The Narrative: Elements, Characters, Space, Time & Language

The Narrative

What Is a Text?

A text is a statement or a set of consistent statements, oral or written, which have a communicative purpose.

Narrate Events

Narrate events means to relate actions and characters across time and space. Its intention is to inform, explain, entertain, or tell a story. If the purpose goes beyond aesthetics, it is a literary narrative.

Elements of the Story

Narrator

"Narrator:" a fictional or real voice that recounts the facts.

• In 1st person: The narrator appears as a character in the story (may be the protagonist or a witness).
• In 3rd person: The narrator relates events from an external perspective, with limited knowledge or with full knowledge (omniscient).

Objective (Objectivist) narrator: Tells what is seen without making value judgments and typically does not reveal characters' inner thoughts.

Omniscient: Controls and knows all elements of the story, including characters' inner thoughts and motivations.

Narration

-Narration: The narration is the plot or the sequence of facts that happen to the characters and the theme of the text. Its basic structure is often linear: introduction, climax, denouement. However, narration can also be circular, begin in medias res, or run in parallel strands.

Characters

Characters are living presences in the story, defined by particular traits and functions.

• Actors (Protagonists): The most important characters; they always have a purpose.
• Antagonists: Characters who work against the interests of the protagonists.
• Secondary: Characters with less importance in the development of events.
• Comparsas: Characters who fill out the action (background or crowd figures).
• Manifold: A single character representing a community.
• Type: Characters that are stereotyped and repeated in various works with the same qualities.

Space and Time

"Space and Time:" The narrative is located in a space (exterior, interior, real, or fictional) and in time: outer time (the time when the action occurs) and inner time (the duration of the narrative).

Language of the Narrative

Lexical Features

-Lexical features: The most characteristic feature is the predominance of verbs (movement, speech, thought).

Morphological Features

-Morphological features: Predominant tense usage includes present perfect and imperfect; it is also common to use the historical present.

Syntactic Features

-Syntactic features:

• Use of narrative styles: interventions by characters in direct style (the characters speak for themselves) or in indirect style (reported by the narrator).
• Prevalence of declarative sentences and many circumstantial complements of time, place, and manner.
• Abundance of adverbial subordinate clauses of time, place, cause, and purpose.

Text Traits: Use of discourse markers. The most frequent markers refer to time: when, after, then, and similar expressions.