Narrator

“ The gravest historians, as well as the lightest story tellers, frame their narrations for effect, and the tendency in all ages to shape and fashion the narrative with a view to the particular effect designed by the individual narrator to be produced has been found entirely irresistible. ”

“ the measure of the fiction is ever on the increase, and each fresh narrator adds something to what he has heard. ”

“ But novelists of another class prefer to admit frankly to the reader that the narrator who stands apart from all the characters and writes about them in the third person is the author himself. They give a personal tone to the narrative; they assert their own peculiarities of taste and judgment, and never let you forget that they, and they alone, are telling the story. The reader has to see it through their eyes. ”

“ Thus the form in which we receive a story from some old woman, or nurse, depends in a certain measure upon the ways and habits of the population which has preserved the tale. At the same time, the ingenuity and the memory of the narrator are important factors in producing the dramatic or moral tenor appreciated by the listener. ”

“ “The eagerness of a listener quickens the tongue of a narrator.” ”

“ The Stories are two and very memorable, and the more credible, because the things hapned in the age of the Narrator, some few years before he wrote them, and in his own Countrey; and he doth avouch them with all imaginable confidence to be most certainly true. ”

“ The Narrator. The first person is preferable; for since Paul learns but tardily certain steps of the complication, the reader (who knows only what Paul knows) must remain in suspense. Try telling the story from an objective point of view, placing every step in its chronological order. What does the story lose?
Characterization. Compare the characteristics of these Oriental figures with those in “A Simple Act of Piety.” What have they in common? Why does Mr. Gilbert choose a half-breed as his narrator and hero? Point out every example of Paul’s fearlessness. ”

“ Narrators, while preserving the original plot and characters of a Tale, vary it, and make it graphic by introducing objects known and familiar to their audience. These inconsistencies do not interfere with belief or offend the taste of a people with whom even the impossible is not a bar to faith; rather, the inconsistency sharpens their enjoyment of the story. ”

“ Many a story, from the large panoramic chronicle to the small and single impression, postulates the story-teller, the picture-maker, and by that method gives its best. Speak [186] ing in person or reported obliquely, the narrator serves his turn. But where there is no positive reason for him there is a reason, equally positive, for a different method, one that assigns the point of view to the reader himself. An undramatic subject, we find, can be treated dramatically, so that the different method is at hand. ”

“ I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the beginning of it, and my own skeptical incredulity during the days that followed for the balance of the strange tale. ”

“ From this time on the shepherd and princess lived happily for many years. He succeeded his father-in-law as king.
—Vincente M. Hilario.
[83]
CHAPTER II
THE SYMBOLIC-DIDACTIC GROUP
We now turn to a set of stories with a new basis, the symbolic-didactic narratives: fables, parables, and allegories. By the word "symbolic" we shall understand that the stories mean something more than appears on the surface. By "didactic," the fact that the narratives are told for the purpose of teaching a lesson. The hearer no more believes in the mere literal occurrence than does the narrator himself. ”

“ Untrained [63] narrators often make the mistake of memorizing paragraph by paragraph and sentence by sentence, and then giving the tale like a recitation, which is not story-telling at all. Story-telling is a constructive, creative art, and the tale that grips and convinces and inspires must be told in a manner that makes it seem like the teller’s own. Practicing the story means facing an imaginary audience and describing so vividly and clearly what is seen that others may see the pictures that pass before the mind’s eye. ”

“ Let an author combine these others with a series of events, let him put them in as aids to the understanding or as ornaments on the thread of his recital, and they are accepted without question as elements of narration, be it prose or verse in form, true or fictitious in content. That is to say, though a story often contains to some extent all the other forms of writing too, we think of it as narrative because it carries us along a course of events. ”

“ What national and racial customs intensify the setting?
“To me, a narrative that has for its aim to interest the reader in its plot is an anecdote, be its plot ever so thick. A narrative that aims to interest the reader in a slice of palpitating life—the joys or sorrows of people—be its plot ever so thin, I call it a short story.”—Benjamin Rosenblatt. ”

“ The one is used to aid or supplement the other. Like description, narration has its place in nearly every form of composition; and in history, fiction, and epic poetry it constitutes, perhaps, the body of discourse. The incidents narrated should be selected according to their interest and importance; they should usually be presented in their chronological order, and there should be a perceptible and often a rapid movement toward a definite end. In all artistic narration we find unity, proportion, and completeness. ”

“ This grouping of drama, action, and passion as the qualities of great poetry is significant. Bald narrative can never realize character or situation as can the dramatic form, either in narrative or for the stage, when the whole action takes place before the mind's eye instead of being told. ”

“ Material of Narration. Narration has been defined as the form of discourse which recounts events in a sequence. It includes not only letters, journals, memoirs, biographies, and many histories, but, in addition, that great body of literature which people generally include in the comprehensive term of “stories.”
If this body of literature be examined, it will be found that it deals with things as opposed to ideas; incidents as opposed to propositions. Sometimes, it is true, the author of a story is in reality dealing with ideas. ”

“ After studying the tale as folk-lore, know it as literature. Master it as a classic, test it as literature, to see wherein lies its appeal to the emotions, its power of imagination, its basis of truth, and its quality of form; study it as a short-story and view it as a piece of narration. It is rather interesting to note that you can get all there is in a tale from any one point of view. If you follow the sequence as setting, through association you get the whole, as may be seen by referring to Chanticleer and Partlet under the heading, "Setting," in the chapter on the "Short-Story." ”

