Introduction
Narrative criticism belongs to a new literary criticism. Its beginning can be traced back to Gérard Genette,[1] even though a more systematic definition comes from Seymour Chatman[2] and to whose work many well-known New Testament narrative critics are closely attached to including David Rhoads and R. Alan Culpepper. The intent of this section, therefore, is to discuss Rhoads and Culpepper’s narrative criticism, the presuppositions of narrative criticism, its important aspects and also present a critical evaluation of the same in terms of its contributions and limitations.
1. Presuppositions
1.1. Narrative criticism takes the formal features of a text in its final form. It assumes that the text in its finished form is unified and complete. The interest lies in reading the text from the beginning to the end as a unified whole rather than dissecting them.[3]
1.2. What is important in narrative criticism is not the historical circumstances behind the text but the stories in the text. As such, it allows the text to speak for itself.[4]
1.3. In such a reading, the evangelists (for examples Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) are not considered mere collectors as in form criticism or mere editors as in redaction criticism, but rather “as authors”[5] who are usually spoken of as implied author. As the real (historical) author is not part of the concern, stories with no real author (anonymous) are also possible to study in the standard of narrative criticism.[6]
1.4. In narrative criticism, the text is regarded as a ‘mirror’ in which readers can see the word in which they live rather than a ‘window’ which regards the text as a means through which an interpreter attempts to learn another time or place.[7]
1.5. Since the ‘how’ (rhetoric and structure) and the ‘what’ (content) of a text are analyzed as a single/unified whole, it is important that the narrative critic is aware of the rhetorical devices (e.g., irony, paradox, parallelism, to mention few) present in the narrative text which may function as a means to deepening or thickening the nuances in a text.[8]
1.6. Narrative criticism is also comparable to rhetorical criticism in the way it attempts to understand the effect the writing has on its reader and in clarifying why it has an effect. However, it is also different in the way it gives more attention to the “rhetoric of narrative” than that of “persuasion” (as in the case of classical rhetorics).[9]
1.7. Unlike structuralism which focuses on the deep level meaning, narrative criticism concerns about the surface level meaning.[10]
2. Important Aspects of Narrative Criticism: Chatman’s Theory
As the researcher considers Seymour Chatman’s theory to be a systematic way of dividing the aspects of a narrative criticism, present study accordingly follows his theory of narrative for outlining the aspects of narrative criticism. Chatman basically deals with the theory of narrative which he called “formalist-structuralist theory of narrative.”[11] According to him, each narrative is always divided into two parts, namely: a ‘story’ and a ‘discourse.’ A ‘story’ is comprised of the content, chain of events (actions and happenings) and existents (characters and settings), which are all considered as abstract concepts without any inherent meaning.[12] On the other hand, a ‘discourse’ refers to “the expression, the means by which the content is communicated, the set of actual narrative ‘statements.’”[13] In this case, his theory is dualistic: (i) a ‘story’ which refers to ‘what’ it depicts, and (ii) a ‘discourse’ which refers to ‘how’ the story is depicted.[14] Rhoads summarizes such dualistic nature in the following lines:
The ‘what’ is the story, apart from how it is told, including: the chain of story events (stated or implied by the narrator, in chronological order), the characters, and the details of setting. The ‘how’ of the narrative is the discourse, the particular way in which a given story is told, including: the arrangement of events in the plot, the type of narrator, point of view, style and rhetorical devices.[15]
It is therefore important that every narrative be analyzed in terms of the relationships between the abstract level of the ‘story’ and the representation of that story in the ‘discourse.’ Tom Thatcher asserts that such analysis is important especially when the “meaning” of a narrative lies in the interaction between “the abstract story world and its concrete expression in the discourse, not in any relationship between the narrative and real world events or entities.”[16] In other words, meaning can be found in the interaction between the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of a narrative, even if that meaning is not limited to an interaction between the two. Chatman’s model then is helpful in analyzing the way in which the author presents events and characters to his/her audiences, and also the way in which the narrative produces meaning.[17] With this brief introduction, the ‘what’ and ‘how’ aspects of the narrative criticism may be outlined as below.
