Narrative Time and Space in the Novel “The Notebook” and Its Film Adaptation: A Comparative Approach

Abstract

This thesis attempted to analyze the presentation of narrative time and space in the novel “The Notebook” and its adapted film version. While adapting literary works from one medium to another and investigating narrative techniques of the adapted literary works are prominent in the academics, both trends have been neglected so far in Ethiopia. Due to this, in order to explore the narrative techniques of time and space, the study targeted Western (American) literary works; the novel “The Notebook” by Nicolas Sparks and its adapted film version. Particularly, the presentation of aspects of time both in the novel and the film was described from three perspectives; frequency, order and duration. Likewise, the mapping of space in the two literary works was based up on five spatial entities; setting, projected space, zone of action, marker and route. Further, the time and space aspects in both works were analyzed comparatively. Subsequently, with regard to order of events, the comparative result showed that both the novel and the film followed unchronological order of storytelling through applying flashbacks and flash-forwards. Specifically, while the novel employed both flashbacks (to tell past incidents) and flash-forward (to provide clues) on the story to be narrated, the film used only flash-forward. Apart from flashbacks and flash-forward, of events time was accelerated by using summery and ellipsis techniques dominantly. Due to these, in terms of duration, discourse time was shorter than story time both in the novel and the film. Furthermore, while singulative telling was the other feature of frequency fairly used in both narratives, the film however used repetitive telling too in different outlooks due to medial capacity of addressing issues. All in all, the finding about aspects of narrative time indicated that both narrative media (equally) devised singulative presentation technique in greater extent in telling stories of events. Withstanding, with regard to narrative space, among the five geographical space descriptions used in the novel „The Notebook‟, the adapted film represented only; setting, projected space, zone action and rout to address same issues of space while the fourth type of space (marker) found only in the novel. Hence both the novel and the adapted film happened to have similarity in spatial representation of space except differences in sematic ability of representation. Over all, in one way or another, the narrative techniques of time and space used in the novel were applied in the process of adapting stories into the film. Therefore, based on the extent it kept the plots, settings and stylistic conventions of the novel, the adapted film can be labeled as intersection (commentary).