked somehow.


 * Barthes' Codes**

Roland Barthes describes a text as

"a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can read, they are indeterminable...the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language..." (S/Z - 1974 translation)

What he is basically saying is that a text is like a tangled ball of threads which needs unravelling so we can separate out the colours. Once we start to unravel a text, we encounter an absolute plurality of potential meanings. We can start by looking at a narrative in one way, from one viewpoint, bringing to bear one set of previous experience, and create one meaning for that text. You can continue by unravelling the narrative from a different angle, by pulling a different thread if you like, and create an entirely different meaning. And so on. An infinite number of times. If you wanted to.

Barthes wanted to - he was a semiotics professor in the 1950s and 1960s who got paid to spend all day unravelling little bits of texts and then writing about the process of doing so. All you need to know, again, very basically, is that texts may be 'open' (ie unravelled in a lot of different ways) or 'closed' (there is only one obvious thread to pull on).

Barthes also decided that the threads that you pull on to try and unravel meaning are called narrative codes and that they could be categorised in the following five ways:

Action / proiarectic code & enigma code (ie Answers & questions) (HERMENEUTIC AND PROAIRETIC CODES: The two ways of creating suspense in narrative, the first caused by unanswered questions, the second by the anticipation of an action's resolution.) NOTE: A Proairetic Code is a plot action that does not directly raise particular questions -- it is simply an action that is caused by a previous event and which leads to other events. It is not inherently mysterious. Example A person walks down the street. A tile falls off the roof of a building. Discussion Where the proairetic code creates tension in a story is in the anticipation it causes with regard to what happens next.

When we read stories we may try to read the mind of the author and hence wonder why what is happening as it is. This effect can be used by the author to lead the reader astray and hence create further tension.

A Hermeneutic Code is something that is unexplained and which creates an unanswered question, often appearing at the beginning of the story, thus creating a tension that engages the audience.

Hermeneutic codes are at the root of all mysteries.

A coherent story will eventually explain and hence tie up all these loose ends. Example

A person vanishes into thin air for no apparent reason.

A hero appears to be killed.

Most detectives stories are built almost entirely on hermeneutic codes.

When something unexpected happens we are engaged as we try to explain why this has happened. We then watch intently to find out whether our explanation is true. If we have not made any prediction, we attend carefully so we will be able to explain.


 * Symbols & Signs
 * Points of Cultural Reference
 * Simple description/reproduction

Structures

Tvzetan Todorov - equilibrium, disequilibrium, new equilibrium He suggests that all narratives follow a three part structure. They begin with equilibrium, where everything is balanced, progress as something comes along to disrupt that equilibrium, and finally reach a resolution, when equilibrium is restored.

This simple formula can be applied to virtually all narratives - it is a more formal way of thinking about the beginning, middle and end, and it takes into account Aristotle's theory that all drama is conflict ie there is a disequilibrium at the heart of every narrative.

Vladimir Propp - characters and actions (31 functions of character types) He developed a character theory for studying media texts and productions, which indicates that there were 8 broad character types in the 100 tales he analysed, which could be applied to other media:

1. The villain (struggles against the hero) 2. The donor (prepares the hero or gives the hero some magical object) 3. The (magical) helper (helps the hero in the quest) 4. The princess (person the hero marries, often sought for during the narrative) 5. Her father 6. The dispatcher (character who makes the lack known and sends the hero off) 7. The hero or victim/seeker hero, reacts to the donor, weds the princess

Claude Levi-Strauss - constant creation of conflict/opposition propels narrative. Narrative can only end on a resolution of conflict. Opposition can be visual (light/darkness, movement/stillness) or conceptual (love/hate, control/panic), and to do with soundtrack. Binary oppositions. As well as Aristotle deciding that 'all drama is conflict' in the 4th century BC, 20th century theorist Claude Levi-Strauss suggested that all narratives had to be driven forward by conflict that was cause by a series of opposing forces. he called this the theory of Binary Opposition, and it is used to describe how each main force in a narrative has its equal and opposite. Analysing a narrative means identifying these opposing forces eg light/dark good/evil noise/silence youth/age right/wrong poverty/wealth strength/weakness inside/outside and understanding how the conflict between them will drive the narrative on until, finally, some sort of balance or resolution is achieved.

Deconstruction

Separating Plot And Story

Think of a feature film, and jot down a) the strict chronological order in which events occur b) the order in which each of the main characters finds out about these events a) shows story, b) shows plot construction. Plot keeps audiences interested eg) in whether the children will discover Mrs Doubtfire is really their father, or shocks them, eg) the 'twist in the tale" at the end of The Sixth Sense. Identifying Narrator Who is telling this story is a vital question to be asked when analysing any media text. Stories may be related in the first or third person, POVs may change, but the narrator will always


 * reveal the events which make up the story
 * mediate those events for the audience
 * evaluate those events for the audience

The narrator also tends to POSITION the audience into a particular relationship with the characters on the screen.

Comprehending Time

Very few screen stories take place in real time. Whole lives can be dealt with in the 90 minutes of a feature film, an 8 month siege be encompassed within a 60 minute TV documentary. There are many conventions to denote time passing, from the time/date information typed up on each new scene of The X-Files to the aeroplane passing over a map of a continent in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Other devices to manipulate time include


 * flashbacks
 * dream sequences
 * repetition
 * different characters' POV
 * flash forwards
 * real time interludes
 * pre-figuring of events that have not yet taken place

Locating the Narrative

Each story has a location. This may be physical and geographical (eg a war zone) or it may be mythic (eg the Wild West). Virtual locations are now a feature of many newsrooms (eg the computers and holograms of the BBC's Nine O'Clock News). There are sets of conventions to do with that location, often associated with genre and form (eg all space ships seem to look the same inside).