# Narratology I. Story, Discourse and Order

Literature I · Introduction to Literary Theory · https://tryals.app/learn/literature-i/narratology-i-story-discourse-and-order

## Two Levels, Then Three

Every narrative can be described on at least two levels. The Formalists called them **fabula** and **sjuzhet**: the events as they happened, and the events as arranged in the telling. Genette, in *Discours du récit* (1972), splits the second and gets three:

- **histoire** (story), the events in their own chronological order;
- **récit** (narrative discourse), the text you actually read;
- **narration**: the act of telling, which itself takes place somewhere in time.

The third level is not a luxury. A first-person novel has a narrator who is telling this at some point relative to the events, and that distance is often the whole subject.

### Order

**Anachrony** is any discordance between the order of the story and the order of the narrative. Two kinds:

- **Analepsis**: narrating an event after later events have been told. (Flashback.)
- **Prolepsis**: narrating an event before it happens in the story. (Flashforward.)

Genette measures each anachrony on two axes. Its **reach** is how far back or forward it goes; its **extent** is how much story time it covers once it gets there. A novel that opens in 1940 and, in chapter two, returns to the hero's childhood in 1915 contains an analepsis of twenty-five years' reach; if that chapter covers a single afternoon, its extent is one day.

Anachrony is not a modern invention. Beginning **in medias res** is the ancient epic norm: the *Odyssey* opens in the tenth year and books IX–XII are Odysseus narrating four years of wandering to the Phaeacians, an internal analepsis, delivered by a character, covering most of the story. Horace prescribes the technique in the *Ars Poetica*.

### Why the order matters

Change the order and you change what the reader knows when. That is the whole apparatus of suspense, irony and revelation:

| Device | What the order does |
|---|---|
| Suspense | Withholds an outcome the story already contains |
| Dramatic irony | Gives the reader knowledge a character lacks |
| Revelation | Supplies an earlier event late, rewriting what preceded it |
| Foreshadowing | A partial prolepsis, enough to prime and not to tell |

A detective novel is the pure case: the story is a murder followed by an investigation, the discourse is an investigation that gradually delivers the murder. The two orders are almost exactly inverted, and that inversion *is* the genre.

### Counting disorder

You can measure how scrambled a narrative is. Number the story events, then write them in the order the discourse presents them. A narrative that tells event 3, then 1, then 2 has two pairs out of order — (3,1) and (3,2) — while the pair (1,2) is in order. Two inversions out of three possible pairs is a mildly reordered narrative; a fully reversed telling would have all three.

> **Common pitfall:** treating every flashback as an analepsis of the whole narrative. Genette distinguishes **internal** anachronies, which stay inside the story's own span, from **external** ones that reach back before the narrative began. An external analepsis fills in background; an internal one revises something the reader has already been told, and only the second can genuinely change the meaning of what came before.

## Practice questions

9 of this lesson's 12 practice questions, with answers. The full set is in the app.

### 1. Why does Genette split the Formalists' two levels into three?

A. Because he needed a distinct structural category to account for the role and reception of the reader
B. Because the act of telling is itself located in time and can be at any distance from the events
C. Because the Formalist model failed to distinguish between chronological order and anachrony
D. Because fabula and sjuzhet collapsed the distinction between internal and external narrative reach

**Answer:** B. Because the act of telling is itself located in time and can be at any distance from the events

**Why:** Because **narration**, the act of telling, happens at a determinate moment. A narrator recalling childhood from old age has a distance built into the telling that neither the events nor their arrangement can express. In Proust that distance is the subject of the entire novel.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/literature-i/narratology-i-story-discourse-and-order/why-does-genette-split-the-formalists-two-levels-into-three

### 2. The Odyssey's events, arranged in STORY order rather than the order the poem tells them.

**Answer:**

1. The fall of Troy
2. Odysseus' wanderings, including the Cyclops
3. Seven years on Calypso's island
4. Arrival among the Phaeacians
5. The return to Ithaca and the killing of the suitors

**Why:** The poem itself begins in the tenth year, with the wanderings delivered as a four-book analepsis narrated by Odysseus himself. In story order the sequence is straightforward; the poem's achievement is that its discourse order is not.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/literature-i/narratology-i-story-discourse-and-order/the-odysseys-events-arranged-in-story-order-rather-than-the-order

### 3. Genette distinguishes internal anachronies from external ones based on their temporal boundaries. Why does this distinction fundamentally matter for how a reader interprets the plot?

