Narratology

Narratology is a theory of narrative. It examines what all narratives, and only narratives, have in
common as well as what enables them to differ from one another qua narratives, and it aims to describe
the narrative-specific system of rules presiding over narrative production and processing. The term
"narratology" is a translation of the French term narratologie--introduced by Tzvetan Todorov in
Grammaire du Dcamron (1969)--and the theory historically falls into the tradition of Russian
Formalism and French Structuralism. Narratology exemplifies the structuralist tendency to consider
texts (in the broad sense of signifying matter) as rule-governed ways in which human beings
(re)fashion their universe. It also exemplifies the structuralist ambition to isolate the necessary and
optional components of textual types and to characterize the modes of their articulation. As such, it
constitutes a subset of Semiotics, the study of the factors operative in signifying systems and practices.
One important starting point in the development of narratology was the observation that narratives are
found, and stories told, in a variety of media: oral and written language (in prose or in verse), of
course, but also sign languages, still or moving pictures (as in narrative paintings, stained-glass
windows, or films), gestures, (programmatic) music, or a combination of vehicles (as in comic strips).
Furthermore, a folktale can be transposed into a ballet, a comic strip turned into a pantomime, a novel
brought to the screen, and vice versa. This arguably means that narrative, or more specifically, the
narrative component of a narrative text, can and should be studied without reference to the medium in
which it occurs.
Now, within the medium--say, written language--a given set of events can be presented in different
ways, in the order of their (supposed) occurrence, for example, or in a different order. The narratologist
should therefore be able to examine the narrated, the story presented, independently not only of the
medium used but also of the narrating, the discourse, the way in which the medium is used to present
the what. In Grammaire du Dcamron, Todorov does not explicitly eliminate the study of narrating
from the "science of narrative" he envisions; but his examination of Giovanni Boccaccio's tales focuses
on the narrated, and his goal is to develop a grammar to account for it. Similarly, most of Roland
Barthes's influential "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative" is devoted to story rather
than to discourse structure.
In concentrating on the what instead of the way, Barthes and Todorov were following a path taken by
Claude Lvi-Strauss and Vladimir Propp. Lvi-Strauss had characterized the logic of myth by focusing
on semantic structure: in Structural Anthropology, he contended that myth always involves the
transformation of one set of semantic oppositions into another, less radical one through a mediation or
a series of mediations. In Morphology of the Folktale, which has proven to be perhaps the most fertile
modern account of story structure, Propp disregarded the narrating in Russian fairy tales and described
them in terms of the component parts of the narrated. Propp developed the notion of function or
category of actions considered from the point of view of their basic meaning in the tale where they
appear; he isolated 31 functions that constitute the fundamental elements of (Russian) fairy tales; he
maintained that no function excludes any other and that however many of them appear in a single tale,
they always appear in the same order; and he argued that tales--and perhaps all stories--always contain
the function lack or villainy and proceed from it to another function usable as a denouement (e.g.,
liquidation of the lack or villainy, rescue, or wedding). Propp also isolated seven basic roles assumed
by characters in (fairy) tales, seven dramatis personae each of which corresponds to a particular sphere
of action or set of functions: the hero (seeker or victim), the villain, the princess (a sought-for person)
and her father, the dispatcher, the donor, the helper, and the false hero. The same character can play
more than one role, and the same role can be played by more than one character.

