Presenting Different Theories on How Narrative Fiction is Structured

In the book, Telling Stories, by Steven Cohan and Linda M. Shires, the two writers explain their theories on narrative fiction and how it is structured. One of the structures narrative fiction is built on is temporality, which is, "the narration's arrangement and display of events in time, which most clearly illustrates the relation between a story and its telling." One of the main concepts that is covered in temporality is order, which I feel is most important to any work of narrative fiction. Frankly, order can make or break a story. If the order is clumsy and confusing, then the reader would have a difficult time following along. Sometimes if a writer is trying to evoke a certain feeling from a reader, there are different chronological orders they could use that would bring out that feeling more than other orders. As you will see in this essay, there are so many different things that a writer can do with narration and the order certain events are introduced to the reader. Personally, I did not realize that there were so many methods and techniques that writers had at their disposal to use when approaching a narrative fiction.

Keeping the whole idea of temporality in mind, I went through the stories we read in Story Quarterly before we learned about the ideas from Telling Stories. What I was looking for was one story that used a lot of temporality, and one that didn't. I found, "The Restaurant of American Dishes," by Tatjana Soli and at once remembered how much flashback the story used. In fact, most of the story is a flashback. The next story I looked at was, "The Wolf at the Door." I quickly read through it to refresh my memory of what happens, and I realized that there was a noticeably less amount of temporality used compared to the previous story. What I want to do is find examples of how temporality is used in both stories, and how this makes the stories different.