Raffles Programme

2024 Year 4 English Literature: Close Reading Prose (Handout 1a)

Name: _________________________ Class: ________ Date: ___________

Overview of Narrative Techniques

A. Sentence Types

Sentence Type Explanation Example

It makes a statement to relay information and
Declarative
ideas, and often conveys a matter-of-fact tone, You drink coffee every day.
Sentence
one that is perhaps bland or unemotional.
Interrogative It usually suggests that the speaker is surprised,
You drink coffee every day?
Sentence quizzical or incredulous
(If character is drinking coffee
leisurely while another character is
Rhetorical questions are questions that are
getting ready to rush out of the
Rhetorical asked without expecting an answer. Writer use
house)
Question rhetorical questions for dramatic effect
sometimes.
Are you sure there isn’t something
else you need to do today?
It usually expresses the strong or heightened
emotion of the speaker. What this emotion is
Exclamatory
depends on the context of the passage, and you You drink coffee every day!
Sentence
would need to specify the emotion, e.g. hatred,
anger, horror, delight.
Imperative It can suggest that the speaker is being assertive,
You must drink coffee every day.
Sentence officious or dictatorial.

Note: Whenever you feel a sentence or indeed any device is used for emphasis, you must go on to state what is being
emphasised.

B. Paragraph and Sentence Length

• The juxtaposition of long and short paragraphs or sentences can be used to create a particular effect.
• Many short paragraphs or sentences together often have a noticeable effect, often indicating a fast and
possibly exciting pace, tension, irony, and/or having the effect of humour. A series of short sentences may
also make the prose seem choppy and disconnected, or, if they are of equal length, it may be monotonous.
• Many long paragraphs or sentences together usually result in the writing seeming dense, swollen, or
ponderous, or it can come across as strongly descriptive, or very intellectual, even perhaps pretentiously
so.

C. Sentence Structure
• Sentences may follow conventional structures similar to ordinary simple speech, or they use more complex,
unusual or artificial structures.
• There may be symmetry or balance in the structure of a sentence, e.g. the sentence falls into two or three
deliberately balanced parts.
• Sentences can be written in a bipartite or tripartite structure.

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 o Bipartite: Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.
o Tripartite: The Holy Trinity of father, son and holy ghost.

Remember to choose appropriate words to describe the precise effect of the use of a particular sentence type, length
or structure. The effect of the above items, however, can only be judged in the context of the whole piece of writing,
and certainly depends on the words in the sentence or paragraph itself.

D. Linguistic Register
The formality of the language not only affects the tone of the writing, but also suggests the context of the
prose piece. For example, the use of colloquial language or informal language may help to establish the
nationality or setting of the character(s), add humour to the piece, provide a greater sense of immediacy, or
make the writing more engaging.

E. Style of Writing
Style can be described as the distinctive manner in which a piece is written, a way of literary expression. It can
refer to the writer’s purposeful use of language to achieve certain effects. The use of –or lack of–variation in
sentence type, length, structure (as well as other rhetorical devices) contributes to the overall style of the
writing. For example, the style may be:

simple terse effusive conversational energetic rambling

sparse complex convoluted sentimental dense verbose
economical expansive elevated ornate eloquent emphatic

Look these words up in the dictionary to find out their nuances.

F. Plot – Conflict and Tension

Characters’ actions often occur in sequence / a chronological order. Once we have established the narrative
order, we need to consider the significance of the plot / or the plan of development of the actions. Without a
plot, the prose passage does not have a story or drama. Conflict is the most significant element of plot because
it generates interest and tension in a story, prompting the reader to become more engaged in the story as
there is doubt in how the story will end. Writers can also use suspense in their stories to build excitement / anxiety
in the reader.

Suspense
As a plot evolves, it arouses expectations in the reader about the future course of events and how characters
will respond to them. A lack of certainty on the part of a concerned reader about what is going to happen,
especially to characters with whom the reader has established a bond of sympathy, is known as suspense.

Conversely, if what happens goes against the expectations we have formed, it is known as surprise. The most
effective surprise, especially in realistic narratives, is one which turns out to have been grounded in what has
gone before; where the writer leads the reader to at first make the wrong inference from the given facts of
circumstance and character, and there is a turning point in the plot that is unexpected.

Prose as Narrative Fiction

The distinction between prose and poetry is that prose often has a narrative / narration while poems tend to
be lyrical in nature.

There are two main levels in a narrative:

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• the level of story: the basic events or actions in chronological order in which they are supposed to have
happened, together with the circumstances in which the actions are performed.

• the level of narration: this comprises the techniques and devices used for telling the ‘story’ to the reader.

These two levels may be seen as corresponding to the distinction between the tale itself and the manner in
which it is told.

Narrative Point of View (POV) / Perspective

The term ‘point of view’ is used to describe and analyse distinctions between types of narration. It signifies the
way a story gets told – the mode (or modes) established by an author by means of which the reader is
presented with the characters, dialogue, actions, setting, and events that constitute the narrative in a work of
fiction. It thus refers to the different types of relation of the teller to the tale in any narrative.