Many narratologists besides Barthes and Todorov were inspired by Propp (and, to a lesser extent, by
LviStrauss) in trying to account for the specificity of narrative by focusing on the narrated. In
Logique du rcit, Claude Bremond defined the elementary narrative sequence as a series of three
functions corresponding to the three basic stages in the unfolding of any process: virtuality (a situation
opening a possibility); actualization or nonactualization of the possibility; achievement or
nonachievement. Moreover, Bremond developed an intricate typology of roles based on a fundamental
distinction between patients (affected by processes and constituting victims or beneficiaries) and
agents (initiating the processes and influencing the patients, modifying their situation, or maintaining
it). Similarly, Algirdas Julien Greimas refined Propp's notion of dramatis personae and arrived at an
"actantial" model, originally comprising six "actants," which has been very influential: Subject
(looking for the Object), Object (looked for by the Subject), Sender (of the Subject on its quest for the
Object), Receiver (of the Object to be secured by the Subject), Helper (of the Subject), and Opponent
(of the Subject). According to Greimas, narrative is a signifying whole because it can be grasped in
terms of the structure of relations between the actants. More generally, drawing on both Propp and
Lvi-Strauss, Greimas argued that (canonical) narrative is organized according to a schema or frame
whereby after a given order of things is disturbed, a contract is established between Sender and Subject
to bring about a new order or reinstate the old one; the Subject, who becomes competent along the axes
of desire, obligation, knowledge, and/or ability, goes on a quest and, as a result of (three basic) tests,
fulfills or fails to fulfill its part of the contract and is (justly) rewarded or (unjustly) punished.
Although much of the early work on narratology thus centered on the narrated and characterized
narrative in terms of it, some narratologists considered narrative to be essentially a mode of (verbal)
presentation--the recounting of events by a narrator as opposed to, say, the enacting of them on a
stage--and they defined their task as the study of narrative discourses rather than the study of the story.
They had tradition on their side. Furthermore, they could argue that focusing on the structure of the
narrated results in a failure to account for the many ways in which the same set of events can be
recounted. Finally, in pursuing their task, they could profit from the extensive work on literary
narration and such topics as distance or point of view that Anglo-Saxon critics (from Henry James to
Wayne C. Booth), Germanic scholars (e.g., Eberhard Lmmert, Gnther Mller, Franz Stanzel) and the
Russian Formalists had performed. Grard Genette is perhaps the most eminent representative of this
narratological tendency. In Narrative Discourse and Narrative Discourse Revisited, he analyzed the
temporal relations that can obtain between the narrative text and the story it recounts, the factors
regulating narrative text and the story it recounts, the factors regulating narrative information, and the
narrating instance (the producing narrative act inscribed in the text, as well as the situation in which
that act occurs).
Defining narrative by its mode of presentation (and insisting on the role of a narrator) instead of
defining it by its object (events) leads to a neglect of narratorless stories. In addition, it disregards the
fact that the story, too, makes narrative whatever it is--without a story there can be no narrative. A
number of narratologists consider both the events presented and their presentation pertinent to the
exploration of its possibilities. Mieke Bal, Seymour Chatman, Michel Mathieu-Colas, and Gerald
Prince, for example, have attempted to integrate the study of the what and the way; and Greimas's most
recent model of narrative makes room for the story as well as for discourse. This "generalized" or
"mixed" narratology can be said to correspond to the "science" that Roland Barthes evoked in his
"Introduction" and to the practice manifested in the other articles making up the well-known 1966
number of Communications devoted to narrative. It can also be said to conform to the present scope of
narratological activity.
It is perhaps the area of narrative discourse that narratologists have explored most thoroughly. Genette,
Todorov (in Introduction to Poetics), Bal, Chatman, Dorrit Cohn, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, and others

have described the kinds of order a narrative text can follow, the various speeds it can adopt (ellipsis,
summary, scene, stretch, pause), the types of focalization and detailing of events it can feature, the
relations that can obtain between the number of times an event happens and the number of times it is
recounted (elliptical, singulative, iterative, or repeating narrative), the basic modes of depicting
characters' thoughts and utterances, and the possible links between narrators, acts of narration,
narratees, and events narrated.
The investigation of story structure has also yielded notable results. Narratologists have examined the
minimal constituents of the narrated (actions and happenings, states and processes), and following the
insight of the Russian Formalists, they have distinguished those constituents that are essential to the
causal-chronological coherence of the story from those constituents that are not. They have studied the
links (temporal, spatial, logical, functional, transformational) between the minimal constituents, and
they have drawn attention to the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy as a powerful motor of narrativity.
They have also demonstrated that narrative sequences can be said to consist of a series of minimal
constituents, the last of which in time is a (partial) repetition or transformation of the first; and they
have proved that ever more complex sequences can be said to result from the conjoining of two
simpler ones, from the alternation of units in one sequence with units in another one, or from an
ordered mixture of these modes of combination. Moreover, apart from showing that actions and
processes can be grouped into basic (functional) classes and that participants in them can be
categorized according to fundamental roles, they have explored the techniques through which
characters are established and settings described (Chatman, Hamon). Finally, they have analyzed how a
story can be characterized semantically as a world consisting of domains (sets of moves or actions
pertaining to a given character, called for by a problem, and representing an effort toward a solution),
each of which is governed by (alethic, epistemic, axiological, or deontic) modal constraints that
determine what "happens" (Pavel).
As for the integration of the study of story and the study of discourse, it usually follows the direction
indicated by the Russian Formalists' work on the relations between fabula ("basic story material") and
sjuzet ("plot"), and it sometimes assumes a grammatical shape (Prince, Narratology): just as linguists
aim to establish the grammar of language, narratologists aim to establish the grammar of narrative.
Ultimately, such a grammar might consist of the following four interrelated parts: a syntactic
component whereby a finite number of rules generate the macro- and microstructures of all stories, and
only stories; a semantic component interpreting these structures, characterizing both the global
macrostructural and the local microstructural narrative content; a "discoursive" component whereby a
finite number of rules operate on the interpreted structures and account for narrative discourse (order
of presentation, speed, narratorial mediation, etc.); and a pragmatic component specifying the basic
cognitive and communicative factors affecting the production, processing, and narrativity of the output
of the first three parts. These components, which constitute the narrative grammar proper, would be
articulated with a textual component allowing for the translation of the grammatical data provided into
a given medium (say, written English).
Of the criticisms directed against narratology and its assumptions, claims, and ambitions, at least four
deserve attention. It is sometimes argued that narratological models are reductive and that they fail to
capture many (important) aspects of narrative texts. But perhaps this overly general charge of
reductiveness does not take into consideration the fact that narratology endeavors to account for all
narratives, and only narratives, to the extent that they are narrative: narratologists have often made it
clear that there are many elements other than narrative ones in a narrative text (e.g., pathos,
philosophical force, psychological insight).
It is more pointedly argued that narratological models are too static and unable to characterize the very
engine that drives a narrative forward to its end, the very dynamics that dictate its shape. It is of course

