ABSTRACT
Stephen Crane is known for his naturalist approach to writing. His early work, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets has a vivid intensity and distinctive dialects. It is centered to the theme of poverty, where a young girl whose name is Maggie was driven to an unfortunate events that leads to her downfall. It is also noted that Crane’s style of writing is short, distinct, and unsentimental that contributed to his naturalistic approach to writing. Thus, this paper tried to explore the narrativity in Crane’s writing, including those of what makes a narrative a narrative. With this, we can finally understand why people are drawn to stories and what it is that makes people hooked to it.
Keywords: stories, narrativity, narration, novella, elements, style, chronological narrative
INTRODUCTION
Stories are everywhere in human lives, and storytelling is indeed part of all human cultures. We think in narrative, dream in narrative, and remember in narrative. People tell stories in musical forms, in pictures and in movement, in words and through increasingly diverse multimodal means. We learn through stories told in the news and in history books, we make decisions based on stories reported in criminal trials, we find it effortless to engage with the fictional stories revealed in our favorite novels and films (Popova, 2015). In short, the earth rotates in narrative, and we understand better in narrative, so they say. So, the questions are being thrown here, why are humans drawn to stories? Is it because of the plot or the way it is narrated?
According to Weitzman (2018), it is impossible to separate stories from the teller. We are initially drawn to stories because we are interested in the teller, who brings us into their world, intertwining it with our own. Plot is what happens in the story while narration is how it is being told. But in some novels, they are closely aligned. This goes to show that plot and narration come hand in hand. But to understand it fully, we must define narrative in a story. Narrative writing or narration is a method of storytelling for literary works. It is a sequence of events, not necessarily arranged in chronological order, told by a narrator, happening in a particular place at a particular time (Tiongson, 2016). A narrative can be fiction or nonfiction, and it can also occupy the space between these as a semi-autobiographical story, historical fiction, or a dramatized retelling of actual events. As long as a piece tells a story through a narrative structure, it is a narrative writing (Kramer 2021). Popova (2015) also noted that narrative doesn’t solely relies on language models alone as it posits a strong connection between humankind and nature and it existed way before language.
Additionally, every narrative has five elements that define and shape the narrative: plot, setting, character, conflict, and theme. These elements are rarely stated in a story; they are revealed to the readers in the story in subtle or not-so-subtle ways, but the writer needs to understand the elements to assemble the story. In addition to structural elements, narratives have several styles that help move the plot along or serve to involve the reader. Writers define space and time in a descriptive narrative, and how they choose to define those characteristics can convey a specific mood or tone (Nordquist, 2019).
For example, chronological choices can affect the reader's impressions. Past events always occur in strict chronological order, but writers can choose to mix that up, show events out of sequence, or the same event several times experienced by different characters or described by different narrators. In Gabriel García Márquez's novel "Chronicle of a Death Foretold," the same few hours are experienced in sequence from the viewpoint of several different characters. García Márquez uses that to illustrate the peculiar almost magical inability of the townspeople to stop a murder they know is going to happen. Also, establishing a point of view for a narrator allows the writer to filter the events through a particular character. The most common point of view in fiction is the omniscient (all-knowing) narrator who has access to all the thoughts and experiences of each of her characters. Omniscient narrators are almost always written in the third person and do not usually have a role in the storyline. The other extreme is a story with a first-person point of view in which the narrator is a character within that story, relating events as they see them and with no visibility into other character motivations (Nordquist, 2019).
Writers also use the grammatical strategies of tense (past, present, future), person (first person, second person, third person), number (singular, plural) and voice (active, passive). Writing in the present tense is unsettling—the narrators have no idea what will happen next—while past tense can build in some foreshadowing. A writer sometimes personalizes the narrator of a story as a specific person for a specific purpose: The narrator can only see and report on what happens to him or her. In "Moby Dick," the entire story is told by the narrator Ishmael, who relates the tragedy of the mad Captain Ahab, and is situated as the moral center (Norquist, 2019).
When it comes to narration, all writers have specific styles in writing and telling of the story. Stephen Crane is of no exception. He is considered one of America's foremost realistic writers and his works marked the beginning of modern American Naturalism. As we go along, we are going to explore his narrative style in his novella’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.
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