One theme of the 173 course on narrative elements was that there is no definitive way of thinking about any of these elements. There are a plethora of ideas about each and, too, there is no need to establish a "stable" view of any because they can change from reading to reading, reader to reader, and even within a narrative itself. Therefore, although below there are "definitions" these are meant to help convey how we approached an element, not a finalized definition of an element.
Also by way of introduction it should be mentioned that the fundamental view of the course was that a narrative is code and a story is an interpretation of the code with no physical existence whatsoever. It is entirely cognitive and subjective, although through communication with others a "story" and be transpersonal. "Code" means the words and layout of a print story or all the many aspects of a film (music, script, camera angle, etc etc.) Thus "story" will be what arises in the mind of the reader and "narrative" will be that thing which the reader reads or the viewer views (and hears) as prior as is possible to the invention / creation of a story although in truth interpretation (significance-making) starts as soon as a reader / viewer encounters any potion of the narrative.
Finally, I find this site interesting: “The Living Handbook of Narratology,” https://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/index.html.This is what we used during the course:
The definition of "character" is not a settled issue. In our course we define a character as "an entity that had, has or appears that it could have intentionality and has engaged in action but where that judgment is lodged in narrative figures not us as readers."
So an immobile and silent statue resembling a human is not a character. It is a prop. Nor is a mechanical doll that repeats the same phrase over and over. It is also a prop. However, if a character within the narrative believes that the statue is talking, or that the doll is not mechanically repeating but acting with intentionality, then they are characters (of a sort).
A statue that gives advice though signs or spoken words is a character.
Any human who has acted within the narrative is a character.
The key here is "perceived (by a character in the story) as having intentionality in action."
However, I would like to revise that to:
"a character (at the level of the story we construct) is any entity that could be perceived by other characters, the narrator, or the reader as having intentionality that might lead to action that will affect any character in the story."
Another way to say this is "a character is any entity in the story we obtain from the narrative for whom we think we may need to generate a ToM (Theory of Mind)*."
*"To a large extent, the human infant is socialized through the acquisition of a specific cognitive mechanism known as theory of mind (ToM), a term which is currently used to explain a related set of intellectual abilities that enable us to understand that others have beliefs, desires, plans, hopes, information, and intentions that may differ from our own.
Korkmaz, Baris. "Theory of Mind and Neurodevelopmental Disorders of Childhood." Pediatric Research 69, no. 8 (May 2011): 101–8. https://doi.org/10.1203/PDR.0b013e318212c177.
Characters are entities that engage in non-random (intended) actions that might enter into relationship with or help or hurt or change the circumstances of other characters. They are entities we notice and think about or should notice and think about.
Our definition of "interest" was specific, limited and social: if the majority of the group to whom you are offering something (an idea, a story) would agree that your offering is interesting, then it is.
The narrator is the narrative-telling entity. The narratee is the entity to whom the narrative is being told. There can be narratives embedded within narratives so there can be sub-narrators and sub-narratees.
However, the narrator is not the author and the narratee is not the reader. Rather, these two entities—narrator and narratee—arise through the cognitive, creative acts of the empirical writer and the empirical reader (or viewer). Both rely on the mediation of code, which itself is not neutral and thus brings yet a third influence to the process. The writer "creates" a narrator with a narratee in mind (perhaps someone specific, more often a diffuse collection of possible imaginary listeners). The reader/viewer, too, constructs a narrator with its narratee. (This is a very important step in analysis and can sometimes be quite difficult. It also often does not lead to one clear conclusion.) To some degree larger or small the writer's and reader's constructed narrator-narratee pair will overlap as a result of the constraints and guidance of the code, which is assembled by the writer making reasonable guesses about how the reader might assign significance to (interpret, give meaning to, make sense of) the writer's offered code.
Having a clear vision of the distance between narrator and narratee and the nature of that relationship is sometimes an important element in understanding the narrative. "My dearest Elizabeth ..." (a letter); "Class, the next thing I tell you might someday be a matter of life and death" (teacher and student); "Once upon a time, in a land far far away ...", and so on.
intradiegetic / extradiegetic
homodiegetic / heterodiegetic
first second person ...
focalization
https://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/26.html
This was not an official term in the Japan 173 class although the importance of considering the "model reader" was presented as key to understanding.
A reader has a limited tolerance for meaning ambiguity. Some mystery in a text is appealing as the reader's curiosity seeks to unpuzzle things, or enjoys the possibility of multiple meanings, or enjoy the suggestive spaces invoked. However, an over-abundance of indistinction can lead a reader to decide the text is too much trouble to bother with. And the lack of a road map for interpretation can cause the reader to misinterpret to the degree that it misses the point of the text. For these reasons a creator usually must bend to this basic: the narrative will be consistent enough to maintain its storyworld and there will be enough navigational signals that the reader can develop reasonable expectations. Expectations need not necessarily be fulfilled--surprises, plot twists, shifts in what one should think the storyworld is are all interesting, exciting, and pleasurable to a reader. But if the text is so puzzling that the reader cannot erect a reasonable set of expectations ("this is the storyworld and this is how things work within it .... I think") the magic of the story evaporates.
