Four Modes of Fiction

Low-Mimetic

• Some novels signal to us in such a way as to create the anticipation of comedy.

• They have a kind of realism that is restrained or angled so as to preclude our identifying with the central character; the protagonist.

• This entails the notation of character and events in manner explicit enough to render them recognizable.

• It does not entail photographic naturalism.

• Term presented by Northrop Frye.

• Frye used this term as a way of describing protagonist who fail to rise above their environment .

High-mimetic

• Identified with tragedy, where the language acts out the meaning in a highly dramatic way.

• In prose, it is what F.R. Leavis called “The Novel as Dramatic Poem”.

•One need not altogether empathize with the protagonist.

Didactic mode

•We may be conscious of the distance deliberately imposed between us and the characters.

• They are held up for our amused contemplation, often to the accompaniment of a good deal of authorial comment.

• The author himself is a palpable presence, a stage-manager or puppet-master, quite explicitly telling us what to think.

• This mode is sometimes ironic, sometimes moralistic.

•We are aware of a split level of narration: the author separate the polish characters point of view from his own informed one in order to satirize what he considers to be ridiculous behaviour or to point a moral

Impressionist

• Particularly wide spread among serious authors in the twentieth century attempts realism through imitating the consciousness of particular characters.

• It predecessors in the eighteenth century: when a character in Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne becomes unconscious, the page goes back!

•One cannot without many qualifications, term them realistic, for the flicker of attention is necessarily stylized when given a degree of permanence if fictional form.