Narrative Structures

Vladamir Propp

Vladimir Propp used the Russian Formalist approach to form his ideas of narrative structure. This means that sentence structures were made to be broken down into elements that could be easily analysed, and Propp used this method to analyse Russian fairy tales.

After the first situation is laid out, the tale takes the following order of 31 functions:
1) Absentation
2) Interdiction
3) Violation of interdiction
4) Reconnaissance
5) Delivery
6) Trickery
7) Complicity
8) Villany or Lack
9) Mediatation
10) Beginning counter-action
11)Departure
12) First funcion of the donor
13) Hero's reaction
14) Repciet of a magical agent
15) Guidance
16) Struggle
17) Branding
18) Victory
19) Liquidation
20) Return
21) Pursuit
22) Rescue
23) Unrecognised arrival
24) Unfound claims
25) Difficult task
26) Solution
27) Recognition
28) Exposure
29) Transfiguration
30) Punishment
31 Wedding

Characters:
He also concluded that all the characters could be resolved into 8 broad character types in the 100 tales he analyzed:

1. The villain — struggles against the hero.
2. The dispatcher —character who makes the lack known and sends the hero off.
3. The (magical) helper — helps the hero in the quest.
4. The princess or prize — the hero deserves her throughout the story but is unable to marry her because of an unfair evil, usually because of the villain. the hero's journey is often ended when he marries the princess, thereby beating the villain.
5. her father — gives the task to the hero, identifies the false hero, marries the hero, often sought for during the narrative. Propp noted that functionally, the princess and the father can not be clearly distinguished.
6. The donor —prepares the hero or gives the hero some magical object.
7. The hero or victim/seeker hero — reacts to the donor, weds the princess.
8. False hero — takes credit for the hero’s actions or tries to marry the princess.

Toderov's Theory of the narrative

Claude Levi-Strauss:

Thought about narrative structure in terms of binary oppositions. Binary oppositions are sets of opposite values which look at the structure of media texts and other examples of media. Examples include Good and Evil, Hero and Villan and Day and Night. Levi-Strauss was less interested in looking at the way in which events are arranged, but the themes arrangement and how they affect the things around them.