So the contract is this: I, the creator, will provide a narrative predictable enough that you the reader has a chance to interpret it but not so predictable as to bore you. I will not be excessively arbitrary or random.
There are exceptions to this of course. For example, the whole point of absurd literature is to be blaringly illogical. And, at the other end of the spectrum, some stories follow a template so closely as to be exceptionally easy to predicate and so are reassuring on that front.
The principle behind the contract is simple: interpretation requires expectation.
Settings are specific locations (whether well-defined or not) of narrative actions and events. They have an enormous impact on the overall atmosphere of the story and, like characters, can be enormously important for a sense of readerly immersion.
Settings can be described in various ways and with reference to various senses.
"The setting of the story helps distinguish characters from one another in how these characters, unique in their class, background, gender, ethnicity, etc., respond to their environment."
Hones, Sheila. "Literary geography: setting and narra!ve space."
Social & Cultural Geography 12.7 (2011): 685-699.
"Every place is a space, but not every space is a setting. “Setting” is different from “space” in that it has no meaning independent of characters’ presence—their actions, habits, personali!es, and thoughts."
Witter, Seth Barry. “On the Concept of Stting: A Study of V.F. Perkins.”
JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, vol. 58, no. 3, Mar. 2019, p. 72.
"There are backdrop settings and integral settings in literature. Backdrop settings are usually more general, and we are unable to pinpoint this to any certain era. These are usually reserved for fairy tales or myths, as the focus is based more on the moral of the story rather than the specifics of the era. Integral settings, on the other hand, are (as the name states) integral to the story. The setting is an essential part of the story, affecting the characters, events, and intricacies of the narrative."
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Setting." Encyclopaedia Britannica, 10 Apr. 2016,
https://www.britannica.com/art/setting
Story logic fail is a step in the progression of the plot (which is used by the reader to construct a story in their mind, thus "story logic fail" not "plot logic fail") which does not make sense—such as a cause-and-effect pair where the effect does not seem to logically arise from the cause; for example, crying when hearing a joke.
However, other conditions need to be met:
Genre consideration. Different genre deploy different cause-and-effect expectations. If you read a fantasy as gritty realism all sorts of things won't make sense. What is the most natural "genre" or "genres" of a narrative is determined by the collective negotiations of writer-text-reader. However, this is not stable. If the narrative is shared by others, that is, if it is discussed in a forum of some sort, a collective judgment of "correct" genre is decided. But, privately, one can attribute any "genre" one wishes; however, some will enable the construction of more engaging stories than other possible genre. In any event, what "makes sense" in terms of cause-and-effect and plot progression changes to some degree with genre.
Relevant group. For something to be story logic fail rather than just inaccurate reading or insufficient external contextual knowledge (such as cultural contextual knowledge) one's relevant group needs to likely conclude, in the majority and on their own without the reader's skillful persuasion, that the plot step does not make sense. That being said, the "relevant group" is the group relevant to the reader. If the reader cares nothing about what others think, the relevant group is just the reader their-selves. However, more likely the reader imagines the sharing of this story with others: a friend, a significant other, a larger social group, the world .... That group, each member, in a real or imagined (by the reader) way, should conclude on the whole that the plot has just progressed in a way that does not makes sense.
Ambiguity. Of course stories rely on ambiguity for evoking richness of meaning, suspense, mystery and a myriad of other very interesting things. This story does not "make sense" in terms of story logic fail does not mean that the story fails to be entirely clear but rather than a certain more is clearly unacceptably odd.
Reading error. We make mistakes as readers, or we read too quickly, or we don't yet fully understand how to read well a certain type of thing. We don't understand ... yet. In this cases "doesn't make sense" is a good indication for us to ask ourself whether we simply are reading successfully yet.
Disagreements. When we understand what the text is asserting but cannot accept it as a fair representation of the world, that is not story logic fail. That is a readerly refusal to accept the textual assertions. In such cases when we say "the story doesn't make sense" we actually mean "I don't agree with the worldview of the story or its understanding of human behavior."
While there are other elements at play, the above are some of the major ones. Thus, when the majority of one's relevant group, having a consensus on genre(s), concludes that something of the narrative doesn't make sense, and it is not ambiguity, reading error, or disagreement, then the credibility of the narrative spirit is wounded or collapses entirely and it loses narrative magic and allure. Probably nothing is more damaging to a narrative than story logic fail.
