the naming of... narrative phenomena... is a difficult matter.
I just spent half an hour attempting to write up the implications of the rhetorical differences between serial homodiegesis and embedded autodiegesis-terms that I came up with earlier this morning and which I genuinely hope will provide a useful shorthand for some of the concepts I'm trying to deal with, but which also make me think of "For god's
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"Homodiegesis" and "autodiegesis" are pre-existing terms within narrative theory (which I've geeked about before, and I've simply borrowed them. "Diegesis," in this context, simply means "mode of narration."
heterodiegesis - a narrative in which the narrator exists at a different level than the characters, e.g. a third-person omniscient narrative in which the narrator may provides commentary on the action but does so from outside the story.
homodiegesis - a narrative in which the narrator exists at the same level as the characters, e.g. the narrated-by-a-friend device in The Great Gatsby or the frame narrator in Frankenstein.
autodiegesis - a subset of homodiegesis in which the character-narrator is also the protagonist.
So: "serial homodiegesis" means that several characters on the same level of existence with each other take turns narrating; "embedded autodiegesis" means that as part of the protagonist’s narration, she includes instances of autodiegesis by other characters (Jane Eyre reproduces Rochester's accounts of his youth and his marriage).
That's the terms themselves, which are relatively straightforward once one knows the jargon. The reasons *why* I'm using those terms are the tricky part; in the first instance, "serial autodiegesis" would be the more obvious descriptor, and my choice to call it homodiegesis instead has to do with my argument about the book's covert destabilizing of its central character-narrator.
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As soon as humanly possible.
autodiegesis - a subset of homodiegesis in which the character-narrator is also the protagonist.
I refuse to believe that this is just a fancy term for "first-person singular". Can you differentiate?
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Homodiegesis and autodiegesis are both first-person narration, so the distinction between homo- and autodiegetic narratives has to do with the relative centrality of the narrator to the main story. David Copperfield is an example of autodiegesis: David tells his own story. The Great Gatsby is an example of heterodiegesis: Nick tells Gatsby's story.
The distinction is meaningful largely because the different terms indicate how much we can know about the inside of the protagonist's head; they take the emphasis off the pronouns and shift it to the rhetorical situation (who is telling the story, to whom, and for what purposes).
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