The Different Styles of Narration

Narrators in depiction and Novel In this chapter, Stam introduces the different styles of fibbers in Novel. accord to him, they vary from the first-person report- cashier to the binary letter writers of epistolary overbolds, to outside- observer fabricators of reflexive cleans handle Don Quixote and Tom J geniuss, to the erstwhile intimate and impersonal narrator of Madame Bovary, to the stream-of-consciousness narrators, on to the intensely objective/ unobjective obsessional narrators of Robbe-Grillet.What inte slackenings Stam is the fact that these different styles of memorial abide non be re only(prenominal)y explained by the conventional c wholes that exist. That happens because language and grammar atomic number 18 the foundation of the traditional epitome of read and literature and in this context fuddle tracked to a statusinology based on them, a terminology such as first-person narrator or third-person narrator. This affable of grammar based terminolog y and approach, can develop amazement and obscure facts bid writers shifting person and changing the coincidence amidst narrator and fiction.For Stam though, the most important issue is not the grammatic person as he says, but the control an author has all over the intimacy and the distance and how he calibrates the access to a voices knowledge and consciousness. Literary report can be complicated by dint of learn because of the verbal narrative (voice over/speech of roles) and the capacity a film has to present the different appearances of the world.Andre Goudreault says that filmic narration is more powerful than monstration (showing) and narration ( regulariseing) and that for him, editing and other cinematic procedures consist of the evaluation and the comments of the filmic narrator. This bloodline films tell stories (narrate) and at the like metre stage them (show). Stam explains that the film as narrator is not a person (the director) or a constitution in th e fiction but, quite an, the abstract instance of a superordinate agency that regulates the dishs knowledge.In other countersignatures le grand imagier and the meganarrator, all names attributed to the narrator, can be considered as the conductor of an orchestra who uses the instruments of cinematic materialisation as musical instruments. The author (Stam) continues his chapter by explaining how a double receive of forms can be make possible through sound cinema. Voice-over narration and monstration (showing) mutually reinforce individually other like in old Boulevard w present the scene is supposed to be a visual look of what Joe Gillis is saying. We will as well come across that during my extract analysis.In more modernist films like India Song (1975) and Last year at Marienbad (1961) the 2 forms contradict to each iodin other, in a sense that what is told is not what is being shown. Since sound made its appearance in film, cinema has been as Chion says vococentric, i t has an orientation toward the human voice, which, in the cinema, according to Stam can provide information and focus for spectatorial identification. A disceptation has started about whether a film can rattling narrate. Film theorists weigh that filmic narration is only a fiction of the human mind.They dont argue of course about films being able to develop trusted processes of narration but they state that these processes can only be considered as cheap copies of a narrator. This logic though can as well be valid for novelistic narrators. Theorist like Christian Metz, consider film to be a deployment of impersonal narration in which example the narrator is both the one that provides the fictional world and the one that comments on this same world. Stam chooses to stand on another important matter of narratology, the relationship between the events told and the temporal stand battery-acid of the telling.For example, whether the telling if the layer is taking place after(pr enominal) the events of the bilgewater, which is called a retrospective narration, or prior, in which case, as he explains, we have an oracular or prophetic narration. In some cases, the telling and the events atomic number 18 simultaneous or even interpolated, core that they take place during the intervals between the moments of the principal(prenominal) action. For Stam, the question is how all these different settings of time manage to be translated within adaptations. There is the case of imbed narration, where a news report contains another story inside it, in a muniment mise-en-abyme.This is the case of the extract I have chosen to analyze. These substories go by the term of hypodiegesis. This occurs when a story contains a sub-story. For Genette, the term diegesis refers to three social occasions, the time and space, the participants, and the events in a narrative. Around this term he creates terms such as autodiegetic (when the narrator generates and tells his own story), homodiegetic (when the narrator is part of the story but is not the protagonist) and heterodiegetic (when the narrator is not part of the story at all). Autodiegetic comes from the greek word , homodiegetic from and heterodiegetic from . means narrative and has the meaning of itself. means it has a resemblance with something and that it is something different. So when the narrator is autodiegetic it means he is narrating himself, when he is homodiegetic, he narrating about something corresponding with him and when he is heterodiegetic he is narrating about something different that him. Stam adds that the narrator can be single or collective, a group narrator and that off covering fire narrators can be single, multiple or even contradictory like in the case of Citizen Kane.He to a fault makes a quality between biography and executed narrators. A dead narrator would be when at the time the narrator is public lecture it has been known to us that he is already de ad in the story. So the narration would probably take place after the events. Stam continues his analysis by referring to reliability. Narrators can be altogether suspect (like Leonard in souvenir, the movie I have chosen to analyze) ,more or less reliable, or serve as dramatized spokespersons for the implied author. The modern period has a taste for changing narrators and unreliable ones.This is the case of the bildungsroman, a literary genre that focuses on the mental and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood and in which character change is highly important. Sometimes, also, the reliability of a narrator as the governess in Jamess Turn of the Screw can cause stickyness for literary interpretation. Cases of lying narration atomic number 18 also offered in the cinema. What is gainsay for Stam, is to find a agency to reproduce in a way all the ambiguity and readerly decipherment of the text, on a cinematic register.Self-obsessed neurotic narrators like Humb ert Humbert in Lolita, tend to be relativized by adaptation in a severe manner. While the narrator in the novel is autodiegetic, in the film he switches to homodiegetic. The problem is that the discursive power an unreliable narrator possesses is drastically reduced by film because of the multitrack nature of the film. In a novel, thither is only one track available and that is the verbal track, which is of course controlled by the narrator.In a film though, even if the narrator can partially control the verbal track by the use of voice-over or character dialogue, that same control remains subject to a outstanding bill of constraints such as the presence of other characters, voices, objects etc. While its not impossible to portrait an unreliable first-person narration in the cinema, all the problems mentioned above lead us to conceive that it would be extremely difficult and could only be succeeded by relentless subjectification in almost all the cinematic registers.Point of View This chapter of The Theory and Practice of Adaptation tries to answer questions concerning focus and point of glance which is a term that has been regarded as problematic. Point of view can either refer to an ideological orientation, an emotional stance or even to the angle from which a story is told. Unlike literature, this term in cinema is eer literal because of the television camera set-ups that ar required. Nevertheless, it can be figurative too at the same time, through the use of cinematic means.For Stam, an authorial point of view can be sensed in films. He explains that the films multitrack and multiform nature are to be seriously considered if we destiny to understand the cinematic point of view since each and every filmic track and procedure can convey one. Next, Stam takes interest in the relationship between the knowledge of the character and that of the narrator, something that has been referred to as focalization. According to Todorov, three were the possibilit ies narrators could either know more, less or as lots as the characters.Of course, one might argue that quantity is not always the case, since the deuce can also know differently. Gennete chooses to make a distinction between narration (who utters or tells) and focalization (who come acrosss) and then separates this outlive term into three sub-terms. Zero focalization refers to narrators who know much more than the rest of the characters. Internal focalization occurs when events are filtered through a character and is sub divided up into frozen(p) for when it is limited to a single character or variable for when its passed from character to character.Finally, external focalization takes place when the reader cannot access to point of view and motivations and can only be a simple observer of external behavior. Andre Goudrault and Francois Jost argued that the term of focalization can create problems when it comes to the visual intermediate of cinema since the sound film has the ability to show what a character overtakes and say what he thinks at the same time. They proposed a separation of these 2 functions by the use of ii terms. The first term is ocularization and refers to the relation of what the camera shows and what the character is supposed to be seeing. Focalization was used by the two narratologists to characterize the cognitive point of view adopted by the story. Stam