Why is Narrative important when
shaping a visual image to the audience?
Narrative is a
story-telling. It is a story which consist of experiences, series of
events, actors, time and location whether true or fictitious. As
stated by Altman (2008), Narrative is "the practice of
story-telling". Therefore, a visual image will be just a picture
and the meaning of the image will be unknown without narrative.
According to Aristotle,
in his work which is focused on literary theory of “poetry”, he
says “a tragedy has the following parts: Prologue, Episode, Exode,
and a choral portion, distinguished into Parode and Stasimon (Howell,
1968). Basically, Aristotle asserted that a narrative has a
beginning, middle and it is structured according to its
intertextuality with the help of the Parode (character) and Stasimon
(narrator). Therefore, Narrative has its own structures which are
beginning part, middle part and final part. This 3 parts are called
as Aristotle's Dramatic Structures.
According to Mieke Bal
(1997) also stated that narrative has 3 structures but different from
Aristotle's Dramatic Structure. He stated first part as Fabula which
is telling us what is happened in the story and why it is happened.
Second part is plot which made of Fabula or events to form a
consistent and coherent whole. Last part is text which represent of
information that produced by an agent. These 3 parts has its
purposes. Beginning part is telling about how the story begin, middle
part is known as climax part where the conflict is happened and final
part is the conclusion of the story.
There are two natures of
narratives which are Story and Discourse. Story is the chronology of
events that is in a narrative. In other word what is told is the
story, which means it is the narrative content. Genette (1988)
stated, discourse is the “oral or wtitten, that narrates them”
which means how the narrative is told. Discourse makes a story clear
on how it is to be told. The visual image will produces a story to
the audience in a form of picture due to the natures of the
narrative. This natures of narrative helps to shape the visual image.
Therefore, this will make the audience understand what is the meaning
of the image. The picture below is an example.
The picture below show
what is told, which is about the war. The first scene shows a group
of soldiers were in battlefield. The second scene shows how the
soldiers help each other do camouflage. The third scene shows the
soldiers are hiding and sneaking the enemy and the last scene shows
how one of the soldier help the other soldier who was shot. This is
how it is told, which is by creating a picture of different scenes in
one picture.
In conclusion, narrative
is important when it comes to shaping the visual image because
narrative is story-telling. It is also due to the two natures of
narrative which is story and discourse which helps in shaping the
visual image to the audience.
References:
Altman, R. (2008). A Theory of
Narrative. New York: Columbia University Press.
Bal, Mieke. (1997). Narratology:
Introduction to the theory of narrative. University of Toronto
Press.
Genette, G. (1988). Narrative
Discourse Revisited. New York: Cornell University Press.
Howell, W. (1968). Aristotle And Horace
On Rhetoric And Poetics. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 54(4),
325.
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