Narrative Mode: A comparative Study on Selected Short Stories of Leo Tolstoy and Edgar Allan Poe

Abstract

Narrative mode is the way in which narrators designed to present the intended story in narratives. narrative mode istherefore the very important issue that should be studied for it is through their narrative mode or way of narration ofthe narrator that writers can do an effort in the reading process of readers in literature or work of art, and it is due tothis reason that scholars like Ronald Barthes’ idea of ‘death of the author’ believe the writer has not a power to say‘the reader should do and shouldn’t do like this and that’ after his/her writing is over. Thus, narratives ingeneral andnarrative mode should be taken as a central point in the investigation of narrative strategies; since other aspects ofnarration like voice, focalization, narrative time and etc would be included in the discussion of narrative mode as away of narration. Therefore, this study discusses narration in one organized work of study for narrative mode has atendency to include almost all elements of narration or narratology for narratology is the study of narration andnarrative mode is all about ways/techniques of narration in narrative strategies. All in all, the very intention behindthis research is related to bring one window of consideration on the different types of narrators and narrative modeshowthe narrative is intrusive or extrusive to the story. In other words, if we consider all the criteria tried to be usedby the different scholars in the classification of narrators that different scholars classify differently, we can subsumedinto one paradigm-related with narrators’ extrusiveness or intrusiveness to the narrative story they narrate. Therefore,our narrative mode that we can experience in literary texts would be either ‘telling mode or showing mode’, thedirect or indirect mode or the diegesis or mimesis mode of narrative. Regarding to the literary productsunderdiscussion; some short stories of Tolstoy and Poe; both these two authors are very famous and well recognizedpersonalities in the Easter/Russia and Western/America part of the world respectively.