2.1. The ‘What’ of the Narrative
2.1.1. Character: ‘Characters’ simply refer to persons in the story, and they can be identified through different ways, for example, by means of speech (what they say and how they say it), actions (what they do), clothing (what they wear), gestures and posture (how they present themselves). They can also be known by what others (the narrators) say about an individual or a group, by “the environment or setting in which they [or an individual] work[s] and play[s],”[18] or by one’s position in the society – whether or not he/she is a part of authority or at the margins. When these characters within the narrative undergo change either for better or for worse, they are known as “dynamic characters.” [19] Understanding these characters of what they do, say, or how they are perceived is essential to comprehending the story. A way to analyzing them is “to focus on the characters’ actions, evaluating the functions of their actions in relation to the plot of the story” and also to treat them as “autonomous beings and to assess them in the same way we evaluate real people.”[20]
2.1.2. Setting: ‘Setting’ simply refers to the background against which the narration takes place. There can be different types of settings which are considered important, contributive and enrich to the story, namely: Geographical,[21] topographical,[22] religious[23] or architectural.[24] It may also include “social or cultural (Jew, Gentile, Samaritan, clean, unclean), political (Rome, Pharaoh, kingdom of God), temporal (night, day, forty days, millennium), or spatial (heaven, earth, abyss).”[25] Minor characters are called ‘walk-ons’ by Chatman[26] and ‘props’ may also form part of the setting.[27] They are important in shaping the atmosphere, contributing to the development of a conflict, bringing out traits in character, [28] providing structure to the story[29] and also contributing to the mood of the narrative.[30]
2.1.3. Events: ‘Events’ are “the incidents or happenings” that occur within a story, and a story cannot exist without such events.[31] A narrative understanding of events can include ‘kernel’ and ‘satellites,’[32] order of events,[33] duration of the time that the narrator devotes to reporting an event, the frequency with which events occur in a story and in the frequency with which they are reported, causation or causal relationships between events and noting conflictspresent in the story.[34] As such, ‘events’ can be approached by focusing on ‘conflicts’ in the story, like the way a protagonist is “in conflict” with supernatural forces, other people or with society in general. Such ‘events’ includes Jesus’ conflict with the demons (forces of nature), the religious authorities and the disciples.[35]
2.2. The ‘How’ of the Narrative
2.2.1. Narration (Narrator and Narratee): The ‘narrator,’ which is a literary term for the storyteller of a narrative, “is not the author but a rhetorical device the author uses to get the story told and to get it told in a certain way.”[36] It is the ‘voice’ that the implied author uses to tell the story.[37] While the ‘narrator’ presents (shows, tells), the ‘narratee’ receives (hears, sees) the story.[38] The ‘narrator’ and the ‘narratee’ are different from the implied author and the implied reader in the way they form “rhetorical devices, created by the implied author” and become part of the narrative itself.[39] That is to say that the ‘narrator’ functions as “the transmitter of the story, whereas the implied author is responsible for its whole design – including the decision to use that particular narrator and not some other.”[40]
There can be different kinds of ‘narrator’: As a character in the story, as the protagonist, or perhaps as a peripheral character.[41] Firstly, ‘the first-person narrator,’ to some degree as a participant in the story, usually speaks of as ‘I/We.’ In such a narrative, the ‘narrator’ may tell his/her own story (‘I’ as the protagonist) or someone’s story in which ‘I’ becomes a mere witness.[42] Secondly, there are also “unnamed narrators outside the story being told, but still evident in the narrative as the storyteller.”[43] They are called ‘external narrator’ who (unlike the ‘character’ who lives in the story world) does not live inside the story-world but tells the story from outside. Such ‘narrator’ often refers to the character by name or by third-person as ‘he/she/they.’[44] They are often identified as “third-person omniscient narrators” who seem to be present everywhere in the story as in the case of gospel writers “who roam from character to character, event to event, delving into the thoughts of some characters, elaborating the motivations of others, commenting on characters, and so forth.[45] Lastly, some narratives take a “middle ground.”[46] These narrators do not identify themselves or refer to themselves as ‘I/We,’ yet they still seem “to exist as human beings, not merely as tape recorders or camera eyes.”[47]
2.2.2. The Implied Author and Implied Reader: In a narrative, the ‘real author’ refers to the flesh-and-blood person who actually penned the story/fiction. As a real historical personage, the real author’s biography can be studied separately from his/her work (narrative).[48] And to recover the real author, extra reading is required because there is none to tell or to be interviewed about him/her.[49] On the other hand, an ‘implied author’ is someone who “implies messages” rather than delivering direct messages to the reader. Unlike the real author, the implied author can be reconstructed from a narrative text itself, “not only from what the narrator says, but from what happens, what the characters are like, what they say about each other, what the setting and atmosphere suggest, and so on.”[50]
