Annotation Guideline No. 7: Guidelines for annotation of narrative structure

Abstract

Analysis of narrative structure can be said to answer the question “Who tells what, and how?”.1 The first part of the question thus concerns aspects such as who is narrating, whether it is a character in the story or not, and if it is a first-person or third-person narrator. The second part is related to the story and its basic elements: characters and events, and how the sequence of events forms a plot. The third part concerns how the narrative text is constructed: ordering of the events, the perspective from which the story is seen, how much information the narrator has access to, etc.