Analyzing Boccaccio's Decameron: Narrative Structure and Style
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means of "you" or a number of nicknames: "hilarious ladies, dear ladies, young ladies, young valuable..."
The Youth:
- Their meeting
- Their decisions
- Their adventures
It is a well-defined framework, characters, scenario, historical time.
Narrative Planes:
- The 'own stories, each with its own characteristics. The first two planes are related by the main narrator, but from different functions.
- In the foreground, the first-person narrator fully identifies with the author and has no narrative function, but expository or argumentative: Boccaccio not "tells", but reflects and expresses his ideology, world view, and value of literature itself.
- In the second, an omniscient third-person voice acts as narrator. This map is dotted with the first interference, as comments or appeals interspersed with readers. In the third level, the stories, we identify each narrator by the introduction, i.e., we know which characters are telling the story. However, strictly speaking, this narrator does not act as such, but adopts the role of a third-person omniscient.
In this third level, the young people who hear the stories play the role of narratee. The narrative perspective is, therefore, variable, and in general, there is no targeting. In terms of narrative technique, the stories follow the traditional model: linearity, omniscience, and classical development approach; middle and end. The very history of the young is also this model. Boccaccio's contribution – not innovation, as this system is already used in The Thousand and One Nights – is to use stories as a narrative framework of the second, to give cohesion to the whole. In regard to the treatment of stage time frames, he contrasts the definition, unity, and strength of the story of young people with the variety of spaces, scenarios, and treatment of stories. The same happens with the characters. The Decameron's realism extends to the characters and environments, and, as already seen, the vernacular. By the book's pages teem monks, beggars, young and old, women of questionable morals, and all sorts of individuals characteristic of society at the time, taken from the natural to the way of a painting or portrait.
Language and Style
The main...