As in the case of the real author, the ‘real reader’ refers to the actual historical (or intended) readers, whereas the ‘implied reader’ is a “hypothetical concept”[51] or “imaginary person in whom the intention of the text is to be thought of as always reaching its fulfillment.”[52] As such, in relation to the implied reader, “it is not necessarily to assume that such a person actually existed or ever could exist. To the extent that the implied reader is an idealized abstraction, the goal of reading the text ‘as the implied reader’ may be somewhat unattainable, but it remains a worthy goal nevertheless.”[53] However, unlike the real reader, the “implied reader” can be defined by the narrative text itself “as the one who performs all the mental move required to enter into the narrative world and respond to it as he implied author intends.”[54]
2.2.3. Rhetorics: Rhetoric deals with how the story is told to create certain effects upon the reader. It is the means by which the author persuades its readers of his/her “ideological point of view, norms, beliefs, and values.”[55] In such an act, there is a direct communication between the author and its readers. Some of common rhetorical patterns are ‘repetition’ (including irony, similes, and metaphors), ‘framing narrative’ (sandwiching or intercalation),[56] ‘rhetorical figures’ (figures of speech)[57] and ‘figures of thought’ (tropes).[58]
2.2.4. Point of View: ‘Point of view’ can refer to: (i) “The ‘angle of vision’ from which the narrator tells the story,” or (ii) “The conceptual world-view of the narrator.”[59] Stating about a difference between the ‘narrator’ and the ‘point of view,’ Culpepper asserts that “the identity of the narrator is determined by whether the narrator is the voice of the author or a character within the story,” while the point of view is “determined by whether the story is told from within by the main character or an omniscient author or from outside by a minor character or an author who has taken the role of an observer.”[60] Thus, the narrative discloses the point of view of the narrator, while it is the narrator who demonstrates the points of view of the characters, in the course of telling the story.[61]
2.2.5. Plot: ‘Plot’ simply refers to the “sequence of events or incidents that make up a narrative.”[62] Putting it in another way, ‘plot’ is the way in which a reader comes to know what had happened. That is, the “order of the appearance (of the events)” whether that order may be “normal (abc) or flashed-back (acb) or begun in medias res (bc).”[63] Some of the plots are designed to achieve ‘tragic effects,’ while others to achieve the effects of the “comedy, romance and satire.” [64] There are two plot patterns which are common in the New Testament, namely: a ‘U-Shaped plot’ (comic plot) and an ‘inverted U-shaped plot’ (tragic). Such (U-shaped) plot pattern usually begins with peace, happiness or prosperities; which was then interrupted by disasters (misunderstandings, rebellions); and ends with the reversal of misfortune to fortune where divine deliverance is realized.[65] Simply putting it, there are ups and downs in the story. Other elements of ‘plot,’ to name a few, includes: unity of action (a beginning, middle and end), causation (in which sequences of events is linked by cause and effect), and conflict (conflict with other characters, with nature and with the supernatural).[66]
3. Select Proponents
It is known that some scholars like Norman Peterson[67] have already used the term ‘narrative criticism’ prior to David Rhoads; but Rhoads have worked out this approach in a more “consistent and definitive way.”[68] To this must be added Culpepper who has more representatively defined the field of narrative criticism for New Testament interpretation. Therefore, it is important that they be discussed in the following.
3.1. David Rhoads: For Rhoads, narrative criticism includes a broad area of inquiry which encompasses plot, conflict, character, setting, narrator, point of view, standards of judgment, the implied author, ideal reader, style, and rhetorical techniques.[69] His understanding of narrative criticism makes two major shifts of perspective.
The first shift is concerned with a shift “from fragmentation to wholeness,”[70] which involves moving towards an emphasis on the unity of the narrative. Unlike traditional historical criticism which breaks up the narrative into ‘chapters, verses and pericopae’ in order to reach its purpose; narrative criticism tends to showcase the narrative text (e.g., Mark, Matthew, Luke, John) as “a whole cloth.”[71] Accordingly Rhoads states the unity of the Gospel by pointing out: (i) the consistency of the ‘narrator’s point of view’ and of the characters from one scene to another; (ii) the way in which the plot has a closure (that is, anticipated events come to pass, conflicts are resolved, predictions fulfilled), and (iii) the rhetorical techniques, along with elements of style and organization, such as the phrase, sentence, grammar, episode, structure. To put in his words, “one can discover the unity of this Gospel in terms of the remarkable integrity of the ‘story’ which it tells, and come to trust that many apparent enigmas and discrepancies may be satisfactorily solved within the larger whole of the story.”[72]
The second shift, Rhoads stated, is a shift “from history to fiction” which basically follows the first shift: “By emphasizing the integrity of the narrative, one is able to enter the fictional world of the story.”[73] The use of the term ‘fiction’ here does not necessarily deny that “Mark used sources rooted in history or that his story does not reflect historical events of Jesus’ day.”[74] Rather, by ‘fiction’ he means to suggest that “the narrative world of the story is a literary creation of the author and has an autonomous integrity…”[75]
As such, Rhoads is not completely detached from other criticisms including historical criticism for he says: “The better critics seem to take seriously the uniqueness of each narrative and also to interpret each story in the context of the age when it was written.”[76] He also believes that knowing the history and culture of the first century will enhance understanding Mark’s story world. Although he has never acknowledged it, some scholars observes the similarity of his theory with New Criticism which holds that “form and content were inseparable” whereby meaning of the text is found in its association with the form.[77]
