Genettes three-layered model:

Story (French. Histoire) for the signified or narrative

content;
Narrative (French. Rcit) for the signifier/ statement/
discourse/ narrative text itself;
Narrating (French. Narration) for the producing narrative
action and, by extension, the whole of the real or fictional
situation in which that action takes place.

The analysis of narrative discourse presupposes

the study of the relationships between:
narrative and story;
narrative and narrating;
story and narrating (to the extent to which this relationship is
inscribed in the narrative discourse).

Story

Narrating
Narrative

Voice
Tense and Mood

Tense temporal relations between narrative and story;

Mood modalities (forms and degrees) of narrative
representation;
Voice the way in which the narrating itself (i.e., the narrative
situation or its instance and its two protagonists, the narrator
and the audience, real or implied) is implicated in the
narrative.

connections between the temporal order of

succession of the events in the story and the
pseudo-temporal order of their arrangement in the
narrative deviations from chronology =
ANACHRONIES:
prolepsis = any narrative manoeuvre that consists
of narrating or evoking in advance an event that
will take place later (1980: 40);
analepsis = any evocation after the fact of an
event that took place earlier than the point in the
story where we are at any given moment (1980:
40).

external analepsis (analepsis whose extent remains

external to the extent of the first narrative) (1980:
49);
internal analepsis;
mixed analepsis (whose reach goes back to a point
earlier and whose extent arrives at a point later than
the beginning of the first narrative) (1980: 49).
heterodiegetic analepsis (analepsis dealing with a
story line (and thus with a diegetic content) different
from the content (or contents) of the first narrative
(1980: 50);
homodiegetic analepsis that deals with the same line
of action as the first narrative.

Speed: the relationship between a temporal

dimension and a spatial dimension (): the speed of
a narrative will be defined by the relationship
between a duration (that of the story, measured in
seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years)
and a length (that of the text, measured in lines and
in pages). (1980: 87-8)
variations in tempo/ narrative speed:

(descriptive) pause (NT = n, ST = 0, thus NT > ST, i.e. NT

is infinitely greater than ST);
scene, most often in dialogue, which () realizes
conventionally the equality of time between narrative and
story (1980: 94) (NT = ST);
summary, a form with a variable tempo (whereas the tempo
of the other three is fixed, at least in principle) which with
great flexibility of pace covers the entire range included
between scene and ellipsis) (1980: 94) (NT < ST);
ellipsis ( NT = 0, ST = n, thus NT < ST, i.e. NT is infinitely
less than ST).

Singulative narrative or, otherwise, narrating once

what happened once. (e.g. Yesterday I went to bed
early);

Repeating narrative or narrating n times what

happened once (e.g. Yesterday I went to bed early,

yesterday I went to bed early, yesterday I went to

bed early, etc.) Although apparently rather
hypothetical and irrelevant to literature, this kind
of repetition has been successfully exploited at
different stages in the evolution of the novel, here
including the eighteenth-century epistolary novel,
or novels in which stress is laid on the repetition
doubled by stylistic or viewpoint variations or that
display repeating anachronies such as the advance
notices and the recalls. (1980: 115)

Iterative narrative or narrating once what happened

n times. This type of narrative can be easily
identified because of its association
grammatical markers of frequency.

with

mimesis/ diegesis (Plato) showing/telling

(Henry James) narrative of events/
narrative of words Information + informer

= C - which implies that the quantity of

information and the presence of the
informer are in inverse ratio (1980: 166):

MIMESIS = A MAXIMUM OF INFORMATION AND A

MINIMUM OF THE INFORMER SCENE;
DIEGESIS = A MAXIMUM OF THE INFORMER AND A
MINIMUM OF INFORMATION SUMMARY.

narrative of words:

