International Journal of Multidisciplinary Consortium
Volume – 2 | Issue – 2 | 2015
[email protected]| http://ijmc.rtmonline.in | ISSN
2349-073X
NARRATIVES AND TYPES OF NARRATORS
ILLUSTRATED USING O’ HENRY’S SHORT STORIES
by
BSL Shilpa | Assistant Professor | Maharaja Agrasen Institute of Management Studies
ABSTRACT
Narratives are the most primary form of communication. There are narratives everywhere
and with everybody. This paper aims to define the meaning of narratives and also look at
the different kinds of narrators through which a narrative can be told. This paper also
defines and explores the different points of view as employed by O’ Henry to tell his
stories.
KEYWORDS: Narratives, Narrators, Point of View, First Person Narrator, Second Person
Narrator, Third Person Narrator, O’ Henry, short stories.
INTRODUCTION
Narratives are one of the oldest forms of communication. It is omnipresent and has existed
long before it got its name. Every child is introduced to narratives early in life. These
narratives that come to us either in the form of grandma’s tales or fairy tales or today’s
cartoons have some form of a narrative or the other. This fact that narratives abound us, in
every nook and corner of the world is beautifully brought out by Roland Barthes:
The narratives of the world are numberless. Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious
variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances – as though any
material were fit to receive man’s stories. Able to be carried by articulated language,
spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these
substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy,
drama, comedy, mime, painting, stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news item,
conversation. Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present
in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind
and there nowhere is nor have been a people without narrative. All classes, all human
groups, have their narratives, enjoyment of which is very often shared by men with
different, even opposing, cultural backgrounds. Caring nothing for the division between
good and bad literature, narrative is international, trans-historical, trans-cultural: it is
simply there, like life itself (Barthes 237-272).
A Narrative is a technical word for a story. Etymologically the word narrative comes from
the Latin word “narrare” which means to recount. Apart from the term ‘narrative’ meaning
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International Journal of Multidisciplinary Consortium
Volume – 2 | Issue – 2 | 2015
[email protected]| http://ijmc.rtmonline.in | ISSN
2349-073X
a story, it also used to refer to art of telling a story. A narrative implies the artistic manner
and all the narrative techniques such as used to make the story compelling and convincing
for the reader. It comes naturally to each one of us as we start to express ourselves using
language. When we share our experiences, feelings, emotions, observations, and thoughts
a narratives spontaneously takes shape.
The theory to study of the construction and techniques of narration was propounded by
TzvetanTodorov in 1969 which he called it as “Narratology”. The term has been defined as
“to designate a systematic study of narrative firmly anchored in the tradition of the Russian
and Czech formalism of the early twentieth century and French structuralism and semiotics
of the sixties” (Patrick 174). Gerald Prince also defines the term as “the study of form and
functioning of narrative” (Prince 184). And, he categorically clarifies that although the
term narratology is new the discipline is not.
Since the time of the emergence of narratology as a specialized subject, a lot of theory has
emerged regarding the narrative style and techniques. Patrick (1994) says, the current
boom in narrative theories has by now reached something close to epidemic proportions.
The theories pertaining to narrative that have recently mushroomed are Russian Formalist
theory of Narrative, Bakhtian or dialogical theory, Chicago School, Hermeneutic, and
Phenomenological theories.
Gerald Prince defines narrative as “the recounting (as product and process, object and act,
structure and structuration) of one or more real or fictitious events communicated by one,
two or several narrators to one, two or several narrates” (Prince 186). From this definition,
we can say that narrative is the process of recounting the events, and this process
intrinsically involves two subjects- speaker or teller and listener. But Rimmon-Kenan if of
the belief that for the recounting of events to be identified as a narrative, there should be at
least two events to make a narrative. He says “a succession of events in order to suggest
that narratives usually consist of more than one”. Adding to this concept of a narrative,
another narratology theorist, Micheal J. Toolan says, events or the change of events as
being the key to the narrative. Toolan also points out that a narrative must give “a
perceived sequence of non-randomly connected events” (Toolan 189). Todorav also agrees
with Toolan and says that transformation holds the key to narrative, and further,Todorov
goes on to define what transformation means in a narrative: transformation represents
precisely a synthesis of differences and resemblance, it links two facts without their being
able to be identified” (Todorov 56).
So from these above theories regarding the nature of narratives, we can deduce that every
narrative is a sequence of at least two events recounted by at least one narrator to at least
one narrate, and this involves an active transformation of events by the narrator. And since
it involves transformation it means that the narrator actively engages in organizing,
shaping and structuring the story for the effective delivery of the narrative. “The narrator is
the one who evaluates, who is sensitively aware, who observes” (Stanzel 99). The narrator
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International Journal of Multidisciplinary Consortium
Volume – 2 | Issue – 2 | 2015
[email protected]| http://ijmc.rtmonline.in | ISSN
2349-073X
is and the techniques that he adopts to transform and organize the various sequence of
events is called as the narrative technique. A narrative technique can be defined as
“craftsmanship”. Narrative technique that is how you choose to tell your story is not a
mere decoration, it is as important as the story – i.e. what you want to tell. The most
important narrative techniques identified are: Arrangement of events to create a plot,
point-of-view, manipulation of time, dialogue, interior monologue, kind of narrator, etc.
Novels, short stories, poems, and essays are considered to be most common forms of
narratives. And, narrative writing can be of three types: Personal, Imaginative, and
Narrative Essays. Personal writing refers to those pieces of writing where the writer talks
about his own experience; the experiences from his personal life forms the story and the
writer tries to narrate his experiences to recreate a similar experience in the mind of the
readers.
An imaginative writer writes from his imagination, creates fictional stories and narrates
them using a variety of techniques to engage, surprise, and delight the reader. O’ Henry
belongs to this category of writers and in his short stories he has used a number of
narrative techniques for effective story telling.
