The Time and Narrative

One of the important problems in Structuralist narratology is the relation between narrative and time and the manifestation of time in narrative.Some philosophers such as Paul Ricour believe that understanding time in an abstract form is very difficult but the action in narrative makes the time objective and concrete.According to Structuralists’ analysis, time, -with causality- is one of the essential components in developing the narrative.In addition, every narrative text has two times:the narrative’s signifier time (the time it takes a reader to read a narrative text) and the narrative’s signified time (the time taken up by the events of the narrative).The Structuralists, especially Genette, have posed three issues regarding the time in narrative: 1- Order,i.e.the way the events in the narrative are ordered and presented 2- Duration,i.e.the relation between the length of time of the story and the time of the speech or the signifier of the narrative 3- Frequency,i.e.the number of times an event occurs and the number of times that event is narrated.In addition,at the end of the article, different kinds of relations between the time of occurance of the events in the narrative and the time of their narration by the narrator are examined.