Readings in Narrative Theory: Narrative as Rhetoric

At the moment, I am doing some intensive reading in narrative theory and game studies. I'd like to present some summaries of my readings here, as well as quotes of interest I have found, and how the reading topics relate to my work. In addition to helping me organize my own thoughts, I hope the summaries might be helpful to others looking for readings on the same or similar subjects. Work summaries will be preceded in posts by their bibliographic information.

Phelan, James. Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996.

Of the chapters from Phelan's book I read, only one ended up frantically pasted with post-it notes; I found the chapter on second-person narrative to be particularly interesting and very relevant. One of the topics of my paper is the feeling of empathy that the medium can generate by combining the personas of the player (as audience, narratee, etc.) with the persona of the main character (as protagonist, narrator) - having the decisions and actions of the former control the latter, allowing the player to in effect mentally substitute himself for the character in the world. (What Gee apparently calls "projected identity.") Perhaps unsurprisingly, the best literary parallel I've come across so far has been second-person narration. A quote (this and all following quotes are from chapter 7 of Phelan's book, entitled "Narratee, Narrative Audience, and Second-Person Narration: How I--And You?-- Read Lorrie Moore's "How""):

"When the second-person address to a narratee-protagonist both overlaps with and differentiates itself from an address to actual readers, those readers will simultaneously occupy the position of addressee and observer. Furthermore, the fuller the characterization of the you, the more aware actual readers will be of their differences from that you, and thus the more fully they will move into the observer role--and the less likely that this role will overlap with the addressee position. In other words, the greater the characterization of the you, the more like a standard protagonist the you becomes, and, consequently, the more actual readers can employ their standard strategies for reading narrative. However, as recent commentators on the second-person narration have consistently observed, most writers who employ this technique take advantage of the opportunity to move readers between the positions of observer and addressee, and, indeed, to blur the boundaries between these positions." (137)

When Phelan uses "observer" in this passage, he means the audience as reader, the person observing and mentally cataloguing/interpreting the text. The "implied reader," to use the literary lingo. In gaming, this would be the audience as player. The gamer with the control pad, controlling the character's actions from outside the game's context.

The "addressee" on the other hand, is the "you" of the second-person narration, the addressed individual that the narrative describes. Phelan quotes from a work by Lorrie Moore ("How") as his example of second-person narration:

"Begin by meeting him in a class, a bar, at a rummage sale. Maybe he teaches sixth grade. Manages a hardware store. Foreman at a carton factory. He will be a good dancer. He will have perfectly cut hair. He will laugh at your jokes."

The addressee here is the "you" who is telling jokes. The "you" who meets "him" at a bar, or a rummage sale. The "you" is a character in the story, and has specific characterization (in particular, in this passage, she is female and dating). The gaming parallel here is the PC - the character that the player controls. Though characterized (we know exactly what Sora from Kingdom Hearts looks like, who his friends are, how he talks, etc.), the PC is still conflated with the player by allowing the player to control his actions, in the same way that the observer and addressee are connected by the pronoun "you."

Phelan's point about characterization steering the audience towards the observer role rather than the addressee role is particularly relevant to my work - in my chapter on player/character empathy, I posit that "implicit characterization" - or characterization that takes place mostly in the mind of the player, rather than in cues inherent in the game - lends itself more readily to a high level of immersion and empathy. This is as opposed to "explicit characterization," which provides the characterization for us within the game, and thus limits the degree to which we as a players can substitute ourselves into that character's role. If the player is thought of as the implicit "you," then he may assume that all characterization elements that apply to him also apply to the main character, unless told specifically otherwise. For instance, if I do not know the gender of a main character, I might choose to believe that she is female, to better empathize and put myself in her position. However, if I am told (as I often am) that the main character is male, this is one step of distance between who I am and who the character is.

For this reason (empathic generality), many games have silent protagonists (the "Silent Protagonist Phenomenon," as I like to call it) - the PCs have no voice, and no dialogue. This very important trait - how the character responds to the world around him, is left up to the player's discretion and imagination. A sarcastic player may choose to imagine sarcastic responses to questions posed to his character, while a sympathetic player may imagine sympathetic responses. We, as players, are allowed characterization that suits our preferences and personality, allowing us to draw as close to the character as possible.

Other quotes:

"Because Moore begins by narrating an event in which the actual reader is not directly involoved--girl meets boy-- the observer role is initially more prominent. But in the second paragraph, where the gender of the you is not specified and the general trajectory of the you's experience is widely recognizable, the actual reader is likely to feel the pull of the adressee role." (137-138)

"As Rabinowitz says, Prince's narratee remains "out there," distinct from the actual reader; a narrative audience, by contrast, occupies some part of the actual reader's consciousness and, given the default position, the actual reader also gives traits to the narrative audience." (143)

"Is it adequate to say, as a structuralist narratology would, that the unnamed you addressed by the narrator is the narratee and the protagonist, that the narrative's implied reader is different from this narratee, someone who infers from the narrator's address a larger cultural story about female-male relationships? Although this account gets at a good part of the communicative structure of the text, it is not fully adequate. It leaves out the way that the second-person address exerts pressure on the actal reader--even the male reader, as in the second paragraph--"to take on the role" of the narratee-protagonist as "you" experience(s) the ups and downs (especially the downs) of the relationship. In other words, continuing to assume that the narratee is a distinct character who is "out there" will mean not just that we prefer the structuralist to the rhetorical framework; it also will mean that the structuralist analysis will neglect a significant aspect of how the text attempts to communicate." (143-144)

"For the mimetic illusion and the emotional force of a play to work, we must enter the observer position of the "narrative" ("dramatic"?) audience and believe in the reality of, say, Othello, Iago, and Desdemona. Indeed, the oft-discussed instances of people leaping upon the stage to stop the action are, in these terms, examples of what happens when we enter so deeply into the narrative audience position that we fail to maintain our simultaneous participation in the authorial audience." (145)

"In narrative, where we always have narrative audiences and narratees, one of the variables in narrative discourse will be how much the narratee and the narrative audience overlap. As I suggested earlier, what second-person narration shows is that the more fully the narrative is characterized, the greater the distance between narratee and narrative audience; similarly, the less the narratee is characterized, the greater the coincidence between the two." (146)

"As I noted above, "How" identifies the narratee as female, but the second-person address blurs the separation of narratee and narrative audience frequently enough for the observer of either sex to be pulled into the narrative's subject position." (148)

"While the clear distinction between the narratee and the narrative audience allows us to infer so much about the narratee's behavior and situation, the "you" address also invites us to project ourselves--as narrative audience, authorial audience, and actual readers--into the narratee's subject position. Consequently, the inferences we make as we occupy the narrative audience position lead us to a complicated vision that mingles narratee and self in the narratee's position. We both occupy the position and know what the position is like in a way that the narratee herself does not. In this way, we feel addressed by the narrator but not fully coincident with the narratee." (151)

As you can see, Phelan's conclusions about second-person address have direct parallels with gaming. Because the player is required to participate in the narrative, she is always addressed as an implicit "you" by the game, by sheer virtue of the fact that her actions/decisions control the main character. The character is her window into the world, her remote-controlled puppet, and addresses to that character by the game automatically become addresses to the player as well, in the same way that the player's actions become the character's actions.