However, Rhoads also draws a line between narrative criticism and other criticisms which tend to fragment the text, by seeing the narrative text as a “world-in-itself.” [78] Thus he bracketed the “historical questions” and looked at “the close universe of the story-world” than putting the contexts outside of the text (as in the case of historical critical approaches).[79] Therefore it is important that one sees the narrative text as containing “a closed and self-sufficient world, with its own integrity, its own past and future, its own sets of values, its own universe of meaning.”[80] He further states that “whatever Mark’s Gospel may yield for us about historical events of Jesus’ day or the circumstances of Mark’s community or the values and beliefs of early Christians, as literature it represents first and foremost a story-world created by the author.”[81]
For making a narrative outline, Rhoads intimately follows Chatman who makes a differentiation between the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of a narrative. However, in the book Mark as Story, Rhoads along with Michie made a distinction between the content of the narrative (its story), and the form of a narrative in terms of its ‘rhetoric’rather than a ‘discourse.’ Accordingly they argue that the ‘story’ refers to ‘what’ a narrative is about while the ‘rhetoric’ refers to ‘how’ that story is told.[82] They appear to depart from Chatman’s terminology (rhetorics rather than discourse) at this point, yet not from his understanding of how narrative functions.[83]
3.2. R. Alan Culpepper: At the time Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel was released, Johannine scholarship was dominated by what Hans Frei called “the eclipse of biblical narrative” which tends to locate the narrative meaning of the text outside the stories themselves.[84] Against such understanding, Culpepper argued that the Fourth Gospel, as a coherent text, was inherently meaningful in its own right, regardless of its historicity and the circumstances that produced the story.[85] His “mirror-like” reading of the text indicates that meaning resides in an interaction between the reader and the text, and not in the historical background of the text.[86]
Unlike Rhoads whose narrative criticism was shaped by Chatman’s two-tiered model of story and discourse, Culpepper is greatly influenced by Chatman’s narrative communication model (see diagram below) in combination with Roman Jakobson’s communication model[87] which suggests that in every act of communication, there involves “a sender, a message and a receiver.”[88] When taken into literature, the ‘sender’ can be compared to the ‘author,’ the ‘message’ to the ‘text’ and the ‘receiver’ to the ‘reader,’ states Powell.[89] Yet it must be noted that Culpepper maintains a slight difference in his adoption of Chatman’s work in the way he places ‘story’ between the ‘narrator’ and the ‘narratee.’ This ‘story,’ for him, involves events, settings, characters, which stands at the center of his communicative model.[90]
Figure: Diagram of Chatman’s Narrative Communication[91] (It is regretted that this diagram cannot be uploaded).
As such, his communicative model moves in the order of the real author through the implied author to the narrator, story, narratee, and then to the implied author and real reader.[92] However, to let only four take an active role in the narrative communication would mean that the ‘real author’ and ‘real reader’ have no role in this narrative communication.[93] Likewise, the ‘meaning’ of the Gospel of John is not to be found in the world behind the text, but in the interaction “between the text that the reader encounters and the hypothetical story world that must lie behind it.”[94]
For a ‘narrative time,’ Culpepper follows Genette’s Narrative Discourse in which the ‘narrative’ functions as the text (the ‘signifier,’ the discourse, or the ‘how’), conveying the ‘story’ (the ‘signified,’ the content or the ‘what’).[95] In other words, narratives are meaningful because they contain both ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’: the ‘signifiers’ are the elements of the discourse, the words that the reader reads; while the ‘signified’ refers to the events, characters, and details of setting that exist within the story world behind the text.[96] ‘Narrative time’ is different from a ‘story time’ (which has a relationship with real or historical time and also lies within a ‘narrative time’) in a way the ‘narrative time’ is determined by the order, duration, and frequency of events in the narrative.[97]
Culpepper continues to discuss the Fourth Gospel’s plot and techniques of characterization, both of which are closely related to in his analysis. He is of the view that the gospels presented Jesus’ deeds and teachings in a ‘linear sequence’ with a certain progression and causality. Therefore, the plot of a narrative in the fourth Gospel also functions as “the evangelist’s interpretation of the story.”[98] Plot and character are thus intertwined in the larger scheme of John’s rhetorical purposes. Culpepper further identifies that almost all of John’s characters (e.g., disciples, Jews, and Mary, to name few) are ‘flat’ because of their inability to grasp the narrator’s perspective (on Jesus, the protagonist).[99]
He observes the ‘narrator’ in John as “undramatized and serves as the voice of the implied author.”[100] And as an ‘omniscient narrator,’ he was able to read Jesus minds at various points, knew that the word was with God in the beginning, and was able to report from various places, jump from one place to another and to be in two places at almost the same time.[101]
The discussion shows that Culpepper closely follows Chatman’s communicative theory, and its positive outcome can be seen in treating John as a unified story/organism. However, Culpepper was driven by “the conception of literary theorizing” which makes the results of the “theorizing as interpretive practice.”[102]