Storyworld as high level reading. In keeping with the approach in 173 of treating the narrative as closer to the code and the story as what the reader constructs following that narrative, the storyworld is the physics, spaces and times of the story as imagined by the reader. Thus the below explanation is interpreted in 173 as describing the storyworld—a cognitive construct at a higher, more comprehensive position, more post-interpretive position than a narrative and its settings.
Subjective value. A storyworld is a highly subjective construct, most meaningful to the reader who conjures it.
Storyworld attractiveness and its fluidity. Needless to say, the storyworld is put together in steps and stages and the narrative progresses and as the readers interpretation of it changes. There is no need to think this storyworld remains stable within a reader even after a reading is complete. Nevertheless, often the feeing of being “in” the storyworld is one of the most engaging and compelling aspects of reading with an allure similar to strong dreams:
"The SETTING is a summation of the space mapped by the actions and thoughts of the characters, general socio-historicogeographical environment, and spatial frames determined by the narrative discourse and/or visuals displayed.
As these aspects of the setting are established, they are shaped and completed by the consumer’s interpretations of them [=STORYWORLD]."
Ryan, Marie-Laure. The Living Handbook of Narratology. Jan. 2014, https://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/44.html. Accessed 16 Sept. 2020.
We did not have a definition of suspense in our class. This is no simple topic. However, it was mentioned in passing by me under time management because, in my opinion, narrative suspense is an anxiety or excitement generating time delay regarding an outcome that the reader wants or expects to know immediately or soon. In the previous sentence, "outcome" is the conversion of an uncertainty (an unknown) that the reader wants to know into a certainty by providing the content. Or, put another way, there is a narrative delay in providing an answer that the reader desires. "Is there a dragon behind that door?" Door rattles and rumbles. Rattles and rumbles more. Door finally opens. No dragon. Suspense over.
Aaron Smuts, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which I usually find interesting, doesn't provide a definition of suspense but mused on what suspense is by covering four different philosophical explanation for the "paradox of suspense" ("If suspense requires uncertainty, how can a viewer [a repeat viewer of a movie] who knows the outcome still feel suspense [as viewer report that the do]?")
But before I quote him on the basic four approaches I want to share this sentence which really leap out of the text for me (he is discussing aspects of the paradox that the theories do not address): "...although narrative fiction is extremely effective at creating intense suspense, we rarely feel suspense in our daily lives." Indeed. And how odd.
Okay, so he says:
"I will consider four different solutions to the paradox of suspense: (1) the thought theory of entertained uncertainty, (2) the desire-frustration theory of suspense, (3) the moment-by-moment forgetting theory, and (4) the emotional misidentification view. The thought theory of entertained uncertainty explains the paradox by denying that actual uncertainty is necessary for suspense; instead, all that is required is for viewers to engage the fiction as they normally would—entertaining thoughts of the story as if they were undecided. The desire-frustration theory holds that uncertainty, entertained or actual, is not necessary for suspense. To create suspense, one merely needs to frustrate a desire to affect the outcome of an imminent event. The moment-by-moment forgetting view is the position that while viewers are immersed in a fictional scenario, they effectively cannot remember the outcome. The emotional misidentification view holds that it is impossible for viewers who know the outcome to feel suspense, and the best explanation of the claims of audiences to the contrary is that viewers must be confusing their actual fear and anxiety with what they take to be suspense."
Smuts, Aaron, "The Paradox of Suspense", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2009/entries/paradox-suspense/>.
"Tone" is the feel of how something is said (narrative tone, a speaker's tone). "Mood" is an emotional state of an animate object in the narrative, although readerly mood is also quite important. It is just that readerly mood is not in the narrative and we focus on narrative elements. "Atmosphere" is the diffuse feel of the story as a whole or specific portions of it, or the narrative.
The perceived tone of the story or a character in the story is an outcome of our interpretation of the writing or speaking style of the narrator or speaker towards something or someone (another character, or us as readers). "A blog can have an informal feel." "Wow, it seems like she was really angry when she wrote this letter." "Academic prose should be formal in tone."
Mood is a subjective experience residing in animate objects that are presented by the narrative as capable of having emotions. (So, a talking fork can have a mood but a regular fork does not.) "Johnny, in a dark mood, continue down the path." "My cat is in an upbeat mood today." "Ah, my windshield wipers are acting grumpy again."
Atmosphere is always diffuse and is an emergent effect arising from qualities of a spacetime setting (moment, room, storyworld), an effect that seems capable of evoking mood within an animate object capable of emotional response: "This room is creepy!" "It was a dark and stormy night …." "She had the atmosphere of a leader." "The entire atmosphere of this story is cynical" (This last could mean the storyworld has that feel, or it could mean the tone of the writer is like that—in which case a more precise sentence would be "The tone of this story is cynical.")