sábado, 6 de octubre de 2012

Narrative Techniques

Before I start analysing Fatelessness, I found important to make a quick review of the narrative techniques. 
There are four components, which are listed below. Each one of those components answers to a specific question.

  1. Point of View: it answers to the question "who tells the story?". It can be either the narrator (first person), the reader (second person) or an outsider that's looking inside (third person).
  2. Narration: it answers to the question "who is the narrator speaking to?". It may be a direct narration, in which the narrator speaks directly to the reader; a frame narration, that could be somehow of direct narration, but that includes also third person; or it could be an indirect narration, in which the narrator is just telling the story, not to the reader.
  3. Speech: it answers to the question "how do the narrator and/or characters of a story speak?". It can be direct (they speak for themselves), reported (the narrator summarizes what the characters have said) or free indirect speech (the characters' thoughts are explicit and direct).
  4. Tense: it answers to the question "when did the events of a story happen?". It may be past (narrator can choose to focus on important events, because it already happened), present (narrator is just as surprised as the reader) or future (the story is about something that will happen).
Apart from this primary components of narrative techniques, there are many other ways to make the reader feel amused by the writing skills. These may include the following:
  1. Flashback: it consists in making a scene where it goes to the past to remember something that happened. It usually helps to understand the context of the narration.
  2. Foreshadowing: it gives clues of what will happen in the future. 
  3. 3rd person omniscient: using an omniscient narrator makes for it possible to tell many characters thoughts.
  4. Dual Narrative: it tells stories from two different perspectives, so the reader has got a better point of view of what is happening.

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