FICTION, EMOTION AND NARRATION IN SELECTED NOVELS OF CHINUA ACHEBE (ENGLISH AND LINGUISTIC PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS)
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Fiction and Emotion
Narration as a concept is the weaving of several strands of events into a story. This means narrative comes out of oral or written account of an event or events such as The Man Died(1972) – the autobiographical narrative on the detention and imprisonment of Wole Soyinka. Narration according Gerard Genette also means “the succession of events, real or fictitious” (25). Narration in this sense may be a novel such as Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. What runs across the two separate definitions of narrative given above is the idea of event without which there can be no narration. Event is the occurrence of action either by man or animal. A student buying a novel at a bookshop is an event and a horse galloping across the field is also an event. The event could be for a very short time and could also be very long such as a civil war. The event or a series of events become a narrative when to use Bridgette Hard et al.’s words they “…are selected and segmented from ongoing information’’ (1221). What Hard et al. mean by “ongoing information’’ are the several existing events from where some have been selected to form the story or narrative.
Selecting from the many episodes has implications on how the narrator perceives each event in order of importance. This means, as Hard et al put it, analyzing segmentation patterns of events indicate “…the breakpoints of larger units aligned with those of smaller units. This hierarchical alignment effect suggested that the events were perceived as partonic hierarchies” (1221). Narration, therefore, involves making sense of abstract events and the selection of events in order of their importance to the narrator. The event may be about the other person written by someone else. The narration, in such a case, is told about a personality other than that of the writer. This genre of narration is known as biography.
Contrary to what some people believe, storytelling is never a matter of “getting the facts, all the facts, and nothing but the facts” (Jacob, 516). This suggests autobiography or biography no matter the perceived reality is mixed with imagination since some events no matter the vividness cannot be presented the way they occurred. What makes a story interesting is the ability of the story teller to select very important events from among the many, for instance, in autobiographical narrative, the way we consider those facts as they are presented to us by a narrator; this is what makes a story different from a simple retelling of factual happenings, as in the familiar secondary school essay composition that starts each sentence with “And then …”. Stories are part of our lives: they extend into our lives and branch out from there; but also, stories can only be understood if they are localized, fleshed out in terms of our daily reality, and by using the right narrative style. A story that has no relation to our world is probably not going to interest us very much. Some stories written in the past have lost interest among contemporary readers due to their monotonous thematic presentations and narrative styles. On the other hand, we also find stories in older literature such as Jane Austen, Pushkin and Shakespeare, which today seem as fresh as when they first were written down.