Narratized or narrated speech, obviously the most distant and,

generally, the most reduced. Genette identifies as a peculiar
species of narratized discourse the narrative of an inner debate,
or, as he puts it, the analysis or the narrative of thoughts or
narratized inner speech. E.g. uttered speech: I informed my
mother of my decision to marry Albertine.; inner speech: I
decided to marry Albertine. (1980: 171)
Transposed speech, in indirect style: Although a little more
mimetic than narrated speech, [] this form never gives the
reader any guarantee or above all any feeling of literal fidelity
to the words really uttered: the narrators presence is still too
perceptible in the very syntax of the sentence for the speech to
impose itself with the documentary autonomy of a quotation.
(1980: 171) E.g. uttered speech: I told my mother that I
absolutely had to marry Albertine.; inner speech: I thought that I
absolutely had to marry Albertine. Words are not simply reported
in subordinate clauses, but condensed, integrated into the
narrators own speech.
Reported speech, the most mimetic form (that Plato rejected) in
which the narrator pretends literally to give the floor to the
characters. E.g. I said to my mother/ I thought: It is absolutely
necessary to marry Albertine.

Genette chooses to challenge most of the theories

on the point of view, on the ground of their
promoting a regrettable confusion between two
different questions which he proposes to answer
separately in the discussion of the categories of
mood and voice. These questions are:
(1) Who is the character whose point of view
orients the narrative perspective?
(2) Who is the narrator? (1980: 186)

Genette introduces his own term, i.e.

focalization
and
re-discusses
the
classification of narratives according to the
perspective they are representative for as
follows:
Nonfocalized narrative or narrative with zero focalization.
This type of focalisation was questioned and eventually
rejected in later theories of the narrative discourse.
Narrative with internal focalization:
Fixed (e.g. The Ambassadors, where everything passes through
Strether, or What Maisie Knew, where we almost never leave the
point of view of the little girl);
Variable (e.g. Madame Bovary, where the focal character is first
Charles, then Emma, then again Charles);
Multiple (e.g. epistolary novels).

Narrative with external focalization (e.g. Hemingways

novellas The Killers or Hills Like White Elephants; Walter
Scott, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, Balzac, etc.)

The temporal determinations of the narrating instance are

manifestly more important than its spatial determinations.
(1980: 215) The chief temporal determination of the narrating

instance is its position relative to the story.

subsequent the classical position of the past tense narrative, by far

the most frequent;
prior predictive narrative, generally in the future tense, but not
prohibited from being conjugated in the present, which has been less
used than the other type of narrating, even in the novels of
anticipation. (1980: 219-20)
simultaneous narrative in the present contemporaneous with the
action, which, in principle, should eliminate any sort of interference or
temporal game. However, the blending of the instances can function in
two opposite directions, according to whether the emphasis is put on
the story or on the narrative discourse.
interpolated between the moments of the action. It is the most
complex type as it involves narrating with several instances and the
very close entanglement of the story and the narrating. One of the
best cases in point is the epistolary novel with several correspondents
in which the letter is at the same time a medium of the narrative and
an element of the plot. Furthermore, the extreme closeness of story
to narrating produces [] a very subtle effect of friction [] between
the slight temporal displacement of the narrative of events (Here is
what happened to me today) and the complete simultaneousness in
the report of thoughts and feelings (Here is what I think about it this
evening). (1980: 217-8)

Any event a

narrative recounts is at a diegetic level

immediately higher than the level at which the narrating act
producing this narrative is placed. (1980: 228) Transitions
from one level to another: metalepses (e.g. Tristram Shandy).
The first-degree narrator
The characters of the first-degree narrative
+
The narrator of the second-degree narrative

The characters of the second-degree

narrative
+
The narrator of the third-degree narrative
etc.

METADIEGETIC

INTRADIEGETIC

EXTRADIEGETIC

Genette does not entirely agree with the use of the

first-person and third-person labels, hence he
uses them in between inverted commas. The

presence of the narrator is invariantly in the first

person. Genette explains that the presence of
first-person verbs in a narrative text can refer to
two different situations that the narrative analysis
must distinguish (although grammar renders them
identical):

the narrators designation of himself as such (I) and

the identity of person between the narrator and one of the
characters in the story.

The term first-person narrative refers only to the

second situation, but the narrator can interfere as
such, in the first person, virtually in any narrative.

Genette distinguishes between two types of

narrative:

with the narrator absent from the story (s)he tells

heterodiegetic;
with the narrator present as a character in the story
(s)he tells homodiegetic:
the narrator is the hero of his narrative (autodiegetic).
the narrator plays only a secondary role, which turns
out to be a role of observer and witness.