The Different Styles of Narration
Narrators in Film and Novel
In this chapter, Stam introduces the different styles of narrators in Novel. According to him, they vary from the first-person report-narrator to the multiple letter writers of epistolary novels, to outside-observer narrators of reflexive novels like Don Quixote and Tom Jones, to the once intimate and impersonal narrator of Madame Bovary, to the “stream-of-consciousness” narrators, on to the intensely objective/subjective obsessional narrators of Robbe-Grillet.
What interests Stam is the fact that these different styles of narration cannot be really explained by the conventional terms that exist. That happens because language and grammar are the foundation of the traditional analysis of film and literature and in this context have leaded to a terminology based on them, a terminology such as first-person narrator or third-person narrator. This kind of grammar based terminology and approach, can create confusion and obscure facts like writers shifting person and changing the relation between narrator and fiction. For Stam though, the most important issue is not the grammatical “person” as he says, but the control an author has over the intimacy and the distance and how he calibrates the access to a character’s knowledge and consciousness.
Literary narration can be complicated through film because of the verbal narration (voice over/speech of characters) and the capacity a film has to present the different appearances of the world. André Goudreault says that filmic narration is more powerful than “monstration” (showing) and “narration” (telling) and that for him, editing and other cinematic procedures consist of the evaluation and the comments of the filmic narrator. This way films tell stories (narrate) and at the same time stage them (show). Stam explains that «the film as “narrator” is not a person (the director) or a character in the fiction but, rather, the abstract instance of a superordinate agency that regulates the
In this chapter, Stam introduces the different styles of narrators in Novel. According to him, they vary from the first-person report-narrator to the multiple letter writers of epistolary novels, to outside-observer narrators of reflexive novels like Don Quixote and Tom Jones, to the once intimate and impersonal narrator of Madame Bovary, to the “stream-of-consciousness” narrators, on to the intensely objective/subjective obsessional narrators of Robbe-Grillet.
What interests Stam is the fact that these different styles of narration cannot be really explained by the conventional terms that exist. That happens because language and grammar are the foundation of the traditional analysis of film and literature and in this context have leaded to a terminology based on them, a terminology such as first-person narrator or third-person narrator. This kind of grammar based terminology and approach, can create confusion and obscure facts like writers shifting person and changing the relation between narrator and fiction. For Stam though, the most important issue is not the grammatical “person” as he says, but the control an author has over the intimacy and the distance and how he calibrates the access to a character’s knowledge and consciousness.
Literary narration can be complicated through film because of the verbal narration (voice over/speech of characters) and the capacity a film has to present the different appearances of the world. André Goudreault says that filmic narration is more powerful than “monstration” (showing) and “narration” (telling) and that for him, editing and other cinematic procedures consist of the evaluation and the comments of the filmic narrator. This way films tell stories (narrate) and at the same time stage them (show). Stam explains that «the film as “narrator” is not a person (the director) or a character in the fiction but, rather, the abstract instance of a superordinate agency that regulates the