hemingway
Characters’ Discourse and Narrator’s Discourse
The creation of first and secondary narratives which can be used to explain the doubling of the story in Hemingway‟s short stories is a function also of the act of narration (“narrating instance” in Genette) and of the presence of a narrator who produces them. In fact, it is exactly the presence of a narrator who produces a narrative text that makes our analysis of narrative discourse possible. Or Genette the “narrating situation is” like any other, a complex whole within which analysis, or simply description, cannot differentiate except by ripping apart a tight web of connections among the narrating act, its protagonists, its spatiotemporal determinations, its relationship to the other narrating situations involved in the same narrative, etc. The demands of exposition constrain us to this unavoidable violence simply by the fact that critical discourse, like any other discourse, cannot say everything at once. (Narrative Discourse 215)
While it is important to isolate certain aspects of the narrative, such as its temporal structure, and examine it in detail, it is also important to get a sense of the big picture within which the temporal structure functions as one of the elements of narrative discourse. Specifically we can examine the function and the nature of the narrators in Hemingway‟s short stories characterized by doubling of the story, as well as the mode of presentation of narrative information which Genette calls “narrative mood.”
In this context we can examine Hemingway’s statement, “So I left the story out” (“Art 3) regarding “The Sea Change,” as a statement not only about the doubling of the story in his short stories, but also about his role as a narrator.
This role is not easy to define—on the one hand he knows the story, and on the other he does not share it with his readers. He is omniscient in the sense that he knows more than the characters (he knows their story and its background), but his
The creation of first and secondary narratives which can be used to explain the doubling of the story in Hemingway‟s short stories is a function also of the act of narration (“narrating instance” in Genette) and of the presence of a narrator who produces them. In fact, it is exactly the presence of a narrator who produces a narrative text that makes our analysis of narrative discourse possible. Or Genette the “narrating situation is” like any other, a complex whole within which analysis, or simply description, cannot differentiate except by ripping apart a tight web of connections among the narrating act, its protagonists, its spatiotemporal determinations, its relationship to the other narrating situations involved in the same narrative, etc. The demands of exposition constrain us to this unavoidable violence simply by the fact that critical discourse, like any other discourse, cannot say everything at once. (Narrative Discourse 215)
While it is important to isolate certain aspects of the narrative, such as its temporal structure, and examine it in detail, it is also important to get a sense of the big picture within which the temporal structure functions as one of the elements of narrative discourse. Specifically we can examine the function and the nature of the narrators in Hemingway‟s short stories characterized by doubling of the story, as well as the mode of presentation of narrative information which Genette calls “narrative mood.”
In this context we can examine Hemingway’s statement, “So I left the story out” (“Art 3) regarding “The Sea Change,” as a statement not only about the doubling of the story in his short stories, but also about his role as a narrator.
This role is not easy to define—on the one hand he knows the story, and on the other he does not share it with his readers. He is omniscient in the sense that he knows more than the characters (he knows their story and its background), but his