Home > Explore Content > All Issues > Article View
The Narrative Discourse of the Novel and the Film L’Espoir
Cross-Cultural Studies
2017,
48(), pp.289-323
DOI : 10.21049/ccs.2017.48..289
Publisher : Center for Cross Culture Studies
Research Area : Literature
DOI : 10.21049/ccs.2017.48..289
Publisher : Center for Cross Culture Studies
Research Area : Literature
-
L’Espoir, a novel by Andre Malraux, contains traits of the genre of literacy reportage that depicts the full account of the Spanish Civil War as non-fiction based on his personal experience of participating in war; the novel has been dramatized into a semi-documentary film that corresponds to reportage literature. A semi-documentary film is the genre of film that pursues realistic illustration of social incidents or phenomenon. Despite difference in types of genre of the novel and the film L’Espoir, such creative activities deserve close relevance and considerable narrative connectivity. Therefore, Gérard Genette’s narrative discourse of novel and film based on narrative theory carries value of research. Every kind of story, in a narrative message, has duplicate times in which story time and discourse time are different. This is because, in a narrative message, one event may occur before or later than another, told lengthily or concisely, and aroused once or repeatedly. Accordingly, analyzing differing timeliness of the actual event occurring and of recording that event is in terms of order, duration, and frequency. Since timeliness of order, duration, and frequency indicates dramatic pace that controls the passage of a story, it appears as an editorial notion in the novel and the film L’Espoir. It is an aesthetic discourse raising curiosity and shock, the correspondence of time in arranging, summarizing, deleting the story. In addition, Genette mentions notions of speech and voice to clearly distinguish position and focalization of a narrator or a speaker in text. The necessity to discriminate ‘who speaks’ and ‘who sees’ comes from difference in views of the narrator of text and the text. The matter of ‘who speaks’ is about who portrays narrator of the story. However, ‘who sees’ is related to from whose stance the story is being narrated. In the novel L'Espoir, change of focalization was ushered through zero focalization and internal focalization, and pertains to the multicamera in the film. Also, the frame story was commonly taken as metadiegetic type of voice in both film and novel of L'Espoir. In sum, narrative discourse in the novel and the film L'Espoir is the dimension of story communication among text, the narrator, and recipient.
250 Viewed
Print this page
Download PDF