| Chapter 2: | Narrative and Its Structures |
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Talib (2002) pointed out that in most of the attempts to define narrative, the reuse of such words as narrative and narration in explaining the concept does not really give any new information on the term and makes the definitions circular. For example, Chatman (1978) defined narrative as a structure that comprises narrative statements. Rimmon-Kenan (1983) defined narrative fiction as the narration of a succession of fictional events. Bal (1985) defined narrative as a corpus that should consist of all narrative texts and only those texts that are narrative.
What is noteworthy in all these attempts to define narrative is a certain degree of agreement among them on its dualistic nature; in other words, narrative comprises a what (narrative content, such as events, actors, time, and location) and a way (how the narrative is told) (Talib, 2004, 1.2). Following the Russian Formalists and French Structuralists, narrative has been described by Chatman (1978) as having a binary structure: story (the formal content element) and discourse (the formal expression element). It was later split into three levels by Rimmon-Kenan (1983) as story, text, and narration, and by Bal (1985) as fabula, story, and text.
In spite of some disparity in their use of the terms, the first term in either the two- or three-level descriptions, story or fabula, can be understood as ‘a basic description of the fundamental events of a story’ and can be regarded as the level with ‘the possibility of “total transfer” from one medium to another’ (Toolan, 1988, p. 9). Conversely, the second term roughly refers to the textual realisation of the story, and denotes the ‘varying manner of presentation of the basic story’ (Toolan, 1988, 2001, p. 10).
Subsequently, a minimalist definition of narrative, that is, ‘a perceived sequence of non-randomly connected events’ (p. 7) has been provided by Toolan (1988). According to Toolan (1998),