Puppets

This is a Puppet Show:

Nice, right? See the wizard and the lady? See the hands controlling the puppets, and the French guy? Of course you do. Puppet shows require multiple roles. First of all you have the puppets, who are the characters and the only part of the show that people are supposed to see. Then you have the puppeteers, who are controlling the puppets and giving each one a voice, unbeknownst to spectators (because they are children, and not-so-sharp). Among them is a narrator of some sort who tells us the whole story, potentially revealing things to the audience (or not). Then, of course, there is an author (the aptly-named Mr. Not-appearing-in-this-blog-post), who is on vacation somewhere because he wrote this puppet show yeeears ago. When they're all in order, it's time to get some popcorn, grab a root-beer, and sit right in front of that bar-napkin drawing of mine for a kick-ass show.

If you think about it, any old narrative fits into the same kind of basic structure: You have characters, an author who writes about them, and a narrator who bridges the gap between the two. After some struggles with diagrams, here is an example that makes a bit more sense to me: Our same puppet show, where the pink boxes represent what Barbara Dancygier calls the "Story-Viewpoint" space, and the red box represents the "Main Narrative" space. My diagram is a little different than Dancygier's, because I have that silly Frenchman on the side. We will come back to him.

What ends up happening is that the narrative action (in the Main Narrative space, stay with me) plays out, creating different narrative spaces for the audience. Those narrative spaces are constructed by observers, based on the action and narration: They are like the scenes in your  head that you make-up as you read, and then associate with different characters and actions. 

So, again, in that red box we have 1.) Characters, 2.) their actions, and therefore 3.) Narrative spaces.

The Story-Viewpoint space (pink, remember?) is where we have our Narrator, the puppeteer, through whose viewpoint we learn what's happening. The narrator chooses what to highlight on stage, what the characters on stage will say and do, and what commentary to make about it. He therefore shapes how we will interpret each character and the narrative as a whole.

But the whole puppet-stage (everything in blue) was constructed by an author, i.e. the writer of the puppet show script who is probably rolling in dough from this clear success of a performance (not the French guy, wait for him, he's coming up next).

So, between the Main Narrative/stage/red box and the Story-Viewpoint/backstage/pink box, there is a lot of connection, i.e. those puppet strings. The characters, though perhaps based on real people with free-will, are totally non-agentive puppets. The viewpoint is thus established by the narrator/puppeteers who are calling all the shots, and are the lens (viewpoint) through which we view all the action. Get it?

But this is a little too simple --- we know that sometimes there is a narrator-character-puppet who appears on-stage, and tells us what has happened/is going to happen/whatever they want us to know which can change our interpretation of the story as a whole. In that case, the string from the hand to the narrator is a live-wire, connecting the narrator to that Main Narrative space (pink box to red box, yes) because he is also a character in the story.

What about that French guy, eh? Well, he can have different roles --- like, sometimes the narrator is totally outside the action, not connected to the narrative at all, but can still give us some background or reveal some secrets. This narrator can even be the author himself (is Mr. Not-appearing-in-this-blog-post French?), or a least the personaof the author, who controls viewpoint as well, but not interact with the characters. But in the end, the author is totally at his time-share, because the show was written in the past, and the performance is just a re-telling of the story the author intended. He is not there. We know you didn't write this, Frenchie. Don't play games.

The possibilities get much more complicated depending on the type of viewpoint that the author is trying to create,which involves time and language as well as shifting viewpoints and all types of crazy narration techniques, but here's one simple example for you. Hopefully this will become clearer, but for now, just watch out for that guy with the mustache --- he's tricky.

-Sarah