Levels: Realms of Existence

Abstract

Every narrative invites the creation of a story world1 in the reader’s or listener’s mind. The characters and events of the story transpire within this imagined space, which may be lightly sketched or elaborately described in the text. Some theorists characterize the story world as a projection implied by the action and characters, some as a bounded set of possibilities strongly guided by and partially constituting genre, and some as a fictional level, surrounded by nonfictional apparatus (and at times containing additional layers of fiction within it). Bakhtin’s chronotope (discussed as a keyword in Chapter 6) combines the time/place of the narrative level in order to characterize a genre’s and story’s possibilities. The details of place and space that contribute to the imagining of the story world are ordinarily referred to as the setting. The elements of setting resemble fictional characters, the other ‘existents’ inside story worlds, in that they provide the particulars out of which readers create fictional worlds in their minds. Sometimes narratives demand that readers imagine worlds inside worlds, not always in conformity with the laws of physics. Theories of fictional worlds and spatiality in literature are discussed in the next chapter, where I consider the fictional worlds that are designed to contain other worlds, as in some fantasy fiction. This chapter takes on a more limited task, the description of the manipulation of stories within stories that occurs when a character becomes a narrator, or when a story is presented inside another story.