Literary Studies – Telling stories: Identifying the narrative situation

Literary prose tells us stories – in the widest sense of the word. But who is narrating them? If the story transports us to a fictional world, it’s safe to assume that the author and narrator are not one and the same person: narrating something fictional is fictional in itself.

The author could have the narrator tell us a lot about themselves, often digressing from the story. However, the narrator might also be pushed into the background, leaving us with the impression that there isn’t a narrator at all.

The narrator could be a participant in the story (first-person narration or Ich-Erzählung) or be completely detached and independent from it (third-person narration; there is no I/me/my in the events presented).

And the narrator could have access to information which we do not normally have available (other people’s thoughts and feelings, events happening at the same time in different places, the future, etc.) or they could be limited in their knowledge like all those immediately involved in the events. In the latter case, the story is told from a particular perspective, either the narrator’s (in first-person narration) or that of one or more character (in third-person narration).

Depending on the choice of the author, we – as readers – find ourselves in different narrative situations. The literary theorist Franz Karl Stanzel (who was, by the way, a professor at the University of Graz) distinguishes between three basic narrative situations, which we will briefly summarise for you here.

The following paragraph is taken from Virginia Woolf’s famous novel Mrs Dalloway (1925/2012, p. 4). Read it carefully and see if you can find out which of the above narrative situations Woolf develops here.

For having lived in Westminster – how many years now? Over twenty, – one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street.

This paragraph is an example of …

In the paragraph, the reader perceives the fictional world from Clarissa Dalloway’s perspective – she’s the focaliser: when Big Ben strikes, we hear it with her (“Out it boomed”), and, even more importantly, it’s her experience and interpretation of the event that is conveyed to us as readers (“First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable”).

The focus doesn’t lie on a particular event itself but much rather on Mrs Dalloway’s perception of it. As such, the paragraph is a typical example of figural narration.

Note: There’s hardly any “pure” figural text (e.g. a whole novel featuring only figural narration); it’s usually mixed with authorial narration.
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