Lecture
The totality of utterances that have representational tasks – narration. Description and reasoning became component parts of narration. In the broad sense, narration is the totality of those utterances, speech acts of the narrator or storyteller, that perform the function of mediation between the depicted world and the addressee of the work as a unified artistic utterance. Types of narration: personal and impersonal. Personal: on behalf of the lyrical hero (confession), on behalf of a character-narrator. Impersonal – on behalf of the narrator, and the novelistic type. Esin distinguishes first-person and third-person narration. First-person narration heightens the illusion of the authenticity of what is recounted and focuses attention on the image of the narrator; the author is almost always hidden, his non-identity with the narrator becomes explicit. Third-person narration allows for a freer conduct of the story, an aesthetically neutral form; Esin also singles out free indirect discourse (narration on behalf of a neutral narrator, but sustained wholly or partly in the speech manner of the character, without being the character's direct speech). This device is resorted to when one wishes to create the character's inner world through his speech. Words characteristic of the character, his speech manner, are employed.
Two types of narrating subjects: the narrator and the storyteller. A personified one (a definite portrait, biography, one can say who he is, he takes part in the action or observes it) – if in the first person, then he is a storyteller; a non-personified narrator depicts events at a distance, impersonally. The narrator is the bearer of speech, unrevealed, unnamed, dissolved in the text. The storyteller is the bearer of speech who openly organizes the entire text with his personality. (Korman)
The author is not the same as the narrator, even where there is an image of the author. An image is always artistically conventional. Any image of a narrator or storyteller is a speech mask. The storyteller is a subject of depiction, bound to a particular social, cultural, and linguistic milieu. It is from this position that he depicts other characters. The narrator conceals character, mode of thought, and worldview behind his speech manner. The author's position may or may not coincide with the narrator's position.
The narrator's possibilities are determined by the author. The narrator is always situated either inside the fictional world or on its border. But this, too, is determined precisely by the author. All of the narrator's knowledge is determined by the author, as is his ignorance, his degree of awareness.
1. The narrator is situated on the border between the fictional world and reality; the storyteller is inside the depicted reality.
2. Where there is a narrator, it seems that the event is telling itself. Where there is a storyteller, events are the object of depiction.
3. The narrator has an all-encompassing purview (the story seems more objective); the storyteller does not – we view events through the eyes of the characters, more subjectively. The storyteller has a specific speech manner, whether or not it is attached to the story.
4. No one within the depicted world sees the narrator. The storyteller, however, necessarily enters into the purview either of the narrator or of the characters.
5. The narrator is, in his purview, close to the author, the creator; the storyteller is close to the characters.
6. The narrator is a bearer of a generally accepted speech manner; the storyteller is not.
Within the text of a single work the modes of narration may change. In any case, the sequence of narrative modes is subordinated to the author's artistic task and carries a definite artistic meaning.
Free indirect speech is «a passage of narrative text conveying the words, thoughts, feelings, perceptions, or merely the semantic stance of one of the depicted characters, in which the conveyance of the narrator's text is marked neither by graphic signs (or their equivalents) nor by introductory words (or their equivalents)» ; in other words, it is set off neither by punctuation nor syntactically.
The device of free indirect speech was first used in Russian literature by A.S. Pushkin, after which it developed further in fiction. Free indirect speech is not set off from the author's speech at the syntactic level, but it retains the lexical, stylistic, and grammatical elements characteristic of the speaking character's speech. The structure of the complex sentence in reported speech, and the presence in the main clause of verbs of speech or thought, clearly reveal that the author is merely transmitting someone else's speech or thought to the reader. Free indirect speech is merged with the author's speech: in free indirect speech the author speaks or thinks on behalf of the character. Example: But here is his room. Nothing and no one, no one had looked in. Even Nastasya had not touched anything. But, good God! How could he have left all those things there in that hole earlier? He rushed to the corner, thrust his hand under the wallpaper and began pulling things out and stuffing his pockets with them. F. Dostoevsky. Free indirect speech belongs to the author — all pronouns and verb-person forms are presented from the author's standpoint (as in reported speech) — but, on the other hand, it possesses a substantial lexical, syntactic, and stylistic specificity characteristic of direct speech.
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