Customer Reviews

Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method

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This book should be required reading for anyone who wants to look seriously at narrative theory. Genette's analysis of the construction of time in narrative discourse is the still the model for theorists writing since then. Such categories as order, frequency, and duration in the narrative presentation of story-time show how narrative decisions on the part of authors can have dramatically different rhetorical effects. Genette views these narrative strategies as a form of rhetorical figuration and gives them terms drawn from classical rhetoric (e.g., "prolepsis" for a flashing forward, "analepsis" for a flashback). Genette's work is one of the clearest of all the French theorists of the 1970s and 1980s who became popular among literary critics and theorists in the US. His work is easily the most empirical of his academic geration of French theorists and perhaps the most likely to be useful in generations to come.

I have had 5 books published (nonfiction) and have been working on a novel. I wish I had studied this book when I was a student. It is superb--essential, in my opinion, for anyone writing fiction. It is not, however, an easy read.

Besides being a writer, I am also a doctor and a commercial aircraft pilot. This book reminds me of getting an instrument rating, when "the lights come on" in understanding aviation. For the first time, I feel that I truly understand the nature of narrative.