A. Internal anachronies can retrospectively alter events already related
B. External anachronies alter the fundamental trajectory of future events
C. Internal anachronies primarily provide exposition prior to the start
D. External anachronies generate suspense by postponing the final climax

**Answer:** A. Internal anachronies can retrospectively alter events already related

**Why:** Conflating narrative functions leads readers to confuse mere exposition with plot revision. External anachronies strictly supply prior context without modifying the established sequence, whereas internal ones intrude upon the already-narrated timeline to force reinterpretation.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/literature-i/narratology-i-story-discourse-and-order/genette-distinguishes-internal-anachronies-from-external-ones-based

### 4. Beginning in medias res is a modernist innovation.

**Answer:** False

**Why:** **False.** It is the ancient epic norm, described by Horace as the mark of the good poet, who "hurries into the action and snatches the listener into the middle of things". What modernism changed was the degree of the reordering, not the fact of it.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/literature-i/narratology-i-story-discourse-and-order/beginning-in-medias-res-is-a-modernist-innovation

### 5. Sort each example by whether it is an ANALEPSIS or a PROLEPSIS.

**Answer:**

- Analepsis: Chapter two returns to the narrator's schooldays, Odysseus recounts his wanderings to the Phaeacians, A witness statement fills in the night of the murder
- Prolepsis: "He would not see the city again for thirty years", A narrator remarks that the reader will learn the truth later, The opening line announces the hero's death

**Why:** Prolepsis is rarer and more conspicuous than analepsis, because announcing an outcome trades suspense for something else, usually irony, or the sense of a fate already fixed. García Márquez's famous opening does exactly this, telling you about the firing squad on the first line and spending the novel getting there.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/literature-i/narratology-i-story-discourse-and-order/sort-each-example-by-whether-it-is-an-analepsis-or-a-prolepsis

### 6. Which are true of the story/discourse distinction?

A. The same story can be told in many discourse orders
B. Story order is reconstructed by the reader from the discourse
C. A narrative with no anachrony has no discourse level
D. The discourse order determines what the reader knows and when

**Answer:** A. The same story can be told in many discourse orders; B. Story order is reconstructed by the reader from the discourse; D. The discourse order determines what the reader knows and when

**Why:** Even a perfectly chronological narrative has a discourse level, it made a choice, and the choice was order. This is why the distinction is analytically useful rather than merely descriptive: it applies to every narrative, including the ones that look transparent.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/literature-i/narratology-i-story-discourse-and-order/which-are-true-of-the-story-discourse-distinction

### 7. Complete the narratological vocabulary of order.

**Answer:** Any discordance between story and narrative order is an **anachrony**. Narrating an earlier event late is an **analepsis**, and narrating a later event early is a **prolepsis**. Genette measures each by its **reach** and its extent.

**Why:** The vocabulary is worth memorising exactly because the phenomena are so familiar. Everyone recognises a flashback; almost nobody, without the terms, notices whether it reaches outside the story's span or how much time it covers when it lands.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/literature-i/narratology-i-story-discourse-and-order/complete-the-narratological-vocabulary-of-order

### 8. Arrange the steps for analysing the order of a narrative.

**Answer:**

1. Segment the text into narrative units
2. Number the units in the order the text presents them
3. Reconstruct the chronological order of the events
4. Map each unit's discourse position onto its story position
5. Classify each departure as analepsis or prolepsis, with reach and extent

**Why:** Doing it in this order stops you naming the flashbacks you happened to notice and calling that an analysis. The map of positions comes first; which departures matter is a judgement made afterwards, on evidence.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/literature-i/narratology-i-story-discourse-and-order/arrange-the-steps-for-analysing-the-order-of-a-narrative

### 9. In a classic detective novel, roughly what proportion of the story's central events, the crime itself, is narrated in the first half of the discourse?

**Answer:** 10 (within ±12)

**Why:** Close to **nothing**: perhaps a tenth, in fragments the reader cannot yet assemble. The genre is the extreme case of the story/discourse split: story order is crime then investigation, discourse order is investigation then crime, and the inversion is not a stylistic choice but the definition of the form.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/literature-i/narratology-i-story-discourse-and-order/in-a-classic-detective-novel-roughly-what-proportion-of-the-storys