What is narrative distance?

Question

could someone tell me what narrative distance, voice and focalization mean grammatically?

Answer 1

In first-person narration, the first person refers to both the narrator (the narrating-I) and a character (the experiencing-I) in the story.  The narrator may be the protagonist of the story (I-as-protagonist)or a minor character (I-as-witness).  Narrative distance refers to the temporal and psychological distance between the narrating-I and the experiencing-I.  First-person narration should suffer from the same limitations on knowledge that we suffer in the world, that is, they should not know other people’s thoughts, etc.  Fictional autobiographies and skaz narratives are subgenres of first-person narration.  A skaz narrative represents a story-telling situation, in which a speaker tells a story to a present audience.  A skaz narrator is often characterized by their diction and syntax, and is closely related to the poetic genre of the dramatic monologue.

Focalization refers to the author’s method of selecting and restricting narrative information, of seeing events and actions from somebody’s point of view, of foregrounding the focalizing agent, and of creating an empathetical or ironic view of the focalizer.  A focalizer is the agent whose point of view orients the narrative.  A text is anchored on a focalizer’s point of view when it presents the focalizer’s thoughts, reflections, knowledge, actual or imaginary perceptions, and his or her cultural and ideological orientation.  A narrator-focalizer is an external focalizer.  A character-focalizer is an internal-focalizer.



A narrative is described as having a fixed focalization if it presents actions and events from the constant point of view of a single focalizer.  Variable focalization refers to the presentation of the story through the eyes of several focalizers.  Multiple focalization is a technique in which the same event, action or episode is represented multiple times, each one through the eyes of a different internal focalizer.

A narrator is the speaker or 'voice' of the narrative discourse. Textual or intertextual voices belong to the narrator and the characters.  An extratextual voice belongs to the author.  In Don Quixote, the distinction between intertextual and extratextual voice breaks down.  



Some prominent vocal characteristics are dialect (regional diction and pronunciation), sociolect (speech characteristics of a social group), idiolect (singular or idiosyncratic style) and genderlect (gender-specific style preferred by women or men).  



Monologism is the effect created when all the voices sound more or less the same.  Dialogism is the effected created when a text presents authors, narrators and characters with distinct, identifiable speech patterns.