Narrative, Narrator and Narration: A Structuralist and Psycho-narrative Reading of The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Abstract

While writing, authors make several decisions about the narrative mood, perspective, and time and these choices are based on what the author wants to communicate to the narratee. The objective of the current study is to explore how the narrative structure is employed by Khaled Hosseini for narration in the novel “The Kite Runner”. The study gives a brief historical overview of the theory of narratology with a special focus on structuralist narratology. Among the structuralist narratologists, it discusses Genette’s (1980) model and its contribution to the theory of narratology. Genette’s (1980) model provides the theoretical framework for the research as the study attempts to analyze how the narrative categories of Time, Instance, and Level of Genette’s (1980) narrative model apply to the narration of The Kite Runner. The study provides a detailed overview of the analytical elements and components of Genette’s (1980) narrative model and applies these narrative features to novel “The Kite Runner”. It is found that Genette’s (1980) model of narratology is quite comprehensive and applicable to literary texts, including fiction. As narration is a form of mental representation, it is envisaged that further research may explore how cognitive formulations are systematically structured and represented in narratives.