Genette's Narratology versus Cognitive one in Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses

Subject Areas :

Tahmineh Kord Gharachorlou ¹ , Ahmad Sedighi ² , Roya Yaghoub ³

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Received: 2024-07-15 Accepted : 2024-08-17 Published : 2025-03-13

Keywords: Cognition, Emotion, Narratology, Plot, State of mind,

Abstract :

Gerard Genette believes that the plot of a story as an arranged form of actual events discovers the structure of a text. He knows the plot as a discourse of a story. His theory contains tense, mood, and voice as fundamental concepts that add to the fabula. Tense is the internal time of fiction that deviates from the external world. Mood depends on the perspective the narrator us-es. Voice relies on the narrator of the story. In a first-person narrative, the narrator reports sto-ries within stories from the past and present to control the events, dominate the characters, and create meaning. However, cognitive narratologists disagree and say that considering the plot of a story is essential but is not enough to determine its meaning. They say the character's mentality, the text, and the reader are also significant that structuralists discard. The cognitive narratologists remark structures cannot tell the reader about literature. The meaning of fiction is created in the character's or reader's mind through the medium of text. The researcher shows this story's struc-ture cannot determine Olivia's emotions as the main character-narrator. The reader should think about Olivia's psychological situation to apprehend the meaning of the whole fiction. The pre-sent paper investigates new insight into the workings of narrative by looking at this novel in light of a narratological perspective and to answer whether Genette's narrative theory is comprehen-sive enough to respond to all questions about the story.

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