4. Critical Evaluation of Narrative Criticism
4.1. Contributions
4.1.1. Unlike historical-critical method which tends to divide larger units into smaller units for analyzing the text, narrative criticism treats the text as a whole for analysis or in a way that is consistent with Christian understanding of the canon.[103] By focusing on the text itself, it attempts to understand “the Bible on its own terms rather than in reference to something else.”[104]
4.1.2. Narrative criticism helps to understand certain biblical texts for which the historical background is obscure. While historical-critical method has attempted to find solutions to questions regarding authorship, date and sources of various New Testament books; many find it difficult to reach at a common consensus. The advantage of narrative criticism is when it enables scholars to learn about the meaning and impacts of certain biblical books without having to solve such difficult questions.[105]
4.1.3. Narrative criticism also helps to examine the ‘nuances, complexities and interrelationships’ of a text through close readings (i.e., to read along with the implied reader so as to identify the nuances, ambiguities and complexities in the text). Such analysis may entail the structure, rhetorical strategies, character development, setting, point of view, and symbolism (so as to name a few).[106]
4.1.4. Narrative criticism emphasizes on an impact the narrative text has upon the reader. Since it takes into account the reader’s response to the narrative text (i.e., the narrative point of view), it can describe the text’s effects upon the reader.[107]
4.1.5. It is also believed that narrative criticism is less conjectural than historical-critical method because an attempt to reconstruct the author’s intention is often considered “hypothetical.”[108] Rather than searching for meaning in the intentions of the authors which is not accessible anymore today; narrative criticism searches for meaning in the text itself which is still accessible even today.[109]
4.1.6. Unlike historical-critical methods which are mostly associated with the work of scholars, narrative criticism is considered to bring scholars and general (non-professional) Bible readers closer together as it does not demand for inquiring the historical transmission of the text.[110]
4.1.7. Besides, narrative criticism is said to have the potential to bring believing communities together. Powell asserts that it can invite for “ecumenical consideration of scripture” in two ways: (i) “As a method that does not begin with the question of historicity…”, and (ii) by recognizing that “a text can posses multiple meanings.”[111]
4.1.8. Narrative criticism may also be able to provide answers to some difficult questions that a believer often asks about the Bible and its meaning.[112]
4.1.9. It further functions as one of the achievements of structuralism in giving attention to a “plot structure, or the ‘grammar’ of plot,” and to the ways in which different kinds of novels are “organized to produce effects of suspense, characters, plot sequences, and thematic and symbolic patterns.”[113]
4.1.10. It must also be said that narrative criticism counters a “reductive tendency to equate truth with history.”[114]
4.2. Limitations
4.2.1. One of the limitations of narrative criticism is when it treats the Gospels as unified narratives whereas they actually are collections of (different) materials. Form critics would rather say that Gospels consisted of traditional units that had been strung together “like pearls on a string.”[115] Therefore, they may not even be relevant to call them a narrative at all.
4.2.2. It appears that narrative criticism too easily ignores and overlooks “inconsistencies” or “cracks and crevices” in the Gospels because of its insistence on their coherence.[116]
4.2.3. It also appears that narrative criticism in particular and literary theory in general tries to understand the concept of ancient literature with the concepts drawn from the study of modern literature.[117] Whereas modern literary approach developed from its encounter with modern literature, imposing such concepts and categories on ancient (e.g., Semitic) literature however may rather lead to a ‘distortion’ of the biblical text.[118] Narrative criticism is particularly interested in interpreting the scripture through methods that were used for the interpretation of secular literature and for the study of fiction.[119] For instance, books which are published in relation to narrative criticism like The Rhetoric of Fiction (Wayne Booth), Aspects of the Novel (E. M. Foster), Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Seymour Chatman) are all related to fiction. Therefore, question arises as to how insights derived from the study of novels be applied to biblical studies, while the Gospels are not works of fiction but which intend to convey historical truth.[120]
4.2.5. One of the greatest pitfalls in narrative criticism is seen in its anti-historical tendency which undermines “the historical grounding of Christian faith.”[121] To understand the Bible as a mere ‘literary text’ and as having ‘no reference to history’ may imply a complete denial of historical approach to the text. In this case, says Longman, “Abraham in Genesis is not a real person any more than the painting of an apple is real fruit.”[122] Similarly, Powell warns that it is fatal to reduce the stories of faith to a mere ‘stories.’ If the historical realities behind these stories are not inquired, it will not be possible for narrative critics to determine the significance of their meaning but only their meaning.[123]
4.2.6. Narrative criticism encounter difficulties when a claim to see the relationship between the real and implied author, between the narrator’s point of view (the voice that tells the story) and the perspective of the implied author (projected by the text), and between the implied reader and the narratee, are difficult to differentiate as in the case of the Gospel of John.[124]
