Metonimy

Handout. Unit 4

Focalization and Narration
(Rimmon-Kenan, Slomith. 1983. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. New York: Methuen)

Who sees? And who speaks? Non-verbal focalization and verbal communication
Implication in “third-person centre of consciousness” and first-person retrospective narratives.

Focalization: a. Position relative to the story
external:narrator-focalizer (narrating self, not experiencing self)
internal: character-focalizer (a position within the story)
b. Degree of persistence
fixed, variable and multiple


Narration: a. Narrative level
extradiegetic: the narrator is “above” or superior to the story he narrates.
Intradiegetic: if the narrator is a character in the story toldby the extradiegetic narrator.
b. Extent of participation in the story.
heterodiegetic: does not participate in the story he narrates.
Homodiegetic: takes part in the story.
c. Degree of perceptibility.
Maximum of covertness (impression of absence of a narrator)
Maximum of overtness (the narrator is felt as an independent sourceof information apart from the story): description of setting, identification of characters, temporal summary, definition of character, reports of what characters did not think or say, commentary.
d. Reliability
Signs of unreliability: contradictions, incongruities, outcome proving the narrator wrong, undesirable ideology, lack of experience, emotional or mental handicaps, etc.Characters are subjected to limited knowledge, personal involvement and problematic value-scheme.

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A woman stood on her back step, arms folded, waiting. Thinking? She would not have said so. She was trying to catch hold of something, or to lay it bare so that she could look and define; forsome time now she had been “trying on” ideas like so many dresses off a rack. She was letting words and phrases as worn as nursery rhymes slide around her tongue; for towards the crucial experiences customs allots certain latitudes, and they are pretty stereotyped. Ah yes, first love!… Growing up is bound to be painful!… My first child, you know … But I was in love! Marriage is a compromise… I amnot as young as I once was.
(The focalizer: the agent whose perception orients the presentation. The focalized: what the focalizer perceives).


Examples of styles of narration

1. First person retrospective narrative: focalization and narration are separated.

"You are to wait here, you boy", said Estella and disappeared and closed the door.
I took the opportunity of being alone in thecourt-yard, to look at my coarse hands and my common boots. My opinion of those accessories was not favourable. They had never troubled me before, but they troubled me now, as vulgar appendages.
(Great Expectations by Charles Dickens)


2. Third-person center of consciousness

The action was at first a little confusing to Edna, but she soon lent herself readily to the Creole´s gentle caress.She was not accustomed to an outward and spoken expression of affection, either in herself or in others.
(The Awakening by Kate Chopin)

3. Internal focalizer

Rogozhin´´s eyes glittered and a frenzied smile contorted his face. He raised his right hand and something gleamed in it. The prince did not think of checking it.


External focalizer


It must be supposed that some feeling ofsudden horror, together with the other terrible sensations of the moment, had suddenly paralysed Rogozhin and so saved the prince from the inevitably blow of the knife which already was coming at him.
(The Idiot by Dostoevsky)


Degree of perceptibility



4. Description of setting
The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees...