Chatman

I remember reading a lot of R.L. Stine books when I was growing up. In particular, he had a series of his Goosebumps books where after each chapter the reader was faced with a decision about where the story would go. For example, it would give you the option to enter the forest and turn to page 16 or return to the playground and turn to page 10.

I remember these were the most frustrating books of his to read. Although he had written all the possible plot lines, ultimately the reader was in charge of the journey and the ending. These books blurred the line between books and videogames for me. When playing a videogame, if I made a decision that ended up killing me I would start again and avoid doing the same thing. I did the same thing with Stine's books, even though some of my peers considered it cheating and gave me hell for it. But if I had made a decision and in the next chapter something vile ended up happening I would return to the former chapter and choose the other option.  read more »

"Rise of the Video Game" introduced Space Invaders as a successor of "Pong" in the video game market, and the very first experimentation with a fantasy setting: invading aliens and the defense against. While the premise of Pong was relatively simple (two people playing a highly simplified, symbolic, pixelated table tennis), a "story" and "discourse" space still existed, but wasn't at all elaborate and dependent almost entirely on the player/viewer's imagination. Space Invaders is similarly minimalistic, although out of necessity, given that game technology had not yet evolved to become a diverse storytelling toolset. Props were limited to simple, often monochrome, pixels and a game play established upon basic, simple premises.  read more »

There was a milestone in narrative history this week. Do you know what it was? And more importantly: Did you celebrate? Well, if you weren't aware, as of Wednesday February 13, the Writers Guild of America (our Hollywood screenwriters, et al) went back to work, after 100 days of being on strike. Hooray! ...Right?  read more »

I have never been much of a gamer. Perhaps anticipating my addictive personality, my parents never upgraded our video game system beyond the Atari 5200. Although I was occasionally able to play Sonic or Mario while visiting my cousin, my early experiences with video games were almost entirely defined by River Raid, Pitfall, SuperBreakout, and the like.

In high school, a friend introduced me to Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, and, when I discovered that Eric Idle had starred in two of the games based on the series, I purchased my very first non-educational computer game. Missing, Presumed...!? proved to be infuriatingly difficult, and a walkthrough became my best friend for a few weeks. Even so, the experience was an entertaining one, and I soon found myself playing Simon the Sorcerer, Monkey Island, and other such adventure games.  read more »

This blog entry will make no sense unless you watch THIS first.

If you recall Chapter 4 of Story and Discourse, Chatman delineates a few examples of "non-narrative" discourse, where an omniscient narrative voice is eschewed for a more intimate perspective of a character's thoughts. Instead of watching a story unfold from the perspective of an external narrator, the reader (or audience) is immersed directly into the character's consciousness.

Specifically, Chatman describes a soliloquy as:  read more »

• The character speaks
• Either he's alone, or his direct surroundings are unaware of his speech
• Traditionally, he faces the audience
• The audience may be anonymous, in that the speaker may not always name the audience
• The style and diction is typical of the character's normal language
• The content reflects the character's situation

When I read through Chatman's discussion of stream of consciousness and interior monologue in the last chapter, it really got me thinking. I rarely see interior monologue in literature and I'm not sure if I've ever seen stream of consciousness anywhere, though I've definitely heard about it from my English classes in IB at home. There are some pieces of dialogue in games and stories that I've read that could be incorporated as interior monologue, but since there are usually people around when they're doing their soul-searching, it can't really be called "interior" (an obscure example being Magnus' countless expressions of his own self doubt throughout the campaign of Ogre Battle 64).  read more »

I was glad to see in the Chatman chapter on existents that I'm not alone. I have always heard people talking about how a character wasn't deep enough or wasn't believable, and I could never quite understand what they meant. I don't have a problem with asking hypothetical questions about the characters like others that he cited did, but I still just see characters as created things.

I think for me the problem has always been that the line between well developed and flat characters is blurred. I've never understood what makes a character real or better than another. I don't know much about Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby, but I still find the character very real. I don't feel like I need to know everything about a character for them to be good. For comics, such as achewood, just knowing their locution and conversational tendencies is enough. I don't know much about Glottis in Grim Fandango, but he's still a very memorable character. Do I need to know where each character came from, go inside their thoughts like Mrs. Dalloway, or know what they're planning to do next for it to be a good character? The line just seems too blurred and too artificial.