true that Lvi-Strauss's analyses of myth disregarded the syntactic dimension entirely, that the seminal
Proppian model, with its fixed order of functions, was static, and that grammars of narrative have
frequently concentrated on isolating minimal story units rather than on capturing the dynamism of
story configurations. On the other hand, it should be noted that Lvi-Strauss never was, nor did he ever
claim to be, a narratologist, that Bremond criticized early on the static aspects of Propp's Morphology,
and that his own model of the narrated emphasized the progressive logic of stories. Moreover, recent
attempts to describe story structure have been explicitly concerned with its dynamic dimension.
Thomas Pavel's grammar of plot, for instance, underlines the primacy of action and transformation and
sketches the system of energies, tensions, and resistances that plot constitutes. Similarly, Marie-Laure
Ryan has been developing a model inspired by artificial intelligence that gives their due to the
moments of suspense and surprises, advance and delay, trickery and illumination--to the sambalike
movement emblematic of plots.
It is also argued that narratology neglects the context in which narratives occur, the situation that partly
determines their shape and contributes to their point, the pragmatic factors that partly govern their
functioning. This criticism is not unjustified. The allegiance of narratology to strategies imported from
structural or transformational linguistics, the concern for capturing the specificity of narrative (a lyric
poem, a syllogism, or an essay can, after all, occur in the same context as a tale), the difficulty of
incorporating contextual factors into a systematic description, and the "scientific" ambitions of the
discipline (its desire to characterize universals of narrative) resulted in the narratologists' reluctance to
make pragmatics part of their domain of inquiry. Still, even in the early years of narratology,
pragmatically based notions (e.g., the role of the confusion of post hoc with propter hoc) were not
entirely ignored. More recently, perhaps because of the repeated sociolinguistic reminders about the
importance of communicative contexts, because of the growing interest in decoding practices, and
because of the increasing awareness that narrative should be viewed not only as a product but also as a
process, narratologists have begun to address more explicitly questions pertaining to pragmatics. Thus,
Susan Lanser has sketched the foundations for a socially sensitive, feminist narratology; Ryan has
argued that some configurations of events make better stories than others; and proposals have been
made to consider narrative context as part narrative text (Prince, "Narrative Pragmatics").
Finally, the very possibility of a coherent narratology, one that successfully integrates the study of the
what and the way, has been put into question by poststructuralist theorists and critics invoking the socalled double logic of narrative. This double logic consists of the two organizing principles in terms of
which every narrative presumably operates. One principle emphasizes the primacy of event over
meaning, that is, insists upon event as the origin of meaning; the other stresses the primacy of meaning
and its requirements, that is, insists upon event as the effect of a will to meaning. The first principle
emphasizes the logical priority of story over discourse; the second stresses the reverse and makes story
the product of discourse. Each principle functions to the exclusion of the other, but, paradoxically, both
are valid and necessary to the deployment of narrative, its impact, its force. This means that
narratology, however much it is developed and refined, will always be deficient: neither principle by
itself can lead to a satisfactory account of narrative, and the two principles cannot be synthesized. The
argument is interesting but not entirely persuasive, for it conflates problems that should perhaps not be
conflated: that of the evaluation of narrative veracity, for instance (is there a difference between
historical and fictional narrative? is narrative a consequence of the events it presents, or vice versa?),
that of hermeneutic practices (from text to event and from event to text), and that of narrative
dynamics.
Whatever the deficiencies of narratology, its influence has been considerable, so much so that critical
and theoretical work dealing with narrative corpuses is often called narratological even if it does not
focus on traits that are narrative-specific and even when it has few links with or little regard of the

