timelets

“...the issue of closure. Probably the most difficult thing about reading narratives is to remain in a state of uncertainty. If a narrative won’t close by itself, one often tries to close it, even if it means shutting one’s eyes to some of the details and imagining others that aren’t there, underreading and overreading.

It is true, in fact, of our response to all but the shortest and simplest narrative texts.”

-- Abbott, H. Porter. “The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge Introductions to Literature).”

“Shakespeare surprised his audience with his version of the story in a way that we now cannot be surprised since we are so familiar with the tragic version. Later, in 1681, Nahum Tate rewrote the conclusion of King Lear, not only saving Cordelia’s life but also marrying her off to Edgar (who may not have been a prince but was certainly well born, unlike his wicked sibling). That version held the English stage for the next 160 years. Purists may object that this ruined the tragedy, but then Shakespeare could be said to have “ruined” Geoffrey of Monmouth’s King Leir when he decided to kill both Lear and Cordelia.”

--- Abbott, H. Porter. “The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge Introductions to Literature).”

“The difference between events and their representation is the difference between story (the event or sequence of events) and narrative discourse (how the story is conveyed). The distinction is immensely important.

...when we read a narrative, we are aware of, on the one hand, the time of reading and the order in which things are read, and, on the other hand, the time the story events are supposed to take and the order in which they are supposed to occur.
...
We can squeeze a day’s worth of events into one sentence:

When I woke up, I packed two loaded guns and a ski mask, drove to the bank, robbed it, and was back in time for dinner.

Perhaps even more interestingly we can tell the same story backwards and still convey both the timing and the chronological sequence of events:

I was back in time for dinner, having robbed the bank to which I had driven with a ski mask and two loaded guns just after my nap.

We can also make many other changes in the narrative discourse and still deal with the same story. We can, for example, change the point of view (from first to third person) and expand the narrative discourse to dwell on a moment in the middle of this series of actions and still communicate with fidelity the same order of events:

He loved that old familiar, yet always strangely new, sensation of being someone else inside his ski mask, a pistol in each hand, watching the frightened teller count out a cool million. Nothing like it to wake a guy up. Nothing like it to give him a good appetite.

“The story can take a day, a minute, a lifetime, or eons. It can be true or false, historical or fictional. But insofar as it is a story, it has its own length of time and an order of events that proceeds chronologically from the earliest to the latest. The order of events and the length of time they are understood to take in the story are often quite different from the “time and order of events in the narrative discourse.”

...we take narrative to mean all modes of conveying stories.
...
So far we have established three distinctions: narrative is the representation of events, consisting of story and narrative discourse; story is an event or sequence of events (the action); and narrative discourse is those events as represented.

...storyworld should be considered a third defining feature of narrative along with story and narrative discourse.

Abbott, H. Porter. “The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge Introductions to Literature).”