1. First-Person Perspective
This POV, insofar as it is consistently carried out, limits the matter of the narrative to what the first-person
narrator knows, experiences, infers, or can find out by talking to other characters. We distinguish between
different types of narrative "I" in the following ways:

i. One who is only a witness and auditor of the matters s/he relates
ii. One who is a participant, but only a minor or peripheral one
iii. One who is himself or herself the central character in the story

Characteristics of the First-Person POV:

• Is able to share thoughts and feelings directly with the reader

• Is involved in the narrative as a character
• May be unreliable
• Cannot enter into the thoughts of other characters

2. Second-Person Perspective
In this POV, the story gets told solely, or at least primarily, as an address by the narrator to someone he calls
by the second-person pronoun "you." This form of narration occurred in occasional passages of traditional
fiction, but has been exploited in a sustained way only during the latter part of the twentieth century and then
only rarely.

This second person may turn out to be a specific fictional character, or the reader of the story, or even the
narrator himself or herself, or not clearly or consistently the one or the other. The story may unfold by
shifting between telling the narratee what he or she is now doing, has done in the past, or will or is commanded
to do in the future.

When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger
in a past stacked among your pillows. Usually you are nestled under blankets and the house is
empty. Sometimes the moon is missing and beyond the windows the low, gray ceiling seems
approachable. Its dark light dims in degrees depending on the density of clouds and you fall back
in that which gets reconstructed as metaphor. 5

The route is often associative. You smell good. You are twelve attending St. Philip and James
School on White Plains Road and the road sitting in the seat behind asks you to lean to the right
during exams so she can copy what you have written. Sister Evelyn is in the habit of taping the

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 100s and the failing grades to the coat closet doors. The girl is Catholic with waist-length brown 10
hair. You can’t remember her name: Mary? Catherine?

You never really speak except for the time she makes her request and later when she tells you
smell good and have features more like a white person. You assume she thinks she is thanking
you for letting her cheat and feels better cheating from an almost white person.

From Citizen: An American Lyric (Claudia Rankine)

The “You” narrator in the story passage above places the reader in an uncanny position. On the one hand,
the reader is directly addressed, placed in the position of the subject of the work: the one experiencing the
emotions, the reactions to the countless slights and aggressions and accumulation of daily “mistakes” that lead
to the sense that “You” are something less than a full citizen of the nation. On the other, “You” has a peculiar
distancing effect. Because we are much more familiar with works in the first or third persons, in which we
immerse ourselves in the perspective of an “I” or a “he/she/it” with whom we can identify but who is distinctly
not us, the narration introduces a kind of dissonance into the reading. There’s a numbness to narration by a
“You,” a flatness.

3. Third-Person Perspective

Third-person narration can be used in such a way that we are not particularly aware of the role of the narrator,
who remains outside the action of the tale. Moreover, the narrative does not need to provide a justification
for the existence of the narrator (as compared to first person narration).

The following are the different ways of evaluating the use of third-person perspective (omniscient / limited,
external / internal, intrusive / unintrusive) in any passage of fiction:

Omniscient Limited

External Internal

Intrusive Unintrusive

a. Omniscient / Limited
An omniscient third-person narrator knows everything that needs to be known about the agents, actions, and
events, and has privileged access to the characters' thoughts, feelings, and motives. The narrator is also free
to move at will in time and place, to shift from character to character, and to report (or conceal) their speech,
doings, and states of consciousness.

The limited third-person narrator tells the story in the third person, but stays inside the confines of what is
perceived, thought, remembered and felt by a single character (or at most by very few characters) within the
story. In such a POV, there is a deliberate narrowing down of a potentially omniscient narration in a narration
that aligns itself strongly with the consciousness of one character, even while remaining third person. It is
important to recognise, therefore, that third person narration need not always embody objectivity. It can quite
easily work from subjective, internal and restricted positions.

b. External (objective) / Internal

Within the third-person perspective, the narration could observe characters and events from outside (i.e.
externally). But third-person narration may also provide access to the (internal) consciousness of characters
by telling us how they think and feel.

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c. Intrusive / Unintrusive
Within this POV, the intrusive narrator is one who not only reports, but also comments on and evaluates the
actions and motives of the characters, and sometimes expresses personal views about human life in
general. Such narrators usually tend to be omniscient.

On the other hand, the third-person narrator may choose to be unintrusive (alternative terms are impersonal
or objective). Such writers for the most part describes, reports, or "shows" the action in dramatic scenes
without introducing his own comments or judgments. More radical instances of the unintrusive narrator even
give up the privilege of access to inner feelings and motives of characters (i.e. focus on the external).

Characteristics of the Third-Person POV:

• Can enter into the thoughts of other characters (i.e. omniscient) or may stay within the confines of a
particular character (i.e. limited).
• May be invisible, or may comment on the narrative (i.e. intrusive narrator)
• Is not involved in the narrative as a character.