also examines how point of view intersects with style. Adaptations have been considered less modernist than their sources but that is not the case with adaptations like the one of Virginia Woolfs Orlando by Sally throwster in 1992 or Bunuels That Obscure Object of Desire, where, in the contrary, the novels modernism is amplified. The author chooses to conclude this chapter not by state questions, but rather by asking them.He is interested in the manipulation of temporality and wonders if instances of Genettes pause take place in the novel and the adaptation, as montage sequenc es or as static close shots without action. He mentions Cristian Metzs eight syntagmatic types in the cinema (one-shot sequence or autonomous shot, line of latitude syntagma, bracket syntagma, descriptive syntagma, alterning syntagma, scence, episodic sequence, ordinary sequence) and asks how these types are useful and wonders about the existence of any correlations with temporality in film and their nature.He questions the role of description in novel and film and wants to know if there is a possibility of pure (unnarrativized) description in any of these two mediums and finally sets the question of stylistic equivalences across them. MEMENTO pic Memento is a film directed by Christopher Nolan and released in the year 2000. He wrote the story with his brother Jonathan Nolan, based on a short story produce by Jonathan called Memento Mori. The whole film can be divided in 22 colored and 22 black and uninfected sequences incontrovertible the opening sequence which runs backward an d is shown in slow motion.In order to understand the analysis of the sequence chosen (1. 22. 58 1. 48. 43) a brief opening to the movies plot is necessary Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) is a former indemnity investigator whose married woman was eliminateed during an assault in their billet. During that assault he bear on a head trauma and now suffers from a memory disfunction which makes him unable to create any new memories after the incident. He remembers of everything prior the incident though like who he is, what his job was and everything about his tone with his married woman.But each time he wakes up he cant remember where he is, why he is there or what he did and who he met the day before. He cannot trust anyone and his whole life is one big everlasting puzzle solving. There is only one thing that motivates him and that is to hunt down and kill his wife murderer. To collect the facts needed to punish his wife he has developed a strategy that consists of taking polaroid contrives of everyone he meets, of the place he lives in and so on while also getting tattooed on his body every important information he comes across. picLeonards tattooed body In his investigation he is assisted by two persons, Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) and Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss). The viewing audience of Memento find out pretty immediate that a mentally ill character like the one of Leonard Shelby is an extremely unreliable narrator. Nollan gives us hints about the unreliability of human memory . picpic We can also see Leonard being manipulated by others and making mistakes while salt away information on his wifes murderer. picpic We can see here that he mistakes the I of the license plate for a 1What is very raise in the strike back story In addition to Leonards revenge story is the embedded story of Sammy Jankis and his wife which we will encounter in the sequence I have chosen to analyze. pic EXTRACT ANALYSIS design The selected movie extract (1. 22. 58 1. 48. 43) is a sequence shot in Scope like the entire film is and in black and sportsmanlike as half of the movies sequences are. Those sequences were shot that way in order to be separated from the colored ones. Black and white sequences are shown in a chronologically forward order whilst the colored ones are shown backwards and dont have a linear narrative structure.In this specific extract, Leonard Shelby narrates part of Sammy Jankiss story, probably the most important one because it describes how he killed his wife by giving her an overdose of insulin. As it is explained to the viewers earlier in the film, Sammy suffers of the same condition as Leonard. Leonard investigated his case when he was still healthy and working for the amends company and refused Sammys insurance claim by proving it was a psychological condition rather than a physical one. Relation between Stams text and the Memento sequenceStam refers in his chapter Narrators in Film and Novel to the case of embedded narration an d how embedded narratives generate hypodiegesis. Hypodiegesis occurs when a substory is embedded within stories. In the case of this extract, the story is the one of Leonards hunting down his wifes orca while dealing with his condition , and the substory , the one of Sammy Jankiss condition and how his wife tries to deal with it. In the sequence Leonard is speaking on the phone with individual yet unknown to the viewers who is supposed to be a constabulary officer.During their conversation, Lenny talks about