Narrative Time in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games: A Genettian Perspective

Abstract

This article utilizes Gérard Genette’s (1972/1980) narrative discourse theory in order to explore the temporal narrative strategies deployed in The Hunger Games (2008), the first novel in the popular series by the American writer Suzanne Collins. Though Genette’s comprehensive theory includes such elements as time, mood, and voice, the main focus of the study will be narrative time, whose elements order, duration, and frequency and their subcategories are first defined and then applied to the analysis of this novel. Genette’s theory of narrative discourse has almost invariably been considered as a purely formal one, a highly systematic classification of terms designed to describe narrative structures, without focusing on the social and cultural factors. In contrast, the present analysis aims at exploring both the formal and the communicative components of Genette’s theory, with a view to bridging the gap between old classical and current postclassical narratology.