Novel : An Insight

Remember our grannies narrating stories of princes and princesses who lived happily ever after? Or even horror stories for that matter if we were a source of intolerable noise and trouble? I am sure we all had our share of stories during childhood.

From there on we make a slight graduation from those granny stories to reading stories from our school textbooks and finally move on to novels.

There are a few basic things we need to understand when we talk of novels and stories and all that jazz. Every story has a plot. According to Aristotle, a plot in literature is “the arrangement of incidents”. A plot has a beginning, middle and an end, which is not necessarily in that order. Again to elaborate further a plot has got Exposition, which gives the background of the story which is essential for the reader to get into the author’s shoe to understand what it is all about. It has got crisis, which describes the turning point of the story, generally being negative, and to be more precise it's the point of tension. Climax is the scene, which is a story’s conclusive part and is the highest point of interest and finally the resolution, which portrays the outcome of the story connecting all the missing links.

Again there is something called Narrator who is different from Author and Reader (or Audience). A Narrator is the entity within a story that tells the story to the reader. But the author can share the same persona if he himself is narrating the story within the story. Hence the author can also become a character in the novel because he could be writing in the first person. In such a case where the Narrator and the Author is one and the same then the story is presented in a way that the Reader can comprehend it. Narrator is but fictitious and exists only inside the story whereas the Author and the Reader both inhabit the real world. An Author is the person who creates a written work, such as a book, story, article or the like. This can be short or long, fiction or nonfiction, poetry or prose, technical or literature. Again Reader/Audience are basically the consumers. [Source: http://en.wikipedia.org] [sic]

A novel is a fictional narrative. Narrative is derived from Latin word gnarus meaning “to know”. In its most evolving context a narrative is anything that is narrated. It is basically a narration of a chain of events. Again there is always a plot in a story, which makes up a novel. Novel originated from the word novella, which is of Italian origin. A novella is a short tale often characterized by moral teaching or satire. Now basically if we write down a story having certain volume we call it, yes you got right, a novel which can consist of one or more protagonists. Oh but hold on, there is much more to it. But if we write a story, which is short in length, say about 5 to 6 pages then we are actually writing not a novel but a short story. A short story is but just another genre like a novel with narrow scope and complexity. A story is the content of a novel and a novel is basically the finished product.

That about all I have for this section.