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Narration and focalization
Stories
• Stories don’t just exist—they must be told
• The telling affects the story and how it is
experienced
Narration
• Narration is the telling of the story
• The narrator is the person (entity) who tells
the story
Storytelling levels in literature
Source: Jahn, Narratology
Narration in audiovisual texts
• However, in audiovisual content the concept
of narration is more problematic than in
literature
• There may be no single narrator
– Some say there is no narrator at all
– Others say that the ‘auteur’ is the narrator
(usually the director)
• Jahn: “Filmic Composition Device” [FCD]
Narration in film
An important piece of vocabulary
• The fictional world within which the
characters live and act is know as the ‘diegesis’
Narration
• Narration can come from ‘within’ the fictional
world (“homodiegetic”) or ‘outside’ the
fictional world (“heterodiegetic”)
• Narration can be very obvious (“overt”) or
may be hard to detect (“covert”)
• The narrator may take the viewpoint of a
character, may present the views of several
characters or may approach the story from a
godlike view (“omniscience”)
Homodiegetic narrative
• The homodiegetic narrative is delivered by a
story character—someone actively involved in
the narrative. Usually, but not always, she
uses the first-person pronoun in her address.
She may be the protagonist or just a bit player,
but she is somehow affecting or affected by
the actions going on in the story.
• The Wonder Years
• Inside Man
• Desperate Housewives
Homodiegetic narrator
• The author/auteur must decide which
character will narrate.
• The perspective of the narrator influences
what the audience member will see, hear and
know about the plot, other characters, etc.
– Minor characters may have very limited
knowledge
• The nature of the narrator will also affect the
tone and emotional implications of the
narrative
Limitations of homodiegetic
narration
• “she is subject to 'ordinary human limitations'
. . . she is restricted to a personal and
subjective point of view; she has no direct
access to (or authority on) events she did not
witness in person; she can't be in two places
at the same time . . . and she has no way of
knowing for certain what went on in the
minds of other characters.”
• Jahn, Narratology
Homodiegetic narrators
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The Lovely Bones
Atonement
Apocalypse Now
Malcolm in the Middle
Fight Club
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Rashomon
Goodfellas
The Usual Suspects
Apocalypse Now
A Clockwork Orange
Displacement of time
• Homodiegetic narrators often tell a story
about things that they experienced some time
in the past
– A common form of such narration gives an
account of the narrator’s earlier life
• The Wonder Years
• Stand By Me
• Titanic
Heterodiegetic narration
• Heterodiegetic narration comes from a
narrator who is not a character in the story.
• Heterodiegetic narrators vary widely in their
knowledge and perspective. They may be
restricted to the perspective of a single
‘person’ or may have ‘omniscience’—
boundless ability to know all there is to know
about the plot, characters, setting, etc. in a
story.
Heterodiegetic narrators
• News anchors
• Documentary voiceovers
• Commercials
• Scroll in Star Wars
• VO in Lord of the Rings
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Almost all Westerns
The Lost Boys
The Client
The Graduate
The Hulk
Stranger than Fiction
Lord of the Rings
Narrator personality
• The personality and characteristics of the
narrator will affect the audience response to
the narrative
– How serious is he?
– How authoritative is he?
– How ‘normal’ is he?
• Some voices project certain traits
– VO Narrators can make a lot of money
Overtness
• How obvious (or overt) is the narration? An
overt narrator is out in the open—a focus of
the audience member’s attention. A hidden
narrator is covert.
• An overt narrator makes the telling or construction
of the story an important focus for the audience
Indicators of narration in
audiovisual media
• In film, television, videogames, etc. five main
indicators of narration are present:
• Voice over (VO) narration—an off-camera voice speaks to
the audience member
• More rarely, an onscreen narrator is present
• The point of view of the camera
• Intrusive visual effects
• Onscreen writing
• Much of the craft of traditional Hollywood style is in
making the narration covert.
