Читать книгу Types of Prose Narratives. A Text-Book for the Story Writer онлайн

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Narrative as a general type needs no definition. What pure description is the ordinary reader might hesitate to assert, or exposition, or argumentation; but not story: he knows that. Let an author combine these others with a series of events, let him put them in as aids to the understanding or as ornaments on the thread of his recital, and they are accepted without question as elements of narration, be it prose or verse in form, true or fictitious in content. That is to say, though a story often contains to some extent all the other forms of writing too, we think of it as narrative because it carries us along a course of events. Frequently the teller spends much time in studying different styles and kinds of description and in analyzing various devices used to secure definite effects, because he wishes to call to his aid every bit of skill possible in portraying his characters and places; but general readers take his fine points of description and exposition as matters of course and are crudely interested in the happenings he has to relate. They are unconscious of the fact that much of their enjoyment comes from knowing how a hero looks, what his surroundings are, and what his disposition and usual character. A story-writer gives no small amount of attention also to transcribing conversations; but the ordinary reader takes these likewise as expected parts of narrative. But there is one thing that the author and the reader agree on at the outset as necessary to be settled; namely, the kind of story to be written or to be read.