Gérard Genette (1930–2018) was a French literary theorist whose Narrative Discourse (1972/1980) established the vocabulary of modern narratology — the systematic study of how narratives are structured and told.
Core ideas
- Voice and focalization: Genette separated two questions that earlier criticism conflated: who speaks? (voice) and who sees? (focalization). A story can be narrated by one character but focalized through another — the narrator tells us what someone else perceives. This distinction clarifies complex narrative situations that the traditional categories of point of view (first person, third person limited, omniscient) cannot fully describe [@genette1980].
- Temporal structure: Genette analyzed how narratives manipulate time through order (flashbacks, flash-forwards), duration (scene, summary, pause, ellipsis), and frequency (how many times an event is narrated vs. how many times it occurred). These categories make visible the gap between the story as it happened and the story as it is told.
- Diegetic levels: Genette distinguished the story world (diegesis) from the narrating act, and introduced terms for narrators who are inside the story (homodiegetic) or outside it (heterodiegetic), and for stories embedded within stories (metadiegetic).
Notable works
- Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (1972; English trans. 1980)
- Narrative Discourse Revisited (1983; English trans. 1988)
- Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1987; English trans. 1997)
Related
- point of view — Genette’s voice/focalization distinction refines POV analysis
- narrator — Genette’s diegetic framework classifies narrator types
- fiction writing — Narrative Discourse is a key text for the discipline
- Wayne Booth — Booth’s rhetorical approach to narrative complements Genette’s structural one