Narratology and ethics

Abstract

The article deals with the little-studied narratological category of “ethos” of narration, introduced into narratology by the developing “neorhetoric”. The author assumes that contemporary narratology has as its subject the formation and retranslation of the event experience of personal presence in the world. The article argues that the ethical potential of narratology lies not in the discussion of moral values, but in the identification of moral dominants to which a particular narrative corresponds. This aspect of narrative practices, first proposed by Paul Ricoeur, is examined in the historical perspective of the formation and change of the dominant narrative pictures of the world in culture: precedent, imperative, occasional (adventurous), and probabilistic. This makes it possible to identify four basic ethos — peace, duty, desire, and conscience — in the course of the historically natural (phasic) emergence of narrative from myth and its further development. Belonging to one of the narrative ethos under consideration is a profound characteristic of the narrative work, the least studied so far. It is erroneous to judge a narrative ethos on the basis of the ethical reasoning of the narrator or the characters. The main mechanism for generating narrative meaning is intrigue: not as a plot scheme, but as a specific chain of episodes in their constructive delimitations and couplings, realized by the focalization and verbalization of the text. In this respect, narratology should not forget the literary experience of the aesthetic analysis of artistic masterpieces. The analytical argumentation is illustrated in the article with references to folklore, literary and biblical texts of various speech genres.