Story and Life
In week 4 lecture, we had a big argument about “What is story?”
Some of us might say life is a story because we would encounter different kinds of thing over our life. However, Adrian argues that life is not a story, and we are not stories. Story is a chain of arranged events with cause and effect but life is full of accidents. In shorts, we are just dealing with accident in life.
There is no any cause-effect chain in life because we don’t what would happen next, like “Hit by car on the way to home?” LOL. If newspaper reports this news, they are just describing it.
“A passenger walked down street yesterday and killed by a car. The car driver was drunk and failed on his alcohol test and he will be sent to a jail.”
This is the description of issue cause we cannot take three random thing and define it as a story. The distinction between story and life is cause and effect. That means someone could make up the car accident as a fiction story. Why the car driver get drunk? How come the passenger walked down that street at that point? Story follows the script. Every single thing is arranged by writer.
According to Bordwell and Thomson, how to make up a three things into a story.
Consider a new description of these same events: “A man has a fight with his boss. He tosses and turns that night, unable to sleep. In the morning, he is still so angry that he smashes the mirror while shaving. Then his telephone rings; his boss has called to apologise.
We no have a narrative, unexciting though it is. We can connect the events spatially. The man is in the office, then in his bed; the mirror is in the bathroom; the phone is somewhere else in his home. Time is important as well. The fight starts things off, and the sleepless nigh, the broken mirror, and the phone call occur one after the other. The action runs from one day to the following morning. Above all, we can understand that the three events are part of a pattern of causes and effects. The argument with the boss causes the sleeplessness and the broken mirror. The phone call from the boss resolves the conflict, so the narrative ends. The narrative develops form a an initial situation of conflict between employee and boss, through a series of events causes by the conflict, to resolution of the conflict. simple and minimal as our example is, it shows how important causality, space, and time are to narrative form.
