The Importance Of Narration By Byegfried Genette

In writing a story, a certain level of theory and technicality must be applied to the narration. Narration is important as it controls the mood, direction and the "regulation of narrative information”, between the reader and the story (1980, p. 41). In the opinion of Gérard Genette, narration is essentially diegesis, in that it can achieve no more than an impression of mimesis by making the story appear real and alive to the reader. Narration can impersonate reality, it will always appear as somewhat fictional no matter how realistic the author tries to make it. In summation, the idea that Genette is trying to communicate is that narration indicates a storyteller. By investigating the different types of narrative instance and the narrative …show more content…
Here we see how complicated the narrative voice truly is. The narrating voice has great interaction with time as it controls the plot time as well as the narrating time. When speaking of narrating time, Genette asks the question of whether narratives can give an explanation on how long it will take for a narrator to voice the story. Gérard Genette stresses the importance between the author and narrator when discussing narrating. We see that many readers and critics often confuse the author and narrator, however Genette shows the great difference between the two, “Nevertheless—and this is finally very odd—the fictive narrating of…almost all the novels in the world…is considered to have no duration; or more exactly, everything takes place as if the question of its duration had no relevance” (1980, p. 70-71). Gérard Genette also highlights the fact that the narrator is strictly within the text, while the author is outside the text. There are four different types of narrating instances, according to Genette’s writing. These narrating instances discuss the relationship between the narrator and the time of which they are narrating. The four types Genette describes are subsequent narration, prior narration, simultaneous narration and interpolated narration. Subsequent narration is the type we are most associated with. It demonstrates how the narrator is telling the story after the event has taken place and tells of how and what has happened to the narratee. Prior narration is how the narrator tells of what is to happen in the future and what is to come. This is used to bring a sense of completion to the story. This however, is not used very often as it tends to not flow well in narration. Simultaneous narrating is was not common in conventional narrating in Genette’s time. It refers to discussing the plot, for example, as it is told in the present tense. It is usually limited to certain genres of