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Chatman

In examining the details of literary theory and narrative structure, Seymour Chatman (1978) explores the nature of a narrative's events, which corresponds to our meaning of action.

Chatman notes that a story's events are "radically correlative, enchaining, entailing", forming a sequence that is "not simply linear but causative" (1978, p. 45). As we have seen, this has been a view held since Aristotle. Chatman suggests that readers will often infer a causality between events, even if such a relationship is not explicitly stated in the narrative itself.

More recent critics have denied such a strict causal view of narrative. A more relaxed view is that later events are simply contingent upon earlier events. That is, the later events depend on earlier events for their existence or occurrence, even if those earlier events did not specifically cause the later events.

However, Chatman notes that not all narratives are concerned primarily with events, changes, or consequences. In a modern plot of revelation, the point is to simply reveal a state of affairs or to explore the details of a character.

The connections between events play a part in a story's verisimilitude. Part of a story's "believability" stems from how early events lead to later events. That is, to what degree does the story contain outrageous coincidences or completely unforeshadowed solutions. But another part of a story's verisimilitude involves the characters--particularly whether their reactions and motivations are understandable. However, it should be noted that verisimilitude is largely a matter of convention established by other texts in the same genre. For example, shooting a cheater over a game of cards is relatively normal behavior in a western, requiring little explanation. The same act is less usual in a Victorian society novel, which means the killer's motivations may need to be presented in more detail for a reader to accept the action.

Chatman also argues that not all events are equal--some are more important than others. These important events, which he calls kernels, are those narrative moments where the course of events is decided, where one path is chosen from the various possibilities. It is these kernels that are connected by causality or contingency; as such, these kernels cannot be removed without destroying the logic of the story.

However, there also exist minor events, which Chatman calls satellites. Satellites do not entail any choice, but serve to flesh out the consequences and details of the kernels. Therefore, satellites could be removed from the story and leave the logic intact, although the resulting story would be impoverished.

These kernels and satellites define a microstructure of events. However, we can also discern a macrostructure--a general overarching story structure--which allows us to group stories together based on structural similarities. The work of Propp and Todorov are examples of this. But Chatman points out the limits of this approach. These macrostructures are not generic or universal, but very specific to a narrow, particular genre--such as Russian folktales or Decameron stories. These are simple, well-structured tales, and their macrostructure does not apply to more general stories.

Nor can we classify stories simply by indexing their kernel events, as an event can only be understood in terms of its greater story context. "A killing may not be a murder but an act of mercy, or a sacrifice, or a patriotic deed, or an accident, or one or more of a dozen other things. No battery of preestablished categories can characterize it independently of and prior to a reading of the whole" (Chatman 1978, p. 94).

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Works Cited

Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978.

ToDo

Discuss probability models? See source for a dropped paragraph on this.
Mention content-based classifications again here?