Narrative Structures in Burmese Folk Tales By Soe Marlar Lwin

Chapter 2:

Narrative and Its Structures

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purpose, the study will use the two most striking features identified in the analysis of narrative structures in Burmese folk tales and compare them with tales from other cultures as examples. Through an illustration of the relationship between the narrative form, function, and field of tales from two cultures, the study hopes to propose a structural analysis of folk tales as a means of gaining insight into the cultural determination of the narrative motif and the social purpose of storytelling.

Although the study of a storyline in folk tales is not a newfound area of research, any systematic differences in the plot structures of different types of Burmese folk tales may still prove to be thought provoking. Propp's (1968) study, which has been recognised as a groundbreaking work in the analysis of narrative structure, is corpus specific (i.e., limited to Russian fairy tales). Zipes (2000) has pointed out that the fairy tale is only one type of literary appropriation of a particular oral storytelling tradition related to the oral wonder tales. Dundes (1980) has also commented that fairy stories and other folk tales can change in both form and field not only over time but also across ethnic boundaries. Thus, with the analysis of the narrative structures in different types of Burmese folk tales, the present study intends to propose story structure as a possible criterion in the categorisation of different types of tales in a culture, and probably also of tales across different cultures.

As noted earlier, Propp (1968) claimed that the number of functional events in Russian fairy tales is limited to 31, and that the sequence of these functional events is fixed. This does not imply that all 31 possible functional events necessarily occur in any one given tale. The only one absolutely necessary functional event, he claimed, is ‘villainy (A) or a lack (a)’ (Propp, 1968, p. 92). This definition should be broadened by specifying the minimum number of functional events and the minimum