narratologist's methods. Narratology can help to account for the distinctiveness of any given narrative,
to compare any number of narratives and institute narrative classes according to narratively pertinent
features, to illuminate certain reactions to certain texts (if Madame Bovary is esthetically pleasing,
perhaps it is partly because of the way Gustave Flaubert uses scene in the midst of summary and
summary in the midst of scene), to support certain interpretive conclusions (the privileging of iterative
narration in Remembrance of Things Past underlines Proust's quest for essences), and even--by
providing certain points of departure--to devise (new) interpretations (so-called narratological criticism
starts with and is based upon narratological description).
Yet narratology is not primarily an adjunct to interpretation. In fact, through its concern for the
governing principles of narrative and through its attempt to characterize not so much the particular
meanings of particular narratives but rather what allows narratives to have meanings, narratology has
proven to be an important participant in the assault against viewing literary studies as devoted above
all to the interpretation of texts. Narratology has also played a significant role in another battle
affecting the shape of literary studies. Through its investigation of the factors operating in all possible
narratives (and not just great, fictional, or extant ones), it has helped to put into question the very
nature of the canon by showing that many noncanonical narratives are just as sophisticated, narratively
speaking, as canonical ones.
More generally, narratological tools and arguments have been used in domains exceeding the bounds
of "literary studies proper": in cultural analysis, for example, to trace the ways various forms of
knowledge legitimate themselves through narrative; in philosophy, to analyze the structure of action; in
psychology, to study memory and comprehension. Indeed, narratology has important implications for
our understanding of human beings. To explore the nature of all and only possible narratives, to
account for the infinity of forms that they can take, to consider how it is that we construct them,
paraphrase them, summarize them, or expand them, is to explore one of the fundamental ways, and a
singularly human one at that, in which we make sense.
Gerald Prince
Notes and Bibliography
Jean-Michel Adam, Le Texte narratif (1985); Mieke Bal, De Theorie van vertellen en verhalen (2d ed.,
1980, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, trans. Christine van Boheemen, 1983);
Roland Barthes, "Introduction l'analyse structurale des rcits" (1966, "Introduction to the Structural
Analysis of Narrative," Image-Music-Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath, 1977); Claude Bremond,
Logique du rcit (1973); Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and
Film (1978); Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in
Fiction (1978); Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (1981),
Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (1975); Grard Genette,
Figures III (1972, partial trans., Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin,
1980), Nouveau discours du rcit (1983, Narrative Discourse Revisited, trans. Jane E. Lewin, 1988);
A. J. Greimas, Smantique structurale: Recherche de mthode (1966, Structural Semantics: An
Attempt at Method, trans. Daniele McDowell, Ronald Schleifer, and Alan Velie, 1983); A. J. Greimas
and J. Courts, Smiotique: Dictionnaire raisonn de la thorie du langage, vol. 1 (1979, Semiotics
and Language: An Analytical Dictionary, trans. Larry Crist et al., 1982); Philippe Hamon, Introduction
l'analyse du descriptif (1981), Le Personel du roman: Le Systme des personnages dans les
RougonMacquart d'mile Zola (1983); Susan Sniader Lanser, "Toward a Feminist Narratology," Style
20 (1986); Claude Lvi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale (1958, Structural Anthropology, trans.
Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, 1963); Wallace Martin, Recent Theories of Narrative

(1986); Michel Mathieu-Colas, "Frontires de la narratologie," Potique 17 (1986); W. J. T. Mitchell,

ed., On Narrative (1981); Thomas Pavel, The Poetics of Plot: The Case of English Renaissance
Drama (1985); Gerald Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology (1987), "Narrative Pragmatics, Message,
and Point," Poetics 12 (1983), Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative (1982); Vladimir
Propp, Morfologiia skazki (1928, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott, 1958, 2d ed., ed.
Louis A. Wagner, 1968); Paul Ricoeur, Temps et rcit, vol. 2 (1984, Time and Narrative, vol. 2, trans.
Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, 1985); Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction:
Contemporary Poetics (1983); Marie-Laure Ryan, "Embedded Narratives and Tellability," Style 20
(1986), "Linguistic Models in Narratology," Semiotica 28 (1979); Robert Scholes, Structuralism in
Literature: An Introduction (1974); Tzvetan Todorov, Grammaire du Dcamron (1969), Potique
(1973, Introduction to Poetics, trans. Richard Howard, 1981).