Abstract
The idea that narrative occurs when a “text” provokes the reader to construct a “story” is a familiar and an established notion. At its simplest, the story, which is the abstracted sequence of events, renders the events into chronological order, while the text, which is a written or spoken discourse, presents the events out of chronological order. Traditionally, the “sense” that a story makes, its intelligibility, has been discussed in terms of plot (the intelligible shape of the action), character (for example, “she is the kind of character who would do such a thing, or respond in such a way), and theme (“what the story means is ...”). The production of meaning involves a complex interaction between text and the reader’s interpretive strategies.
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Collins, J., Wilson, R. (1994). The Broken Allegory: Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child as Narrative Theodicy. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Allegory Revisited. Analecta Husserliana, vol 41. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-0898-0_19
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