I hope you enjoyed Thursday’s holiday and have some good plans for Monday’s holiday as well. Remember that since Monday is a holiday, we do not have a discussion due Sunday night. Since Wednesday follows a Monday schedule, you’ll contribute to our online discussion by Tuesday night.
For this discussion, I want us to start thinking about our first formal assignment, Project #1. Read through the instructions and start brainstorming about what you might want to work on. Not sure yet? That’s fine, too. We haven’t finished reading all of the stories you might want to focus on. If you have questions, thoughts, or comments about the assignment, please use the commenting space on that page so we can read and reply to each other there. I am happy to revise the language of the assignment to make it clearer and more understandable.
Since a major aspect of this project is thinking about a story’s narrator and what affect the type of narrator has on the way we experience the story, let’s think about the narrator in “Young Goodman Brown” as well as the other stories we’ve read so far. If we look back at our list of different types of narrators, what do they offer us as readers as we enter and live in a given story world? Think about the definitions of the terms to help you understand what the narrator does and can’t do in a given story:
- first-person narrator
- second-person narrator
- third-person narrator
- third-person limited
- third-person omniscient
- third-person objective
I’d like us to add a few other terms to our list. They come from narratology, the study of narrative, and sound more technical than these other terms:
A narrative is heterodiegetic if the narrator is not a protagonist or if the narrator exists in a different sphere than the protagonist. Third-person narratives are most commonly associated with this term, but other narratives can be, such as you-narratives, they-narratives, and one-narratives.
A homodiegetic narrative is equivalent to a first-person narrative. If the narrator is the main protagonist, such as in an autobiography, that is called an autodiegetic narrative. That style of narration is different from a peripheral first-person narrator, in which a first-person narrator is a minor character. First-person narrators, whether homodiegetic or autodiegetic, are inherently limited in their perspective and are potentially untrustworthy.
These definitions come from Monika Fludernik’s An Introduction to Narratology, 2009, and draw on the work of Gerard Genette and Franz K. Stanzel.
To make them a little clearer, here are the building blocks of those words: diegesis refers to the story world. Hetero- means different; homo- means same; auto- means self. Therefore, we have someone different than the story world telling a heterodiegetic narrative, someone in the same story world telling a homodiegetic narrative, and even more specific than that, we can say that when the narrator in the story world is the protagonist, or main character, we have an autodiegetic narrative.
Getting back to our discussion here, what kind of narrator do we find in “Young Goodman Brown,” and what effect does that have on our experience in reading the story? What other narrative styles have we encountered in the other stories we have read, and how did those affect our reading experiences?
