A BOOK RECOMMENDATION: INTRODUCTION TO THE STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF NARRATIVES (ROLAND BARTHES)

In his article, Barthes asserts that there are countless narratives in the world and lists them: fable, fairy tale, long story, epic, story, tragedy, drama, comedy, pantomime, painting, stained glass, cinema, painting, newspaper article, speech, etc. In addition, he says that narrative is everywhere, in every time and in every society.

But does the universality of the narrative show that it is worthless? How can we distinguish between narrative types? Contemplating these issues, Russian formalists Propp and Levi-Strauss have argued that there is a dilemma in this regard: Narrative is either an ordinary and meaningless expression of events; or it contains a structure open to analysis that is common with other narratives.

In the course of the narrative studies, the necessity of adopting a deductive method in narrative analysis, which even linguistics could not overcome, emerged. A theory was also required to describe and classify narratives. In this context, linguistics was chosen first; however, linguistics remained in the sentence dimension. “A sentence is the smallest piece that represents the discourse fully and completely.” said Martinet. There is a "secondary" relation between the sentence and the discourse. This is also called the homology relation. In terms of structure, the narrative is similar to a sentence, but cannot be reduced to a sum of sentences.

When we come to the subject of levels of meaning, we come across the concept of level of description. The level of description is also divided into three: the level of functions (Propp, Bremond), the level of actions (Greimas), the level of narration (Todorov).

If we first consider the level of functions, we see that in the narratives, each system consists of a combination of various units. For this, even the smallest narrative units should be defined. These first units are also called "functions". But is everything functional in the narrative? In narratives, everything carries meaning to varying degrees. The structure of the narrative is ambiguous, it carries a function even when it seems to resist all kinds of functions. Because everything has meaning or nothing has meaning.

As for the actions in the narrative, Aristotle said that the characters of the narrative are secondary and dependent on the concept of action. He also said that there can be a narrative without characters, but that characters can not exist without a narrative. The narrative characters (players/actors) constitute a necessary plane of description. It can be said that there is not a single narrative without the characters of the narrative. Structural analysis has tried to define the narrative person not as an entity but as a participant in an action. The most important thing is to define the narrator according to his participation in a field of action. These areas are few in number, have distinctive features and can be classified. For this reason, the second level of description is the level of the narrators, but it is called the level of actions.
When we come to the level of narration, we come across the question “Who is the sender of the narrative?” question arises. The first view assumes that the narrative is given by one person (first-person narrative). The second view treats the narrator as a kind of holistic consciousness (third-person narrative) that is seemingly impersonal, giving the story from above, that is, from the point of view of God.

These are all levels of the narrative. As a result of all these studies; just as linguistics can not exceed the sentence level, it has been determined that narrative analysis can not exceed the level of discourse.