Montagut Benavent, David
35336 Narrativa anglesa - Group C
2-6-2014
Narrative situation in two dystopian novels: Never let me go and Animal Farm
In this paper I am going to analyse the narrative situation in both Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never let me go and George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The aim of this essay is to compare the two narratives (on the assigned topic) and to show the similarities and differences between these stories.
The structure that I will use in this essay will be the following: Firstly, I will provide an overview of the previous literature/historical context of both narratives. Secondly, I will talk about what the narrative situation is and the subjects covered. Here I will talk briefly about the narrative voice and focalization. Thirdly, I will deal with the narrative situation (focusing on Rimmon-Kenan's and Stanzel’s classification) in Never let me go, and in contrast I will discuss the narrative situation in Animal Farm. Finally, I will summarize the topics covered and I will provide a conclusion.
Never let me go was written by Kazuo Ishiguro and it was published in 2005. During the 1980s, authors all over the world started to write in English, and one of these authors was Kazuo Ishiguro. This novel considers the theme of cloning, which was an issue that was dealt with in 2001 and 2004. In these two years (2001 and 2004) an enactment was passed in the UK and US with the aim of providing research into stem cells in order to improve human health. People started to question the role that clones should have in improving human’s health if we started cloning people.
Animal Farm was written by George Orwell and it was first published in the UK in 1945 and then in the US in the 1946. During the 1920-1930s after the WWI, the world was still in crisis and people had fear of another global conflict and as a result the literature in this time was negative and pessimistic. Authors (Orwell itself) wrote about people from middle and lower classes. During the 1940s, authors went into exile because of the events that were going to happen (WWII). In this decade literature was more religious maybe because people were afraid about the war that was coming. George Orwell reflects in his dystopian book the events that led Stalin to seize national power (Russian Revolution of 1917) and his totalitarian order during these years.
Focusing on the assigned topic, now I am going to explain briefly what is dealt in the narrative situation. The narrative situation considers two slants: the narrative voice (narrator of the text) and focalization (angle of vision in which the story is told). Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, author of Narrative Fiction (1983), classifies the narrators according to four factors: narrative level, participation in the story they narrate, perceptibility and reliability. Rimmon-Kenan also sorted the kinds of focalization according to two criteria: position relative to story and degree of persistence. However, it was Stanzel who proposed new terms to express the combination of narrator plus focalization. These new terms were: authorial narrative situation (heterodiegetic narrator + external focalizer), first-person narrative situation (homodiegetic narrator + internal focalizer) and figural narrative situation (heterodiegetic narrator+ internal focalizer).
In Never let me go if we take into account the Rimmon-Kenan’s classification of narrators, we can say that in the narrative level we find an extradiegetic narrator because the narrator is above the story, since Kathy tells the story of herself when she was younger. Focusing on the participation in the story it narrates, we can say that we find an homodiegetic narrator because it participates in the story it narrates. Kathy H. is both the narrative voice in the novel but also a character in the story; she has the role as an I-as-protagonist narrator and sometimes when she is observing
