The Window Structure of Narrative Discourse
Life, the subject matter of narrative, is a massively parallel machine. Just as a computer may run several programs concurrently, a narrative may develop several plot lines; and just as a program may receive input from another program, the outcome of a line of actions may be affected by another sequence of events taking place at the same time but in another location. If we map a reasonably well-developed and complex narrative, the resulting graph will be a tapestry of converging and diverging, splitting and merging strands. But if life is parallel, its narration is sequential: only one line can be normally shown in the current "narrative window." The concept of window, borrowed from the familiar Microsoft operating system, can help us describe one of the most neglected aspects of narrative strategy: how discourse keeps track of concurrent processes, how it unravels the tangled knot of intersecting destinies, how it deals with the spatial mobility of characters and how it moves back and forth among the various sites where the fate of the storyworld is being decided. The narratological study of windows is concerned with two phenomena: 1. Window structure. Given a specific plot, mapped as a temporally ordered sequence of states mediated by events, the window structure determines how many different frames (or "takes") are necessary to present the story. 2. Window management: the study of how narrative discourse handles the succession of frames and marks the transitions.
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Embedded Narrative and Tellability
The tellability of a fabula depends on the complexity of an underlying system of so-called "embedded narratives." Since narrative universes are inhabited by intelligent beings, they are composed not only of a physical world, realm of factual events, but also of numerous private domains, such as knowledge, wishes, intents, and obligations. Insofar as they link states and events in a causal pattern, these mental constructs present the same structure as the story of which they are a part; this is why I call them "embedded narratives." In a good fabula, the mental representations of characters do not simply reflect and interpret actual events, they also delineate a variety of mutually incompatible sequences of possible or counterfactual events. Far from being limited to "what objectively happened," the semantic universe of good stories is thus a layered entity, in which a variety of actual and virtual stories are braided together.
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