Essay help

ergonomics

I apologise if this is in the wrong place. Feel free to move it.

I have to write a 3000 word essay on the 'narrative style' of two novels. I've been looking at the question for so long that I've completely lost the meaning of narrative style. Can someone explain it for me? I assume it's just the way the story is narrated but I'm wondering how I can write 3000 words on that!

r3nu4l

This is purely my interpretation and you should really ask the person who set the essay to clarify this for you.

Wikipedia

Wiki wrote:

In written forms, the reader hears the narrator's voice both through the choice of content and style (the author can encode voices for different emotions and situations, and the voices can either be overt or covert), and through clues that reveal the narrator's beliefs, values, and ideological stance, as well as the author's attitude towards people, events, and things. It is customary to distinguish a first-person from a third-person narrative (Gérard Genette uses the terms homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrative respectively). A homodiegetic narrator describes his or her personal and subjective experiences as a character in the story. Such a narrator cannot know anything more about what goes on in the minds of any of the other characters than is revealed through their actions, whereas a heterodiegetic narrator describes the experiences of the characters who do appear in the story and, if the story's events are seen through the eyes of a third-person internal focaliser, this is termed a figural narrative. In some stories, the author may be overtly omniscient, and both employ multiple points of view and comment directly on events as they occur.

So as you can see there are different types of narrative style, you could take two books, one written in two different narrative styles and discuss these styles, differences between them, advantages and disadvantages for the author and the reader etc.

Are you allowed to pick any novels or have you been set novels to choose?

Don't forget that you could take two similar narrative perspectives (e.g. take to homodiegetic novels) written 100 years or more apart and then compare the differences in that style based on passage of time. You are comparing like with like based on time difference.

AS I SAY, THIS IS JUST MY INTERPRETATION OF WHAT YOU PUT FORWARD TO US, I COULD BE VERY WRONG:
I haven't sat in your class listening to what your teacher/lecturer wants, you really should ask him/her for help, advice and guidance.

JumpJump

UCD, Critical Reading, Stage 1, no?

Montallie

As I understand it, narrative just refers to how the story is told. In a narrower sense it can refer to the actual style of the narrative behind scenes, that is, the tone in which the narration is spoken. But in the wider sense it refers to the path along which you drive your story. This path is made up of a mix of telling (plain narration where we have to see everything through the storyteller's eyes) and showing (where we are allowed to see the scenes as they occur, hear the dialogue ourselves).

Older novels (Victorian, etc.) tended to do a lot of telling, while the modern trend is for a lot of showing, so that we actually feel like we're there experiencing the story for ourselves. This is much more like TV or movies, so suits readers who are used to these.