Elements of Fiction - Narrator / Narrative Voice and Other Terms

Paradox

A statement that contradicts itself and still seems true somehow.

Present information

Dialogue can be used as an alternative to exposition; instead of being fed dry facts, the reader will enjoy learning the background of the story.

Develop character

Dialogue can reveal the personality, age, intelligence, and experience of a character.

Motifs

Recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and to inform the major themes of the story.

Stock

"Borrowed" personage or archetype (ex. Western hero in white hat; old, longed-nosed, straggly-haired hag as evil witch). Closely related to stereotype. ...

Complication

"Exciting" Force is what fuels the rising action and may incite later events. Longs works may have several "complications".

Slant Rhyme

-Also called "half rhyme" -Rhyme in which either the vowels or the consonants of stressed syllables are identical.

Dynamic

A developing character, usually at the center of the action, who changes or grows to a new awareness of life (the human condition).

Stereotype

A character so little individualized as to show only qualities of an occupation, or national, ethnic, or other group to which s/he belongs (ex Irishman, Sicilian, soldier, nerd, dumb blonde, obnoxious brat, silly teenager).

Sentimentality

A cheap way of trying to create emotion with the reader, sentimentality employs stock response - an emotion that has its source outside of the story (babies, puppies, young love, patriotism...), a "sweet" view of life, and other techniques to avoid having to actually create emotion-inducing situations in the story. Instead, good writer draws forth emotion by producing a character in a situation that deserves the reader's sympathy and showing enough about the character and the situation to make either/both real and convincing.

Round

A complex, fully-developed character, usually prone to change.

Metaphor

A figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable. (A comparison being made without the words "like" or as".)

Simile

A figure of speech involving the comparison of one thing with another thing of a different kind, used to make a description more emphatic or vivid. (A comparison being made with the words "like" or as".)

Foreshadowing

A literary device in which the outcome of the struggle or conflict is anticipated or hinted at by such elements as speeches or actions of characters or by symbols in the story.

Allegory

A literary work in which the symbols, characters, and events come to represent, in a somewhat point-to-point fashion, a different metaphysical, political, or social situation.

Poeticizing

A narrator's use of immoderately heightened and distended language to accomplish particular effects.

Fantasy

A nonrealistic story that transcends the bounds of known reality, the fantasy requires the reader's "willing suspension of belief."

Individual

A more eccentric and unusual representation of character.

Flat

A one-dimensional character, typically not central to the story.

Internal Rhyme

A rhyme involving a word in the middle of a line and another at the end of the line or in the middle of the next. Ex: I went to town to buy a gown. Ex: I see a red boat that has a red flag. / Just like my red coat and my little red pail. Ex: The snowflakes are dancing, floating, and falling.

Flashback

A scene inserted into a film, novel, story, or play to show events that occurred at an earlier time; this technique is used to complement the events in the "present" of the story.

Foil

A secondary character serving as a backdrop (mirror) for a more important character. Typically, the foil is rather ordinary and static so that the unusual qualities of the primary character will be more striking in contrast. Often this same character is both confidant and foil.

Eye Rhyme

A similarity between words in spelling but not in pronunciation. Ex: Move and love

Limited Omniscient

A story told in the third person in which the narrative voice is associated with a major or minor character who is not able to "see/know" all, may only be able to relate the thoughts of one or some characters but not others, may not know what happened "off stage" or in the past.

Omniscient

A story told in the third person; the narrator's knowledge, control, and prerogatives are unlimited, allowing "wuthorial" subjectivity.

Sub-plots

A story within a story... Sub-plots are the little things going on in the background that often make the main plot more interesting by giving the reader more to think about. These little events are especially effective when they tie in seamlessly with the main plot.

Irony

A term with a range of meanings, all of them involving some sort of discrepancy or incongruity. It should not be confused with sarcasm which is simply language designed to insult or to cause emotional pain. Irony is used to suggest the difference between appearance and reality, between expectation and fulfillment, the complexity of experience, to furnish indirectly an evaluation of the author's material, and at the same time to achieve compression. (A discrepancy between what is real and what is perceived as real. When what appears, on the surface, to be the case, differs radically from what is actually the case.)

Dramatic/Indirect Presentation

Actions "show" the kind of person the character is.

Allegory #2

An allegorical story has a second meaning beneath the surface, endowing a cluster of characters, objects, or events with added significance; often the pattern relates each literal item to a corresponding abstract idea or moral principal. The creation of an allegorical pattern of meaning enables an author to achieve power through economy. Few works of literature are allegories.

Diversion

Any episode prior to the climax that does not contribute directly to the rising action or add to the suspense (example: comic relief in tragedy).

Fiction

Any imaginative re-creation of life in prose narrative form.

Develop conflict

Arguing characters create conflict; dialogue can also build tension.