4.2.7. Besides, the problem of narrative criticism lies in the reader. It is said that “when the reader becomes external to the text and functions as a contemporary reader outside textual constraint, there seems to be a resulting epistemological crisis.”[125] As a result, ‘the external contemporary reader becomes the locus of understanding’ than what the text really intended to say.[126]
4.2.8. Narrative critics can also hardly arrive at a singular meaning. Often times, they disagree to one another or, they allow for more than one interpretation of the text.[127]
4.2.9. The limitation of narrative criticism can also be found in its attempt to understand each Gospel single-handedly. In this manner, the story of Jesus would have been liable to four different stories. The challenge, therefore, is to tell the story of Jesus as the unified singular for which the discipline will require contributions from other disciplines.[128]
The discussion shows that narrative criticism as a new literary approach gives priority to the wholeness of the text and its analysis of the same. It is basically a text-centered approach, even though some critics (e.g. Rhoads) would like to claim that reading a text in relation to the historical context would enhance the meaning of the narrative text. But as a whole, it must be noted that narrative criticism inclines towards a synchronic approach. It is also pointed out that the interplay between the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of a narrative produces meaning, even if the meaning cannot be limited to the interaction between the two. The approach is comparable to other literary approaches called ‘structuralism’ in the way the text becomes a primary concern (even if it may be less philosophical), and ato ‘New Criticism’ in the way both stress on the text above the author and in emphasizing the unity of the text (but New Criticism is often criticized for not taking into account the role of the author and the reader). Besides, narrative criticism also gives importance to the impact the writing has upon the reader as in rhetorical criticism, yet again maintain differences in the way meaning is drawn from the implied author. Narrative criticism is truly a helpful methodology especially in relation to literatures which no scholar is able to ascertain their origin/background. However, the notion of ‘implied’ author/reader can be confusing. Besides, reading a scriptural text without having considered the historical background and its authorial intent appears to be more conjectural than real. A narrative criticism then can be much more effective when used in conjunction with other critical methods.
[1] Although Gérard Genette has been included in the early surveys of literary structuralism, he is mostly identified with narratology. [Elizabeth A. Castelli, et. al., eds., The Postmodern Bible: The Bible and Culture Collective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995),84]. In his book Narrative Discourse, Genette distinguished three levels that may be posited of any narrative, namely: (i) That which is given, the narrative, or say, the text itself, from which the one can reconstruct (ii) the story or signified content (the events that are the object of the narrative) on the one hand, and (iii) the narration (the act of narrating with its spatial and temporal context) on the other hand. There can be multiple possible relations between the three levels in terms of tense (temporal relation between story and narrative, i.e., chronological sequence of events), mood (non-temporal story, i.e., the narrators filtering and colouring of the story content), and voice (the shifting relation of the narrating to the story as well as to the addressee). Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, translated by Jane E. Lewin(New York: Cornell University Press, 1980), 25-32.
[2] Seymour Chatman, “Towards a Theory of Narrative,” New Literary History 6/2 (Winter 1975): 295; cf. idem. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980 [1978]).
[3] Mark Allan Powell, What is Narrative Criticism? (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 2, 7.
[4] Powell, Narrative Criticism, 5; cf. William A. Beardslee, Literary Criticism of the New Testament, Guides to Biblical Scholarship (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969).
[5] Powell, Narrative Criticism, 3.
[6] Powell, Narrative Criticism, 5-6; James L. Resseguie, Narrative Criticism of the New Testament: An Introduction (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 21.
[7] Powell, Narrative Criticism, 8.
[8] Resseguie, Narrative Criticism, 18, 20.
[9] Powell, Narrative Criticism, 15.
[10] Powell, Narrative Criticism, 13.
[11] Chatman, “Theory of Narrative,” 295.
[12] Chatman, Story and Discourse, 19.
[13] Chatman, “Theory of Narrative,” 295.
[14] Chatman, “Theory of Narrative,” 295.
[15] David Rhoads, “Narrative Criticism and the Gospel of Mark,” The Journal of the American Academy of Religion L/3 (1982): 414.
[16] Tom Thatcher, “Anatomies of the Fourth Gospel: Past, Present, and Future Probes,” in Anatomies of Narrative Criticism: The Past, Present, and Futures of the Fourth Gospel as Literature, edited by Tom Thatcher and Stephen D. Moore, SBL 55 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008), 19. Italicized in the sentences are mine.
[17] Thatcher, “Anatomies of the Fourth Gospel,” 19.
[18] Resseguie, Narrative Criticism, 121; cf. Rhoads, “Narrative Criticism,” 417.
[19] Resseguie, Narrative Criticism, 122.
[20] Rhoads, “Narrative Criticism,” 417.
[21] Geographical can include places or cities like Jerusalem, Jericho, Judea, Samaria, Galilee and the like.
[22] Topographical can refer to mountain, sea, desert, river and the like.
[23] Such as Sabbath, festival and the like.
[24] Examples can be cited as house, pool, synagogue, temple, tomb and the like.
[25] Resseguie, Narrative Criticism, 87-8; cf. Rhoads, “Narrative Criticism,” 419.
[26] Examples can be cited as crowd, soldiers, passersby and the like. Chatman, Story and Discourse, 138-39.
