Abstract
In both literature and film, we’re faced with complex characters, complex plots, complex themes, complexity in narration and, occasionally, complexity in narrative structure, all of which have been long present in fictional works and all of which have been addressed extensively by scholars (we’ve witnessed a resurgence of these terms in academic circles in recent years following the rise of the puzzle film in the 1990s).But what can be inferred when we consider narrative complexity in terms of adaptation?For this study, I consider complexity in relation to nonlinear storytelling and apply stylistic methods of analysis to the blockbuster film Arrival (2016) and its source text - Ted Chiang’s short story, Story of Your Life (1998). The aim of this paper is to examine narrative complexity in adaptation and address questions surrounding what is adapted in such cases, how it is adapted, and the effects both versions of such a text can produce.The argument that I advance is based on the premise that by breaking down the text (moving image and printed text) into its narrative components, we can develop a better understanding of how complex narratives such as this operate across platforms. My analysis focuses on the nonlinear narration, narrative focalisation and the presentation of coinciding narrative frames that are present in the source text and its film adaptation.
Highlights
This paper forms part of a larger research project in which the aims are concerned with the exploration of narrative complexity in adaptation, and this involves identifying the elements which contribute to producing a text which is complex, and an examination of how those elements are translated/adapted across mediums
My methodology adopts some key aspects of structural approaches to narrative
The story level refers to the events which comprise a text; the discourse level refers to the methods via which those events are presented within the text
Summary
This paper forms part of a larger research project in which the aims are concerned with the exploration of narrative complexity in adaptation, and this involves identifying the elements which contribute to producing a text which is complex, and an examination of how those elements are translated/adapted across mediums. My primary interest is in the examination of how these aspects are formulated on both narrative levels, with the aim to gain a further understanding of narrative complexity as a general concept, and with a specific focus on texts in adaptation Both versions of the text that I intend to discuss in this paper – Arrival being the film version, and ‘Story of Your Life’ being the written text that it was adapted from (which is a short story) – are nonlinear, in that the events of the story are presented out of chronological order.
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