For further reading

means of a detailed study of Marcel Proust’s seven‑volume work, Remembrance of Things Past (1927). Genette begins by differentiating among three levels of narrative that generally have been included under the umbrella of the term narrative: story, narrative, and narration.

Story consists of the succession of events being narrated. The story thus pro‑ vides the content of the tale in the order in which events “actually hap‑ pened” to the characters, an order that does not always coincide with the order in which they are presented in the narrative.

Narrative refers to the actual words on the page, the discourse, the text itself, from which the reader constructs both story and narration. The narrative is produced by the narrator in the act of narration.

Narration refers to the act of telling the story to some audience and thereby producing the narrative. However, just as the narrator almost never cor‑ responds exactly to the author, the audience (narratee) almost never cor‑ responds exactly to the reader. For example, in The Great Gatsby, Nick describes his summer in New York to some audience (narration). In doing so, he presents a verbal discourse, which we see as the words on the page (narrative). And that discourse represents the events in which Nick appears as a character (story). Genette’s work focuses on narrative, the words on the page, but he notes that all three levels work together. That is, for the purposes of analysis, he separates aspects of a text that don’t operate separately, but he does so in order to see how they interact. And he observes that story, narrative, and narration interact by means of three qualities, which he calls tense, mood, and voice. 1. Tense is the arrangement of events in the narrative with respect to time.

That arrangement involves the notions of order, duration, and frequency. a. Order refers to the relationship between the chronology of the story (the order in which the events of the story occur in the fictional world) and the chronology of the narrative (the order in which the narrative presents those events). For example, Jay Gatsby’s story consists, in part, of the following facts in the following order: he was born to poor farm‑ ers, ran away from home, worked for Dan Cody, courted Daisy, went to war, returned, and set about acquiring a fortune and reclaiming Daisy. However, the narrative presents these events in a different order. For example, we don’t learn about his boyhood until chapter 6. b. Duration refers to the relationship between the length of time over which a given event occurs in the story and the number of pages of narrative devoted to describing it. A character’s trip to Europe may last five years in the story, but the narrative may describe it in five lines.