[27] Props, for example, can refer to Samaritan’s water jar. Resseguie, Narrative Criticism, 87-8.
[28] Chatman, Story and Discourse, 138-45; cf. Resseguie, Narrative Criticism, 88.
[29] David Rhoads and Donald Michie, Mark as Story: An Introduction to the Narrative of a Gospel (Philadephia: Fortress Press, 1982), 63.
[30] Resseguie, Narrative Criticism, 88.
[31] Powell, Narrative Criticism, 35.
[32] “Kernel events are those in which choices are made that determine the subsequent development of the narrative. Satellite events do not involve choices but simply describe the working-out of those choices make at the kernels.” Powell, Narrative Criticism, 36.
[33] “Discrepancies between the order of events in story time and discourse time are called anachronies…A general distinction is made between analepses, in which an event is narrated belatedly, and prolepses, in which an event is narrated prematurely.” Powell, Narrative Criticism, 37. “Story time here refers to the order in which events are conceived to have occurred by the implied author in creating the world of the story,” whereas “discourse time refers to the order in which events are described for the reader by the narrator.” Powell, Narrative Criticism, 36.
[34] Powell, Narrative Criticism, 42-3.
[35] Rhoads, “Narrative Criticism,” 415-16.
[36] Rhoads and Michie, Mark as Story, 35.
[37] Resseguie, Narrative Criticism, 37.
[38] Seymour Chatman, Reading Narrative Fiction (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1993),95. “Showing a story is a metaphor because ‘to show’ means literally to give a visual presentation. But in literature the author presents words, not people and objects, or even pictures of them. Readers read those words, and from them reconstruct the events, characters, and settings.” Chatman, Narrative Fiction, 92. “Every ‘told’ narrative implies a narratee, for the act of telling does not happen in a void. It presupposes someone, some audience, interested enough to hear. More often than not, narrative fictions do not name or even allude to narratees. When the narratee becomes a full-blown person in the discourse, we need to ask why the (implied) author invented her.” Chatman, Narrative Fiction, 96.
[39] Powell, Narrative Criticism, 27. However, this case can be different in the Gospel of John when Alan R. Culpepper admits the difficulty to differentiate the narrator and the implied author in John. R. Alan Culpepper, Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel: A Study in Literary Design (Philadelphia: Fortress Pres, 1983), 6-8.
[40] Chatman, Narrative Fiction, 242.
[41] Rhoads and Michie, Mark as Story, 35; Rhoads, “Narrative Criticism,” 420.
[42] Resseguie, Narrative Criticism, 168.
[43] Rhoads and Michie, Mark as Story, 35.
[44] Resseguie, Narrative Criticism, 168.
[45] Resseguie, Narrative Criticism, 168.
[46] Chatman, Narrative Fiction, 93.
[47] Chatman, Narrative Fiction, 93.
[48] Chatman, Narrative Fiction, 90, 240.
[49] Chatman, Narrative Fiction, 241.
[50] Chatman, Narrative Fiction, 242; cf. Culpepper, Anatomy, 205.
[51] Powell, Narrative Criticism, 21.
[52] Cf. Jack D. Kingsbury, “Reflections on ‘the Reader’ of Matthew’s Gospel,” New Testament Studies 34 (1978): 442-60.
[53] Powell, Narrative Criticism, 21.
[54] Culpepper, Anatomy, 7.
[55] Resseguie, Narrative Criticism, 41-2.
[56] A narrative pattern of A B A’ in which the embedded narrative of B interrupts the framing narrative of A, A’, yet resumed after the end of the embedded narrative. Resseguie, Narrative Criticism, 54.
[57] Rhetorical figures include but are not limited to rhetorical questions, antithesis, parallelism (AA’ or BB’), chiasmus/chiasm (ABB’A’), inclusions/inclusio and anaphora (repetition of the same expression at the beginning of two or more successive clauses or sentences to add force to an argument such as the repetitive use of ‘any’ in Philippians 2:1-2). Resseguie, Narrative Criticism, 56-61.
[58] Figures of thought use “words and phrases that depart from customary or standard ways of using the language” unlike that of rhetorical figures which use language in the customary, standard, or literal way. Some figures of thought are hyperbole, paradox, simile (as, like), synecdoche, metonymy, metaphor, understatement, double entendre, misunderstanding, irony (verbal and situational) and carnivalesque. Resseguie, Narrative Criticism, 61, 64.
[59] Resseguie, Narrative Criticism, 167.
[60] Culpepper, Anatomy, 20.
[61] Rhoads, “Narrative Criticism,” 421. There are four planes on which the narrative point of view is expressed: Phraseological, which refers to different kinds of words and phrases used in the narrative; spatial-temporal concerns about ‘where and when events are narrated’; psychological has to do with the different thoughts and behaviors of characters; and ideological in the sense of identifying the narrator’s norms, values, and worldview. Boris Uspensky, Poetics of Composition: The Structure of the Artistic Text and Typology of a Compositional Form, translated by Valentina Zavarin and Susan Wittig (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).