Language

Can be abstract or concrete.

Dialogue

Can be either more dialogue than description, or dialogue limited to certain characters, or simply lacking dialogue altogether.

Sentence Structure

Can be simple or complex.

Universal

Characters with problems and traits common to all humanity.

Suspense

Critical investigation will ask the more important question "Why?" rather than "What?" Suspense is most often produced either by mystery or by dilemma.

Private (Personal)

Definable only within the context of the story in which it appears. For example, early in T. S. Eliot's long poem The Waste Land, the narrative voice issues, "Come in under the shadow of the rock." In Eliot's poem, the red rock is symbolic of the spiritual shelter of the Anglican Church, although this is not a "received" symbol traditional to any particular culture.

Expository/Direct Presentation

Described and/or "explained" by the narrator.

Happy ending

Everything ends well and all is resolved.

Dénouement

Falling Action

Memoir of Observer Narration

First person, narrator is observer rather than main participant; narrator can be confident, eyewitness or "chorus". This narrator can be reliable or unreliable.

Subjective Narration

First person, narrator seems unreliable, tries to get readers to share his/her side or to assume values or view not usually presumed by the reader.

Detached Autobiography

First person, reliable narrator that guides the reader. Narrator is main character, often reflecting on a past "self" - sometimes an adult recounting an event from childhood. When it is the latter, it is important to notice "how" the adult voice affects the child's story.

Interior Monologue

First-person, train of thought "overheard" by the reader, or sometimes "overheard" and reported by an omniscient narrator; other times it occurs as stream of consciousness.

The Hook

How much time do you give a story to capture your undivided attention? A chapter? A page? A paragraph? How long will it take you to capture your readers' attention? The hook is what gets people interested in what you have to say. Hooks are well-placed at the beginning but can be found elsewhere in the plotting as well.

Exposition / Rising Action

How readers learn details previous to the story's beginning, and then continues toward the climax of the story.

Visual

Imagery of sight.

Olfactory

Imagery of smell.

Aural

Imagery of sound.

Gustatory

Imagery of taste.

Tactile

Imagery of touch.

Conflict

In fiction, this is the opposition of forces or characters; this "friction" usually fuels the action.

Artistic Unity

Is essential to a good, effective, successful story. Nothing in the story is irrelevant, superfluous; that is, the story contains no detail or element that does not contribute to the meaning. Nothing occurs that "flies in the face" of the "reality" of the story and/or the characters. The work should have a sense of "natural inevitability" with its specific set of characters and the initial or core situation.

Climax #2

Like conflict, climax is an essential part of storytelling. The climax normally occurs right before the dénouement or final resolution of the main conflict in the plot. At this peak in a story's plot, the interest of readers is most piqued so that they race through the falling action to discover the conclusion.

Tragic or Unhappy ending

Many events in life do not end pleasantly, so literary fiction that emulates life is more apt to have an unhappy conclusion, forcing the reader to contemplate the complexities of life.

Two-dimensional

May be used as vessels to carry out the plot.

Order

Narrative events may be related in different orders: for example, Chronological/Linear (natural order); in media res (in the middle of things); or begin in the present and return to the past ...

Open-ended/Lack of Resolution/Partial Resolution/Indeterminate

No definitive ending or resolution occurs, leaving the reader to ponder the issued raised by the story.

Dramatic irony

Occurs when a reader perceives something that a character or narrator in a work of literature does not know. It is also the contrast between what a character or narrator says and what a reader knows to be true. (When the reader knows something that a character or characters do not. A literary technique by which the full significance of a character's words or author's are clear to the audience or reader although unknown to the character.)

Animal characters

Personified create particular effects, especially when the animal characters contain connotative metaphoric connects to human traits, i.e., fox = sly, weasel = duplicity, swan = elegance.

Deus ex Machina

Plot device in which someone or something appears "out of the blue" to help a character to overcome a seemingly insoluble difficulty.

Characterization

Process by which fictional characters are presented/developed.

Imagery

Sensory details such as similes, metaphors, onomatopoeia in a work .

Syntax

Sentence patterns of language - grammatical and ungrammatical arrangements of words.

Framed Narrative

Some narratives, particularly collections of narratives, involve a frame narrative that explains the genesis of, and/or gives a perspective on, the main narrative or narratives that follow. Some stories have multiple narrative frames that draw the reader away from the initial, outer setting (and the "reality" of the story) through a narrative maze to the core events that are far/deeply removed from the first narrative encounter.

Conflict #2

Some plot elements are optional. Conflict is not. Without conflict, there is no purpose. Characters want something they do not have, or they are looking for ways to change their current reality, or they must overcome challenges of some kind, however great or minute. Were someone to write a story without conflict and the product would be a character sketch or a character study.