Overtness
Overt narration
• News anchors
• Game show hosts
• Inside Man
• Extreme Makeover
Covert narration
• Big Bang Theory
• CSI Miami
– But note visual effects
• The Client
• A History of Violence
Point of View
• Physical point of view: the position or angle from
which the camera or a particular narrator or
character observes an event or a scene
• Mental point of view: the perspective taken by a
particular narrator or character in a story in seeing
and hearing an even or scene, reflecting on an idea,
creating a relationship between two or more things,
or remembering events or dreams
Focalization
• Focalization refers to the viewpoint from
which the story is told
– Usually the viewpoint of the narrator
• omniscient
• However, the viewpoint can be split from the
narration
– The narrator (or FCD) can tell the story from a
character’s perspective
Three major types of POV (Jahn)
• View of narrator
– Homodiegetic first-person
– Heterodiegetic omniscient
• Narrator becomes covert and presents
viewpoint of story character
– Internal focalization
Advantages of omniscience
• The viewer/reader can be made aware of things that
are unknown to the characters
– plot, characters (and what they are thinking), setting,
backstory
– The maniacal killer is right behind you, idiot!
• The position allows for evaluation of characters and
their actions
– He got what he deserved
– He knew he would get caught—that’s why he did it
Advantages of omniscience
• The story can be more ‘expansive’—it can include a
much wider set of characters, motives, actions
– While he was doing this, she was doing that, and her
friend was with her brother, etc.
Internal focalization
• The story can be told from the viewpoint of a
character even if the narrator is heterodiegetic
– The narrator ‘gets inside the head’ of that
character, often relating their perceptions, fears,
beliefs, etc. to the implied audience member.
Internal focalization
• “One of the main effects of internal
focalization is to attract attention to the mind
of the reflector-character and away from the
narrator and the process of narratorial
mediation.” (Jahn)
– The goal in this case is to draw attention to the
story and not its telling
Representing focalization
• Focalization can be represented by ‘subjective’
camerawork
• over-the-shoulder camera shots, shot-reverse shot
representations of interactions among characters, focus on
a character looking into the distance then turning to adopt
the sightline of the looker, etc.
• Things that only one character can see may be presented
to the audience
– Sixth Sense
• Internal thoughts may be represented by VO
Objective and subjective
visualization
Objective
• CSI
• Big Bang Theory
• NCIS
Subjective
• A Beautiful Mind
• Gladiator
• Lord of the Rings
• Rashomon
• Wolfen
• The Fisher King
Shifting narration and focalization
• Narration and/or focalization can shift within a
given text—perhaps between omniscient and
first-person or from one character to another.
– Commonly, narrative begins with character
narration, then it shifts to omniscient
heterodiegetic FCD
• Grey’s Anatomy
Can You Trust the Narrator?
• Sometimes narrators can’t be trusted. A
narrator whose account you cannot trust is
known as an “unreliable narrator.”
– Limited view/Limited access
– Self interest/Deception
– Personal perspective
– Mental instability
Unreliable narrators
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Rashomon
The Usual Suspects
A Clockwork Orange
The Murder of Roger
Aykroyd
• Goodfellas
• Fight Club
• Dexter
• A Beautiful Mind
Paralepsis (Jahn)
• An infraction caused by saying too much; a
narrator assuming a competence he does not
properly have; typically, a first-person narrator
(or a historiographer) narrating what
somebody else thought . . . or what happened
when he was not present.
Paralipsis (Jahn)
• An infraction caused by omitting crucial
information; saying too little; typically, an
omniscient narrator pretending "not to know"
what happened in her/his characters' minds,
or what went on at the same time in another
place, or distortively censoring a character's
thought, or generally pretending to be
restricted to ordinary human limitations.
• “Paralepsis and paralipsis are instances of
violations of Grice's (1975) famous principle of
co-operation -- the notion that speakers
(narrators) are socially obliged to follow an
established set of 'maxims': to give the right
amount of information, to speak the truth, to
speak to a purpose (tell something worth
telling), to be relevant, etc.”
• Audiences will assume narrators are following
the rules until it is demonstrated that they are
not.