Chapter 6, Narrative Summary: Karrah, Keagan, Aj, Hans, & Kimberly

Culler begins by telling what stories are. Stories are the way we make sense of things; life does not simply have a cause and effect relationship. A + B does not always yield C. Instead we follow the “logic of story” whereas our job as the audience is to understand, to conceive of how one thing managed to cause something else. Aristotle said all good stories require a beginning, middle and end, which are not enough. A plot requires transformation from the initial situation, change with reversal and resolution that makes that change legitimate. Stories require an ending that’s relevant to the beginning. Writers and readers shape the events in plots to make sense of things.
Presentation.

• “Who Speaks”? A first person narrator can be the main protagonist of their story, a minor character or an observer whose role is to describe events to the audience.
• “Who Speaks to Whom”? The audience is also known as the narrate, the audience at the time of the story is written is expected to recognize certain allusions. 
• “Who Speaks When”? A narrator can speak as events transpire, immediately follow particular events, or the most common method after the final event in the story.
• “Who Speaks What Language”? Different Narrators have distinct languages where they can recount a story or adopt/report the language of others. A story with many voices is called polyphonic. Single voiced story is monological.
• “Who Speaks With What Authority”? Listeners grant story tellers with a certain authority. As listeners we accept what narrators tell us until we’re given a reason to doubt them. This imposes the problem of self-conscious narration. A narrator can ‘abuse’ their power, sometimes discussing the merits of the story they tell. They can be hesitant about the manner they tell it in or flaunt their knowledge of the story.

Focalization is the story that is told through a character in third person. This person is not the narrator though the novel presents the story through their perspective. The focalizer may not be the same as the narrator.

• “Temporal”, the story could be told from what the character knew at the time or later with the benefit of hindsight, or if the author might combine these two perspectives. 
• “Distance and Speed”, the story can be told slowly in great detail or very quickly. Pseudo-iterative is something so specific that it cannot occur over and over is presented as what regularly happened.
• “Limitations of Knowledge”, sometimes narratives are presented from a limited perspective. This can describe what transpired with great detail but abandons character thoughts and intentions.

Omniscient narration is a focalizer who’s a ‘god-like’ figure with access to the thoughts and hidden motives of each character. Stories can be focalized through one character both in first person as what they observed or in third person but from a third person limited point of view. Unreliable narration is a result from limitation in point of view.

Ending “What Do Stories Do”? The simple answer is pleasure. They can give a new twist to familiar situations. Pleasure is linked to desire and when narrative is driven by desire in the form of epistemophilla, a desire to know, we want to discover the secrets within the narration, we want to know the end, to find the truth.