This document provides a summary of a lecture about analyzing narratives and how they are structured. It discusses several key elements of narrative analysis, including who is speaking in the narrative, to whom they are speaking, when they are speaking, and in what language. It also examines ideas like unreliable narration, dialogue versus monologue, and focalization, or who sees the events in the narrative. The document aims to outline some basic formal distinctions between narratives and how they can be analyzed through studying elements like points of view, voices, and perspectives represented.

1. Lecture 10: Who’s
Speaking, and What
Can They Say?
PATRICK MOONEY, M.A.
ENGLISH 10, SUMMER SESSION A
7 JULY 2105

2. Theory, reading, culture
“He was already telling me about the very important book
—with that smug look I know so well in a man holding
forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own
authority.” (Solnit 2)
“I like incidents of that sort, when forces that are usually so
sneaky and hard to point out slither out of the grass and
are as obvious as, say, an anaconda that’s eaten a cow or
an elephant turd on the carpet.” (3)
“Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or
not they know what they’re talking about. Some men.” (3)

3. “
”
[…] let me just say that my life is well-sprinkled
with lovely men, with a long succession of
editors who have, since I was young, listened
and encouraged and published me, with my
infinitely generous younger brother, with
splendid friends. […] Still, there are these other
men, too.” (3)
But men have agency, too

4. (Some reminders from Foucault)
“we all know the rules of exclusion. The most obvious and
familiar of these concerns what is prohibited. We know
perfectly well that we are not free to say just anything, that we
cannot simply speak of anything, when we like or where we
like; not just anyone, finally, may speak of just anything.” (216)
“We have three types of prohibition, covering objects, ritual
with its surrounding circumstances, the privileged or exclusive
right to speak of a particular subject; these prohibitions
interrelate, reinforce and complement each other, forming a
complex web, continually subject to modification.” (216)

5. (And a quick look at Gordimer)
“His [Sonny’s] community had a certain kind of
communication with the real blacks, as it did with
the town through the Saturday dispensation; but
rather different. Not defined—and it was this lack
of definition in itself that was never to be
questioned, but observed like a taboo, something
which no-one, while following, could ever admit
to.” (18; ch. 2)

6. (But back to Solnit)
“I’ve learned that a certain amount of self-doubt is
a good tool for correcting, understanding,
listening, and progressing—though too much is
paralyzing and total self-confidence produces
arrogant idiots, like the ones who have governed
us since 2001. There’s a happy medium between
these poles to which the genders have been
pushed, a warm equatorial belt of give and take
where we should all meet.” (4)

7. “Credibility is a basic survival tool. […] Violence is one way
to silence people, to deny their voice and their credibility,
to assert your right to control over their right to exist.” (4)
“On two occasions around that time, I objected to the
behavior or a man only to be told that the incidents hadn’t
happened at all as I said, that I was subjective, delusional,
overwrought, dishonest—in a nutshell, female.” (5)
“But explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of
obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be
filled with their wisdom and knowledge.” (6)

8. “ […] some very funny letters to this site. None was
more astonishing than the one from the
Indianapolis man who wrote in to tell me that he
had ‘never personally or professionally
shortchanged a woman’ and went on to berate
me for not hanging out with ‘more regular guys
or at least do a little homework first,’ gave me
some advice about how to run my life, and then
commented on my ‘feelings of inferiority.’ He
thought that being patronized was an experience
a woman chooses to, or could choose not to
have—and so the fault was all mine.” (2)

9. “Cultural centrality for narrative”*
“Frank Kermode notes that when we say a ticking clock goes
‘tick-tock,’ we give the noise a fictional structure, differentiating
between two physically identical sounds, to make tick a
beginning and tock an end. ‘The clock’s tick-tock I take to be a
model of what we call a plot, an organization that humanizes
time by giving it form.’” (Culler 84)
“Children very early develop what one might call a basic
narrative competence: demanding stories, they know when you
are trying to cheat by stopping before reaching the end.” (84)
* Culler 83

10. “Aristotle says that plot is the most basic
feature of narrative, that good stories must
have a beginning, middle, and end, and that
they give pleasure because of the rhythm of
their ordering. But what creates the impression
that a particular series of events has this shape?
Theorists have proposed various accounts.
Essentially, though, a plot requires a
transformation, There must be an initial
situation, a change involving some sort of
reversal, and a resolution , a change involving
some sort of reversal,and a resolution that
marks the change as significant.” (85)

11. “And then there he was. What are you going to see? he said.
But I had seen.” (Gordimer 25–26; ch. 3)
“But clowns are said, Will, she [Aila] said.
“The faces they draw over their faces, the big down-turned
mouth and the little vertical points below and above the
middle of each eye, that suggest shed tears. When he sat
opposite me at supper that first night what face did he see
on me. What face did he make me wear, from then on, to
conceal him, what he was doing—my knowledge of it—from
us: my mother, my sister, myself.” (32–33; ch. 4)

12. “a shaping of events”
“From one angle, plot is a way of shaping events to make
them into a genuine story: writers and readers shape events
into a plot in their attempts to make sense of things. From
another angle, plot is what gets shaped by narratives, as they
present the same ‘story’ in different ways.” (Culler 86)
“Plot or story is the material that is presented, ordered from a
certain point of view by discourse (different versions of ‘the
same story’). But plot itself is already a shaping of events. A
plot can make a wedding the happy ending of the story or the
beginning of a story—or can make it a turn in the middle.” (86)

13. And so there are
some basic formal
distinctions
between
narratives …
●
“Who speaks”? (87)
– First-person
– Third-person
– Protagonists, participants,
observers
●
“Who speaks to whom?” (87)
– Who is the naratee? How
do we know?
●
“Who speaks when?” (88)
– During the action,
immediately?
– During the action,
interspersed with it?
– After it’s all over?

14. ●
“Who speaks what language?” (88)
– Polyphony: Mikhail Bakhtin’s description of the
fundamental characteristic of the novel form: it includes
multiple genuinely different voices as part of its
structure. (A musical metaphor.)
– Dialogue: Conversation between (two or more)
characters; a multi-dimensional and dynamic way of
creating shared meanings.
– Monologue: A speech by one character.
●
“Who speaks with what authority?” (88–89)
– Unreliable narration: The narrator gives the reader enough
information to make us doubt their interpretations of events.
– Self-conscious narration: the narrator’s acknowledgment or
awareness of the process of narration.

15. Focalization: “Who
sees?”
●
Note that the person
speaking may not be the
person whose view is
being presented.
●
Some variables:
– When? (89)
– How quickly? (90)
– How much does the
speaker know? (90)