Narrative Structure Analysis - Essay Example

Narrative Structure Analysis Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road is Sal Paradise’s personal narrative, shown by the frequent use of pronouns like I, my, and me, marking him as the story’s teller, with the message about his friend Dean Moriarty’s surprise with two other people: Ed Dunkel and Marylou (Kerouac, 1999). Personal elements show Sal as the teller, with Dean’s rash actions and unannounced arrival at Sal’s family gathering as the causal element, Christmas Day of 1948 as the temporal element, and the spatial element as Testament, Virginia.

Dean is the narrative’s primary agent because his actions caused conflicts within the short narrative, the absences of which make it monotonous(Couper-Kuhlen, 2003, p. 25). The reversed event sequences make it interesting, the beginning marking Sal’s present-day account of spending Christmas with his relatives in Virginia, the middle part showing Dean’s surprise and unannounced visit to Sal in Virginia, and the final part describing the events leading to Dean’s unannounced visit to Sal, bridging the beginning with the end.

Kerouac focused the addressee’s attention using sequence markers depicting what came first and last. For example, the phrase “It was over a year before I saw Dean again” (Kerouac, 1999, p.101) implies the present setting, continuing until Sal learned that “Dean had lived happily with Camille in San Francisco ever since that fall of 1947…” (Kerouac, 1999, p.104).The phrase “I learned that (Dean had lived…)” prompts a flashback in the story’s timeline on how Dean ended up in Virginia in a car with two other people.

Even in the narrative’s reversed sequence of events, subtle context clues and prompts show what happened, what happened next, and what happened after that (Hooey, 2000, p. 25). Contextually this is the narrative’s sequence: Dean compulsively bought a car using Sal as a scapegoat to leave her and be on the road. Meanwhile, within the year that these events happened, Sal spent time writing his book at home and going to school. Sometime between Christmas and New Year Sal visited his relatives and brother in Virginia, but was surprised on Christmas Day when Dean and company appeared at his brother’s doorstep.

After settling down, Dean told Sal why he visited unannounced (Kerouac, 1999. Kerouac moderates narrative timeline jumps by prompts connecting indirectly-related events. Since people take contexts and subtle links using their own experiences and views, the narrative makes sense even when sequences are reversed (Underhill, 2013, pp 20-22), increasing story depth by provoking the addressee to piece the sequence of events together, deviating from usual story lines’ predictability. The narrative is linear following a general narrative structure, discussing how events initiate conflicts and how these are resolved (Georgakopoulou and Goutsos 2004, pp.56-58), even if the denouement was depicted first and the triggering events were placed at the end.

Kerouac (1999, pp. 101-103) showed present-day events first with Sal visiting his brother Rocco and staying with his Southern relatives in Virginia, followed by Dean’s unannounced arrival as the resolution, and the denouement where Sal accommodated Dean’s party. The end discusses causal events: why Dean and his party showed up in Virginia, how Dean his job on the railroad, how he lost his savings by impulsively buying a car, how he told his wife Camille that Sal needed him with the car, and realizing it was unreasonable (Kerouac, 1999, pp.103-105), signaling that Dean’s actions were causal elements setting things in motion.