So i recently saw Atonement in theaters, and as I was reading over the section on order and duration in Story and Discourse, I kept thinking back to this film because it employed many of the concepts Chatman discusses, particularly with regard to anachrony. The entire film is a bit hard to follow at first if you haven't read the book because many scenes are revisited with slightly different angles at numerous points in the story. Every event is given new light each time it is revisited, and new information is learned that helps the viewer piece together the truth of the plot. Chatman refers to this as repetitive anachrony, which he defines as an anachrony that repeats what has been stated before though with a different slant on original events. In the case of Atonement, the "slant" is the particular character's point of view, which serves a mainly expository function. There are also some ellipses in the movie that jump over a significant amount of time, leaving the viewer to piece together the untold events. One such instance is when the movie quickly transitions from the scene of Robbie's arrest to his departure with the army.  read more »

Upon reading the third chapter of Story and Discourse and reviewing Chatman's descriptions of characters through traits, I understood why certain characters stand out amidst others who are lost to the realms of the forgotten. It is, as Chatman states, the traits that define a character, and thus his/her memorability. In my experiences with stories through books, comics, and games, if the character is one-dimensional, "flat" as Chatman refers to it, s/he is often seen as boring or incredulous. A character who is inexplicably cheerful or evil simply for evil's sake does not make a believable or memorable figure, and the author or work may be criticized as comparably unilateral. It is the blending of several unique traits, often traits which may at times war with each other, that makes the character believable; are we not similarly constructed--complex, flawed, at times unpredictable? The fact that we can empathize with these constructed entities is what makes them come alive not only in the story, but also surfacing in our acquaintances or even ourselves.  read more »

"Finally, the cinema cannot describe in the strict sense of the word, that is arrest of action. It can only "let be seen"...Filmmakers may use a narrator's "voice-over"; but they find this effect inartistic, and generally limit it to introductions."

-Chatman

I'm not sure if I agree with Chatman when we makes this generalization because some of my favorite movies use voice-overs as the main tool to communicate events and emotions. Fight Club and Apocalypse Now are two of my personally favorites and I don't think that the use of voice-overs rendered them inartistic, but rather offered a different approach to effectively relay the story from the narrators point of view.

For two years, I've been involved with Theatre Strike Force, the improvisational comedy group on campus – and if there's a good way to learn the importance of narrative (as far as keeping an audience's attention), improv is probably one of the best teachers you can get. Having just been to an audition on Thursday night for the TSF-affiliated long-form improv groups (and not doing too well, I might add – for reasons both in and out of my control), the aspects of narrative that Chatman describes in Story and Discourse (Ch. 2) certainly pertain even to completely made-up situations, although at times, improvising wholeheartedly ignores or breaks the 'rules' or necessities of narrative.  read more »

Chatman’s depiction of time clearly defined the elements that compose most narrative forms: summary, ellipsis, scene, stretch, and pause. The most remarkable part of identifying these elements is the distinctive role they play in different forms of narratives. The stretch element occurs when discourse time is longer than story-time. One of the most prominent ways I have seen this manifest itself in cinema is during momentous events, like the winning of a state championship in Remember the Titans or the making of the final shot in Hoosiers to win the game.

The stretch technique helps build anticipation or suspense in the viewer which is valuable when a whole film has been based on the victory of a team. If the gaming winning shot occurred as it does in real time, in a few seconds, the viewer would not have the time to feel nervous or excited. The drawing out of these moments gives us a chance to see the player’s intensity, the coach’s passion, and the mother’s worried lines on her face.  read more »

[sigh] Seymour Chatman, I would admit, seems like a very scholarly theologian, but for our reading purposes he can be hell (at least to me). Personally I think he goes on, and on about a topic and loses the reader’s attention. That is to say, he dives deep into one topic and literally loses the reader when he tries to get back to the main point. I mentioned in class on Wednesday that I was rather confused about his two possible dispositions of events. I'm sorry I can't recall who gave the example in class, but I am thankful for their input. This blog is basically to summarize what I think he means on pages 66-67. Hopefully it helps others who are also confused by this elaborate theory. When he is trying to describe the two types of story-strands the second 'type' gets confusing. The first sequence, as you all of you may have gotten, was the continuation of one story to another. [Story A starts -> Story A ends -> Story B Starts -> Story B ends etc]. The second sequence however, is somewhat like this (I think). [Story A starts -> Story A ends -> Return back to the beginning of Story A, -> Story B starts -> Story B ends -> both Story A and Story B ends at the same time].  read more »

Over the course of my college career, I’ve gradually gotten used to reading analytical and theory texts. Some are wonderfully constructed, concise and insightful, and others… not so much. I’m still on the fence as to how I regard Chatman’s Story and Discourse. I admit that at times I don’t feel like I have the proper background necessary for maybe not comprehending but appreciating the Chatman’s efforts with this book. He mentions the work of many other scholars, including Propp, Todorov, and Genette. Honestly, I have not read any work by these people and it might be a stretch to say that I even know who they really are. So, I guess, consider this a disclaimer for whatever follows.  read more »