his condition while comparing it to Sammys and decides to speak about what happened to him and his wife. This is when hypodiegesis occurs. pic Once this embedded narrative begins we are the scene is no longer situated in the same place and the characters have changed. As Leonard narrates the camera serves as a visual manifestation of what he is describing. We see him in a room with Sammys wife crying plainly after we hear him speaking about how she came to see him in his off ice.Then he talks about how, persuaded he could snap out of this mental condition, she wander him through his final exam. picpic Then we are transported back to the Jankiss home where Leonard does not describe the fact that she tricks her husband into giving her three in series(p) insulin shots (as it is shown) but only talks about how she found a way to test him hoping she would call his bluff. As Stam says a voice over narration gradually gives way to direct monstration, yet we somehow take what is monstrated to rise from the initial narrative.What makes this substory so interesting is the fact that the story of Sammy Jankis may in fact be the story of Leonard Shelby. Perhaps this whole parallel story wants to show the viewer that Leonards own wife was killed not by a murderer but by Leonard himself. There are several(prenominal) hints that point out the lack of the characters reliability and lead us to conclude that his substory is a fabrication of his own subconscious. Relia bility is actually a very interesting issue for Stam and in this case our narrator belongs to those who are almost completely suspect as they are called in Stams text.There are three important moments in the sequence that help us understand Leonards unreliability. The first one is when he takes in his hands a picture of himself (which later we learn it was took the moment he killed his wifes murderer) and turns it the other way so that he doesnt see it anymore. At the same time he says Its completely fucked because nobody believes you, its amazing what a little brain disability will do for your credibility. I guess its some kind of poetic justice for not believing Sammy. picpic The fact that he hides the picture shows the viewers that he does not want to see it.He does not want to see himself while he tells Sammys story, because he wants to forget that it is actually his story. He is lying to himself and wants to believe his lies. His words have also great meaning. He says that nob ody believes him and that he has no credibility. He is again talking about himself because it is he that does not believe himself and he knows that he is not credible. His subconscious is projected to the viewers, we can see how deep inside he knows he is lying and he is fighting to believe these lies.As he says he didnt believe Sammy, or, maybe he didnt believe himself? The irregular hint is given to the spectators when he looks at one of his tattoos which is remember Sammy Jankis and at the same time says on the phone Like Sammy. What if Id done something like Sammy? . pic In this case, a doubt is raised, both in our minds and in Leonards mind. What if he had done something like Sammy? What if he had killed his wife without knowing it? The ending will show that he actually did kill his wife exactly how Sammy is supposed to have.The tattoo reminds him of Sammy, he needs that tattoo, he needs to be reminded of Sammy, otherwise there would be no meaning for him to continue on leavin g. He needs to mask the facts in such a way so that hell have a single-valued function to go on. Remembering Sammy Jankis means to forget about what he did. The last moment that points out to Leonards lack of reliability is the most visual one. While Leonard describes how Sammy was put in a home after the cultivation of his wife, we can see Sammy sitting in a lead at the exact home. The camera starts to zoom in on him, when, at a certain point, a doctor passes in front of him and we have a cut.When the action starts again, the doctor gets out of the way and we can get a glimpse (for exactly 2 frames) of Leonard sitting in that same chair instead of Sammy, just before the scene ends. It is obvious that Nolan wants the viewers to see that Sammy and Leonard are the same person and that Leonard is actually describing his own story. picpic Conclusion Memento is a film with unique narrative structure. The story behind it is rather simple but the narrative structure is extremely elabor ate and constant attention from its spectators is needed.The lack of short memory of the protagonist and and the chaos undermentioned him and his attempts to put together the puzzle of his wifes murder are linked to whole storytelling in a very intelligent way. The fact that the main plots narrative structure is backwards and that its conclusion is revealed in the opening sequence, along with the mix of color and black and white sequences, can sometimes confuse the spectators as much as the main character. The spectators are this way driven to identify themselves in Leonard, sharing with him the confusion and the feelings of each revelation, as well as those of the disappointing truth.