[62] Resseguie, Narrative Criticism, 198.
[63] Chatman, “Theory of Narrative,” 296.
[64] Resseguie, Narrative Criticism, 204-05.
[65] Resseguie, Narrative Criticism, 204-05.
[66] Resseguie, Narrative Criticism, 198-201.
[67] Norman Peterson, “Point of View in Mark’s Narrative,” New Testament Studies 34 (1978): 442-60.
[68] Castelli, The Postmodern Bible, 85.
[69] Rhoads, “Narrative Criticism,” 412.
[70] Rhoads, “Narrative Criticism,” 412.
[71] Rhoads, “Narrative Criticism,” 412.
[72] Rhoads, “Narrative Criticism,” 412-13.
[73] Rhoads, “Narrative Criticism,” 413.
[74] Rhoads, “Narrative Criticism,” 413.
[75] Rhoads, “Narrative Criticism,” 413.
[76] Rhoads, “Narrative Criticism,” 412.
[77] Castelli, The Postmodern Bible, 86. For further information on the inseparability of form and content in Mark, see Rhoads and Michie, Mark as Story, 4, 62.
[78] Rhoads, “Narrative Criticism,” 413.
[79] Rhoads, “Narrative Criticism,” 413.
[80] Rhoads, “Narrative Criticism,” 414.
[81] Rhoads, “Narrative Criticism,” 414.
[82] Rhoads and Michie, Mark as Story, 4.
[83] Castelli, The Postmodern Bible, 87.
[84] Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).
[85] Thatcher, “Anatomies of the Fourth Gospel,” 1-2.
[86] Culpepper, Anatomy, 4.
[87] Culpepper, Anatomy, ix.
[88] Cited in Powell, Narrative Criticism, 9.
[89] Powell, Narrative Criticism, 9.
[90] Culpepper, Anatomy, 6; cf. Castelli, The Postmodern Bible, 89.
[91] Chatman, Story and Discourse, 151.
[92] Culpepper, Anatomy, 6.
[93] Chatman, Story and Discourse, 151.
[94] Thatcher, “Anatomies of the Fourth Gospel,” 21.
[95] Culpepper, Anatomy, 53.
[96] Culpepper, Anatomy, 53; cf. Chatman, Story and Discourse, 24-5.
[97] Genette, Narrative Discourse, 31-7, 87-95;Cf. Culpepper, Anatomy, 54.
[98] Culpepper, Anatomy, 85.
[99] Culpepper, Anatomy, 102-03.
[100] Culpepper, Anatomy, 16-7.
[101] Culpepper, Anatomy, 26.
[102] Castelli, The Postmodern Bible, 291.
[103] Resseguie, Narrative Criticism, 38.
[104] Resseguie, Narrative Criticism, 38.
[105] Powell, Narrative Criticism, 86.
[106] Resseguie, Narrative Criticism, 39.
[107] Resseguie, Narrative Criticism, 40.
[108] Powell, Narrative Criticism, 96.
[109] Powell, Narrative Criticism, 96.
[110] Powell, Narrative Criticism, 87.
[111] Powell, Narrative Criticism, 89.
[112] Powell, Narrative Criticism, 88.
[113] “Though Narrative Discourse does not directly assimilate either of these investigations, it is the centerpiece of the study of narrative, for in attempting to define the forms and figures of narrative discourse.” Jonathan Culler, “Forward,” to Genette, Narrative Discourse, 8.
[114] Powell, Narrative Criticism, 99.
[115] Cf. Powell, Narrative Criticism, 91.
[116] Cf. Powell, Narrative Criticism, 92.
[117] Tremper Longman III, Literary Approaches to Biblical Interpretation, vol. 3 (Leicester: Apollos, 1987), 50. For example, Propp and Greimas developed their theories of structure of folk tales by analyzing Russian stories which are again applied to biblical stories (notably Roland Barthes). V. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, second edition(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003); A. J. Greimas, Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method, translated by Daniele McDowell, Ronald Schleifer, and Alan Velie (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983).
[118] Longman III, Literary Approaches, 50.
[119] Castelli, The Postmodern Bible, 291; Cf. Powell, Narrative Criticism, 93-4.
[120] Cf. Powell, Narrative Criticism, 93-4.
[121] Powell, Narrative Criticism, 96.
[122] Longman III, Literary Approaches, 55.
[123] Powell, Narrative Criticism, 100-01.
[124] Cf. Culpepper, Anatomy, 6-8.
[125] Castelli, The Postmodern Bible, 292.
[126] Castelli, The Postmodern Bible, 292.
[127] Cf. Powell, Narrative Criticism, 95-6.
[128] Powell, Narrative Criticism, 101.
LAI-LEENG 