In a narrative essay, an author’s main objective is to present the author’s particular point of
view. In these narrative essays the central theme is to define the author’s point of view and
elaborate the same.
In this paper we look at different points of view in O’Henry narration of his short stories
for effective story telling. Point of view may be defined as the way a story gets told and
who tells it. It is the method of narration that determines the position, or angle of vision,
from which the story unfolds. The reader's access to the story is governed by the point of
view in which the story gets told. The point of view also refer to the kind of narrator who
is telling the story. In narratives there can be three types of narrators or points of view:
“homodiegetic” or the first person narrator, second person narrator, and ‘heterodiegetic’
narrator or the third person narrator.
When the story gets told by a homodiegetic or the first person narrator’s point of view, the
narrator is a character in the story. He is personal and subjective in his narration. He knows
about the characters and events only to the extent that are revealed through their action.
This point of view sacrifices the omnipresence and omniscience of the narrator as it gets
intimate and involved with the central character. The second person narrative is when the
narrator addresses the central character as “you”. It makes the readers feel as if they are
characters in the story. This is kind of rare and is not used often by the writers.
The third person point of view is the most common and the popular form of narrative point
of view. Third person narration offers a lot of freedom and choice to the narrator to narrate
his stories. A third person point of view can choose to be either subjective third person
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International Journal of Multidisciplinary Consortium
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[email protected]| http://ijmc.rtmonline.in | ISSN
2349-073X
narrator or an objective third person narrator, an omniscient third person narrator or a
limited third person narrator.
A subjective third person narrator is a narrator who describes the emotion, feelings, and
thoughts of one or more characters. And objective third person narration does not describe
any character’s emotion or thought. On the basis of the knowledge, a third person narrator
can be either an omniscient narrator or a limited narrator. An omniscient narrator – i.e. “a
god-like narrator” is someone who knows everything about his fictional universe. He has
an access to the minds and thoughts of all the characters; he knows everything – of all
events, of all people, of all places, and of all times of his fictional universe. But in limited
third person narrative – the narrator has an access to one character’s mind and thoughts
and it is limited to that one particular character and not to anybody else. O’ Henry is a
master story teller who has in his story telling used various techniques like: surprise
ending, smiles full of tears, surprise ending, etc. He is ingenious in his plot construction
and has employed a variety of points of view to tell his stories.
First Person Point of View:
O’Henry has used the first person narration in his well –known short stores: The Tale of a
Tainted Tenner and Memoirs of a Yellow Dog. In both these stories the narrator is the
central character narrating his own personal experience in the first person. In the Tale of
the Tainted Tenner, the tenner note is the narrator of his everyday experience:
I am a ten-dollar Treasury note, series of 1901. You may have seen one in a friend's hand.
On my face, in the centre, is a picture of the bison Americanus, miscalled a buffalo by fifty
or sixty millions of Americans. The heads of Capt. Lewis and Capt. Clark adorn the ends.
On my back is the graceful figure of Liberty or Ceres or Maxine Elliot standing in the
centre of the stage on a conservatory plant. My references is—or are—Section 3,588,
Revised Statutes. Ten cold, hard dollars—I don't say whether silver, gold, lead or iron—
Uncle Sam will hand you over his counter if you want to cash me in.
Similarly in the story of The Memoirs of a Yellow Dog, the dog does narrate his own
experiences:
“‘I was born a yellow pup, date, locality, pedigree and weight unknown… From a
pedigreed yellow pup to be an anonymous yellow cur looking like a cross between an
Angora Cat and a box of lemons….If men knew how Women pass the time when they are
alone they’d never marry’. (O. Henry 38-39).”
Third person point of view:
Instories like The Cop and the Anthem we can see the use of a limited third person point of
view being used to tell the story. The character which is being intimately introduced and
explored is the character of Soapy.
Soapy feels a hand laid on his arm. He looks quickly around into the broad face of a police
man.
‘What are you doin’ here?’-asked the officer.
‘Nothin’, said Soapy.
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International Journal of Multidisciplinary Consortium
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[email protected]| http://ijmc.rtmonline.in | ISSN
2349-073X
‘Then come along’ said the policeman.
‘Three months on the Island’, said the magistrate in the police court the next morning.
(O.Henry 37).
The story ends. Unexpectedly Soapy is arrested and put inside the prison.
There are many other stories like The Romance of the Busy Broker, The Last Leaf,
TheOpen Window in which O’Henry has successfully employed third person narrative.
CONCLUSION
Narratives are primary to our existence. A narrative which comes from the Latin word
“narrare” means to recount. And since this means a story that needs to be told by someone,
there are an implied intervention of a narrator who can adopt various modes and
techniques to narrate his story. He can choose to speak from various points of view, such
as the first person, second person, and third person subjective or objective or third person
omniscient or limited. O’Henry has written his short stories using both first and third
person narratives.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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2. Kenan, R. (1983. p. 55, 59–70.). Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London,
New York: : Routledge.
3. O’Neill, P. (1994). Fictions of discourse: reading narrative theory. Toranto: University
of Toranto Press, .
4. Prince, G. (1982, p 184-186). Narratology: the Form and Function of Narrative. Berlin:
Mounton Publishers.
5. Stanzel, F. ( 1986.p. 99). A Theory of Narrative. Melbourne: Press Syndicate of the
University of Cambridge .
6. Todorov, T. (1981.p.56,58.). Introduction to Poetics, Trans. Richard Howard. .
Minneapolis,: University of Minnesota Press.
7. Toolan, M. J. (1988. p.175, 189.). Narrative - A Critical Linguistics Introduction.
London and New York: Routledge.
8. Wikipedia, Free Encyclopedia .http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative. (n.d.).
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