“ Those were not days, be it remembered, when people wrote fiction for the sake of introducing discussions. There still lingered in the novelist's mind the time-worn heresy that he had a story to tell, and that his people must act as well as talk. The plot—delightful and obsolete word!—was then in good repute, and conversation was mainly useful in helping on the tale, in providing copious love scenes, and, with really good novelists, in illustrating and developing character. ”

“ The abundance and the vividness of character-presentation; the liveliness and the abundance of the staging of that character; the variety of scene and incident—all most properly connected with the plot, but capable of existing and of being felt without it; the human dialogue; the admirable phrase in that dialogue and out of it, in the digressions, in the narrative, above, and through, and about, and below it all—these things and others (for it is practically impossible to exhaust the catalogue) fill up the cup to the brim, and keep it full, for the born lover of the special novel-pleasure. ”

“ Sometimes the events come out in conversation or dialogue, the dramatic method, and the author appears but little. When he appears not at all we have true drama instead of narrative. The larger number of stories, doubtless, are a mixture of author and character talk. ”

“ We shall use for suggestive analysis in this study not a complete specimen of narration, but several examples illustrating two of the three elements necessary to the personnel of a good story. These three recognized elements are the setting or situation which the pictures compose, the atmosphere which the characters create, and the plot or the action in which the characters engage. We shall leave the question of the plot to class work upon the selections from epic poetry to be considered later in this study. ”

“ Further, as the lives of all men and women are more or less conditioned by their surroundings and circumstance, any story will require more or less description. Incidents are of but little moment, character showing may have but slight interest, description is purposeless, unless the happenings of the story develop in the characters feelings toward which we assume some attitude of sympathy or opposition. Including this fourth element of the story, we shall then have [2] incident, description, character, mood, as the first elements of the narrative form. ”

“ Under the division of narratives of fictitious events we notice six groups, when we are thinking of source and purpose: (1) the primitive-religious; (2) the symbolic-didactic; (3) the ingenious-astonishing; (4) the merely entertaining; (5) the instructive; (6) the artistic. Within these groups come the following individual types: (1) myth, legend, fairy tale, nursery saga; (2) fable, parable, allegory; (3) the tale of mere wonder, the imaginary voyage with a satiric or expository purpose, the tale of scientific discovery and mechanical invention, the detective story ”

“ The narrative is one of intense interest from beginning to close, and the characters of the various personages with whom the hero of the story is associated, are drawn with perhaps more skill, and a deeper knowledge of human nature, than in most of the author’s previous novels. ”

“ Narrative Literature. Of all forms of sustained discourse, we may reasonably suppose that of narration to have been the earliest. The incidents of the hunt were related at the return; the experiences of the past were told as a guide to the present; and the first efforts of the imagination are the depicting of fictitious occurrences, tradition and myth, story and history; these make up most of the entertainment of conversation to simple minds. ”

“ It seems to me that this is to give our drama a more illustrious lineage, and a more natural origin, than by ascribing it to the miracle-plays of the Middle Ages. What may have been contributed by the miracle-play—but we cannot be sure—is the form of dialogue, the conduct of a story by speaking characters. ”

“ Narration, the Natural Mood of Fiction.––Since, then, the natural mood, or method, of fiction is narration, it is necessary that we should devote especial study to the nature of narrative. And in a study frankly technical we may be aided at the outset by a definition, which may subsequently be explained in all its bearings.
A narrative is a representation of a series of events. ”

“ But will not the orator express himself in the most perfect manner, when he seems to speak truth? Now, indeed, the narration is laid out as a champion-ground for eloquence to display itself in; the voice, the gesture, the thoughts, the expression, are all worked up to a pitch of extravagance, and what is monstrous, the action is applauded, and yet the cause is far from being understood. ”

“ In each sentence, to be sure, narrative or description or dialogue will predominate; but still the narrative is always present in the description, and the description in the dialogue, as Mr. James says; and if you take a paragraph this fact will appear more clearly, and if you take three or four paragraphs, or a whole story, the fusion of all three styles in the same words is clearly apparent.
It is impossible to give fixed rules for the varying proportion of description, narration, or dialogue in any given passage. The writer must guide himself entirely by the impression in his own mind. ”

“ Well, but life is full, also, of endings, of the results in concrete action of character, of completed dramas. And we expect and give, in the stories we hear and tell in ordinary intercourse, some point, some outcome, an end of some sort. If you interest me in the preparations of two persons who are starting on a journey, and expend all your ingenuity in describing their outfit and their characters, and do not tell me where they went or what befell them afterwards, I do not call that a story. ”

“ The narrative may take on a high degree of complexity, involving many well-differentiated characters and a well-developed art of conversation, and in some instances, especially in revenge, trickster, or recognition motives, approaching plot tales in our sense of the word. ”

“ Kinds of Narration.+—Narration consists of an account of happenings, and, for this reason, it is, without doubt, the most interesting of all forms of discourse. It is natural for us all to be interested in life, movement, action; hence we enjoy reading and talking about them. To be convinced that there is everywhere a great interest in narration we need only to listen to conversations, notice what constitutes the subject-matter of letters of friendship, read newspapers and magazines, and observe what classes of books are most frequently drawn from our libraries. ”

“ The material through which we are to exercise the imagination and develop imaginative vigor is the narrative form of discourse. Narration is successful when it records or has the effect of recording actual experience. ”