Practice question · Multiple choice
Why does Genette split the Formalists' two levels into three?
Hints
- Ask what a first-person narrator is doing, and when.
- A narrator recounting their youth in old age occupies a third position.
Show the 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.
Practise Narratology I. Story, Discourse and Order
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