Understanding the Novel: Structure, Elements, and Classification

The Novel

Definition

The novel is a prominent contemporary narrative subgenre, captivating both critics and audiences. It presents narrative patterns found in other subgenres, offering a compelling storytelling experience.

It is a story of considerable length, centered around a narrator who presents actions, characters, times, and places, emphasizing one of these categories as dominant.

Structural Elements

1. Time

As a story, the novel's events are arranged in a specific sequence.

• Time of speech: The final point in time of the narrated events.
• Story time: The timeframe in which the story unfolds.

2. Space

Space serves to locate characters and their actions, creating symbolic effects. It functions independently and can symbolize character or mood.

3. Plot

The novel's story comprises a set of actions with a defined organization, forming an intrigue with various episodes or narrative units. Traditional novels typically follow a structure of exposition, development, climax, and resolution.

4. Characters

Characters are the agents driving the novel's action. They can be decorations, agents of action, fictional individuals with their own psychology, or even the author's mouthpiece.

5. Narrator

There are seven narrative possibilities:

• Omniscient author and editor: Narrated in the first person, offering judgments on events.
• Neutral omniscience: Narrated in the third person.
• Selective omniscience: The story is told from the characters' perspectives.
• I-Witness: A character narrates the observed action.
• I-Protagonist: The main character narrates their own story.
• Dramatic: Actions and words of the characters convey the story without revealing thoughts or emotions. There is no narrator.
• Film Mode: The author presents fragments of life without selection or order.

Classification of the Novel

Novels can be classified based on various aspects:

• Thematically: Adventure novels, chivalry novels, etc. From a cultural perspective, there are classic, medieval, baroque, romantic, realistic, and contemporary novels.
• Genre: Epic novels, contrasted with lyric novels (with language that draws attention to itself) and dramatic novels (with tragic endings).
• Linguistically: Autobiographical novels (in third or second person) and epistolary novels.