Review: Analyzing a Narrative's Architecture

Combine structure, narration, archetype, motif, and movement to analyze a complete narrative.

Here is an original story outline to analyze. A lighthouse keeper's assistant narrates, in present tense, the night of a great storm. Between scenes, short italic sections from forty years later show her as an old woman telling the story to her granddaughter. During the storm, the keeper, her mentor, insists the lamp is working; she sees it has failed and relights it herself while he sleeps. In the later sections, she tells her granddaughter that the keeper saved the ships, and the granddaughter asks why she is crying. Now apply the track's tools.

Structure: a frame narrative with two timelines. Narration: the older narrator is unreliable, publicly crediting the mentor. Archetype: the mentor is subverted. Motif: light, which fails in his hands and returns in hers. Irony: readers know the truth the granddaughter does not. Theme: the story suggests that loyalty can lead people to erase their own courage. Each tool reveals a different part of the same design.

• 1Combine structure, narration, archetype, and motif.
• 2Look for irony created by gaps in knowledge.
• 3Build a nuanced theme from all of the evidence.