Symbols

Symbols are concrete objects/images that stand for abstract subjects. The objects and images have meanings of their own but may be ascribed subjective connotations such as heart = love, skull & crossbones = poison, color green = envy; light bulb = idea, seasons = times in a lifespan.

Where

The "physical" environment where the story takes place (the description of this environment may suggest its importance to other aspects of the fiction such as theme and "message."

Personification

The attribution of a personal nature or human characteristics to something nonhuman, or the representation of an abstract quality in human form.

Character development

The change that a character undergoes from the beginning of a story to the end. The importance of a character to the story determines how fully the character is developed.

"Confident" for confidant

The character in whom another character (usually the protagonist) confides, much like Watson is confidante to Sherlock and Tonto is confidante to the Lone Ranger.

Antagonist

The character with whom the protagonist is engaged in a struggle.

Anthropomorphic characterization

The characterization of animals, inanimate objects, or natural phenomena as people. Skilled authors can use this to create fantasy even from stuffed toys (Winnie-the Pooh). The characterizing of inanimate objects from tiny soldiers to trees and so on has many effects in stories - however, sometimes a bird is just a bird, a cigar is just a smoke, and water is simply water.

Third Person Narrator

The classic narrative point of view through which a disembodied narrative voice knows everything, recounts the events, introduces the characters, reports dialogue and thoughs, and all details.

Dialogue #2

The direct (quoted) "verbal" exchanges between characters.

Situational irony

The discrepancy between appearance and reality, or between expectation and fulfillment, or between what is and what would seem appropriate. (When what happens is the opposite of what is expected. A state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result.)

Atmosphere (Mood)

The dominant emotion/feeling that pervades a story. It is less physical and more symbolic, associative, and suggestive than setting, but often akin to the setting.

Established (General)

The meaning of an established symbol is derived from outside the context of the story, from "received association," i.e., symbolism is agreed upon "universally" (artificially) by culture, religion, tribe, kinship, etc. For example, a journey = life; water = rebirth/new beginning; lion = courage.

Character

The mental, emotional, and social qualities to distinguish one entity from another (people, animals, spirits, automatons, pieces of furniture, and other animated objects).

Climax

The moment in the story at which a crisis reaches its highest intensity and its potential resolution, the turning point.

Editorializing

The narrator's commenting on the story in order to instruct the reader how to feel about or respond to a character, an event, and/or a situation in the story s/he is relating.

Alliteration

The occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent of closely connected words.

Objective or Dramatic

The opposite of the omniscient; displays an objectivity; compared to a roving camera with sound. very little of the past or the future is given; the story is set in the present. It has the most speed and the most action; it relies heavily on external action and dialogue, and it offers no opportunities for interpretation by the narrator.

Narrative Point of View

The perspective form which the events in the story are observed and recounted.

Protagonist

The principle figure in the story.

Assonance

The repetition of the sound of a vowel or diphthong in non-rhyming stressed syllables near enough to each other for the echo to be discernible. (Vowel sounds are the same.) Ex: Penitence and reticence.

First Person

The story is told from the first person "I" personal point-of-view, usually that of the main character.

Theme

The theme (1) can be a revelation of human character; (2) may be stated briefly or at great length; but (3) is not the "moral" of the story.

Local Color

The use of regional details to add interest and (sometimes) meaning to the story. Use of Local Color may include description of a specific locale, a manner of dress, customs, speech patterns (dialect or accent), and slang expressions. Critical thinkers will determine if these details are just a decorative motif or if these details reflect or enhance a theme, add to the meaning, or serve as a key to some aspect of the narrative or characters.

Break up narrative

The writer can use dialogue to balance out the other elements of fiction such as description.

Back-story

There is more to every story than what we actually read. The characters each have a past and there are usually important events that have taken place prior to the story itself, and sometimes the past will drive the action in the present. This is back-story, also known as what-happened-before-this-story-took place.

Static

These can be either round or flat characters, but they do not change during the story. Folktales, fairytales, and other types use static and flat characters whose actions are predictable, so the reader is free to concentrate on the action and theme as each moves toward an often times universal discovery.

When

Time includes all of its dimensions.* What was going on at that time? What, if any, importance has the period and/or time-span of events with regard to the themes, motifs, characterizations, atmosphere, tone, etc.?

Resolution

Type of Conclusion/Ending

Advance the plot

What characters discuss can ultimately change the course of the story.

Verbal irony

What is said is actually the opposite of what is meant/intended. Verbal irony occurs when a narrator or character says one thing and means something else.

End Rhyme

When a poem has lines ending with words that sound the same.

Regionalism

When the description of a region becomes an intrinsic and necessary part of the work, the relationship of the region to the action is characteristic of Regional Literature.

Diction

Word choice. Can be formal or informal.