Narrative Analysis
Narrative Analysis
Narrative Analysis
Introduction
orientation within the social sciences. The most varied personal, political, institutional,
organizational and conversational stories are currently collected and studied. The use of
2. The second moment was characterized by the study of narratives as texts with a
particular form.
3. The third moment includes a movement beyond a separate narrative text, into the
Definitions of narratives
genres. The most basic form of narrative, however, is not the prduct of poetic muse but of
ordinary conversations. Many scholars tried to define the terma narrative. Some favor
Barbara Heinstein Smith (1981) offered a useful definition: “someone telling someone
else that something happened.” Ronald Barthes (1966) claims that “Narrative is first and
introduce them but also by the readers and interlocutors who influence the direction of the
narrative.
In the 1960s, the concept of narrative has emerged as an autonomous object of inquiry.
1. Structuralist Narratology
Two related but somewhat different approaches to the structure of narrative became
known in the West beginning in the mid-1950s. One was that of the Russian Vladimir Propp,
whose Morphology of the Folktale (1968) was published in Russian in 1928 but first
translated into English in 1958. Propp’s technique for showing what all folktales have in
common and how they can differ is essentially that of linguistic analysis. Propp’s work might
more accurately be called the syntax of the folktale, since its fundamental claim is that all
folktales have the same syntagmatic deep structure, the same sequence of “functions” or
meaningful actions by characters. Once characters and their initial situation are introduced
(“A little girl and her little brother lived with their elderly parents”), an interdiction is
addressed to the hero or heroine and some family member leaves home (“One day the parents
said to the girl, ‘We are going into town. Take care of your brother and don’t go out of the
yard.’ Then they left”). Next the interdiction is violated (the little girl leaves the yard) and a
villain appears on the scene (geese swoop down and snatch the little brother). And the tale
Through his study of the Russian wonder tales, he found out that different characters
perform identical actions. He takes a variety of actions and condenses them into basic
functions. He also reduced the number of key actors in fairy tales into basic categories. He
identified the roles of villain donor, helper, princess and her father, dispatcher and hero.
The power of the Proppian model lies in this compression of unlimited number of agents and
their possible moves into a limited number of alternatives and in arranging the unctions into a
sequence.
While Propp’s approach to characterizing the universal features of folklore is like that
of formal syntax, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s (1955, 1964, 1966) is more similar to formal
semantics. Lévi-Strauss’s interest was in describing the abstract elements of meaning that are
expressed in myth, semantic contrasts such as male/female and raw/cooked. His claim is that
traditional narrative around the world, though superficially varied, all deals with a limited
William Labov’s influential work on personal experience narrative (PEN) began in the
context of his research about the social correlates of linguistic variation in New York City,
and elsewhere. In order to elicit unselfconscious, “vernacular” speech, Labov had people tell
stories about themselves, often (though not always) stories about dangerous or embarrassing
experiences. Fourteen of these stories formed the basis for “Narrative analysis: oral versions
of personal experience” (Labov and Waletzky 1967) (The paper has since been reprinted as
Labov and Waletzky 1997). In this paper, Labov and Waletzky propose a “formal” approach
to PEN. The goal was to describe the invariable semantic deep structure of PEN, with an
eye to correlating surface differences with the “social characteristics” of narrators. Labov’s
project was similar to Vladimir Propp’s in its attempt to lay out the underlying syntagmatic
structure of plot elements in narrative, except that Labov’s focus was on the functions of
According to Labov and Waletzky, a clause in PEN can serve one of two functions,
referential or evaluative. Referential clauses have to do with what the story is about: events,
characters, setting. Evaluative clauses have to do with why the narrator is telling the story and
why the audience should listen to it: evaluative material states or highlights the point of the
story.
Any narrative, by definition, includes at least two “narrative clauses.” A narrative clause
is one that cannot be moved without changing the order in which events must be taken to have
occurred. If two narrative clauses are reversed, they represent a different chronology: “My
wife left me. I fell in love with Paula.” implies a different sequence of events than “I fell in
love with Paula. My life left me.” For Labov, “narrative” is not any talk about the past, or any
sequence of “events which (it is inferred) actually occurred” (Labov 1972: 360).
A “fully developed” narrative may include clauses or sets of clauses with the following
1 abstract: one or two clauses at the beginning that summarize the entire story.
2 orientation: narrative clauses which identify place, time, characters and their activities.
3 complicating action: narrative clauses that recapitulate the main events in the story and
4 evaluation: it is used to state what is interesting or unusual about the story, why the
audience should keep listening and allow the teller to keep talking.
5 result or resolution: it releases the suspense and tells what finally happened.
6 coda: free clause at the end of the narratives that signal the end of the story.
Labov’s approach informed studies in practice and offered a means to approach fairly small