[Closed Captions]
One set of advanced visualizations available
for the texts in Digital Yoknapatawpha is the narrative analysis dashboard.
This is available under visualizations “Narrative Analysis,”
The dashboard brings together several different ways to investigate Faulkner’s narratives these include overviews of
“Plot Structure,”
“Narrative Status,”
“Narrative Progression,”
and “Event Frequency by Date.”
This video covers how each of these charts works, and how they can be used to analyze Faulkner's fiction.
You can navigate to each section by using the timestamps in the table of contents.
[Function Overview]
For ease of use there is a quick reference guide to all of the information under the legend.
For a more in-depth view there is an extensive commentary that explains the underlying
principles of the narrative theory that was used to design the charts.
The dashboard has several interactive features.
First, users can select a text in the drop-down.
By default the texts are ordered by publication date,
but they can also be sorted alphabetically by clicking the toggle on the right.
Hovering over the data points reveals more information about them.
Clicking on legend entries turns that data series on and off.
Clicking on the camera in the top right frame of each chart will download that chart as a PNG file.
The dashboard also allows users to compare up to four texts.
Clicking “add chart” adds a new chart to the viewport.
Users can then select the story they want to compare.
The additional charts for each story can be retrieved by clicking “additional insights.”
The new charts can also be deleted, and leaving only one chart returns the dashboard to its default display.
[Plot Structure]
The main display shows the plot structure of each story.
The plot structure is calculated by comparing the order of events in the story on the vertical axis
with the order in which those events are told on the horizontal axis.
If an event in a story happens later, it is higher up.
Conversely, if an event happens earlier, it is lower down.
In the story displayed here, “Retreat,”
we see that the events go up as the chart goes across.
This indicates that a story is told in the order that it happens.
It is very linear.
Faulkner rarely has linear narratives though.
This is why first-time readers of “A Rose for Emily” can find it challenging.
The story opens with its ending: Emily's death.
Even though this is one of the first events in the story,
it actually happens much later in the chronology.
That is why the event is high up on the vertical axis.
Meanwhile, the death of Emily's father is an event that happens very early in the chronology,
but is told to the reader in the middle of the story.
It is very far down on the vertical axis.
The different ups and downs on the chart are all indicative of moving back
and forward through the chronology, and represent flash forwards and flashbacks.
We can intuit from this chart that “A Rose for Emily” is not very linear.
One question we can ask is why Faulkner decided to tell this story in such a scattered fashion.
Is the fragmentation the result of the townspeople patching the story together through gossip?
Did the narrative jumps prevent us from seeing Emily as a full person?
In the default mode, the plot structure chart is represented through “Rank Order.”
This means that all events have been given a chronological number and ordered by that number.
This does not take into consideration the date of an event.
Clicking “Date Order,” orders events by the approximate date range during which they happen in the story.
Because not all dates in the story could be precisely determined,
the editors entered them as a range of earliest possible date and latest possible date.
Looking at the “Date Order” chart, we see a similar pattern emerge.
The story starts in 1924 and skips back to 1850 at the earliest, and then returns to the 1920s.
The chart highlights how much of the story is actually about a period several generations preceding Emily's death.
Told from the perspective of the present,
to what extent is this a story about the values of the past?
It is interesting to compare the plot structure of “A Rose for Emily” to other stories.
In comparison to “Retreat,” the story is far more nonlinear,
but in comparison to a highly experimental novel, like Absalom, Absalom!,
it is probably a little easier to read.
The difference between the different charts,
highlights just how much Faulkner reinvented his writing with each new work.
[Narrative Status]
Each event in the text has been coded with a narrative status.
This is the way in which that part of the story is conveyed.
The categories include
“narrated,”
“remembered,”
“told,”
“hypothesized,”
and the special category “narrated + consciousness.”
A novel like the Sound and the Fury, uses all five different ways of telling the story.
We can note just how much of this novel is remembered,
and that suggests that the past is always present.
Hovering over each pie piece will give more information on that particular narrative status.
For “A Rose for Emily” there is only one narrative status: “narrated.”
This too was a conscious choice on Faulkner's part, and perhaps his reason
for doing so was to lock Emily's life into one narrow perspective: that of the townspeople.
[Narrative Progression]
The “Narrative Progression” chart shows how many jumps backward
and forward the text makes.
This is a different representation of the information
in the plot structure chart that makes it easier to understand how linear
or non-linear a story is compared to other Faulkner texts.
For example, in comparison to “A Rose for Emily”
the story “Ambuscade” is far more linear.
[Event Frequency by Date]
“The Event Frequency by Date” chart gives an overview of
when most of the events in the story take place and also measures the total time span of a story.
This chart is useful in determining what historical period is more frequent in the story.
For “A Rose for Emily” this period is around the 1880s.
This is when her father dies, and when Homer Barron mysteriously disappears.
Thus, even though the story is narrated from the present,
most of the important events take place in the past.
The four different charts display the same text from different, sometimes contradictory perspectives.
Looking at the charts for “A Rose for Emily,” the dashboard suggest that this is a nonlinear
story spanning 74 years that begins with its ending.
It is conveyed to the reader through a narrator,
and the majority of its events are in the 1880s.
Taken together, these insights point us to the two major events of this period:
the death of her father,
and her relationship with Homer Barron.
We may wonder how Emily's relationship with
and subsequent loss of her father shaped her relationship with Homer Barron.
In turn, we could also ask why Homer Barron had an interest in Emily in the first place.
Was the boisterous and social, migrant laborer, Homer, genuinely in love with Emily, a demure recluse?
Or did he simply cast eyes upon her
because she was a grieving, rich, single woman without an eligible suitor in town?
Was she interested in Homer because her father would have disapproved of him?
Would he have ever married Emily?
Or was this simply a temporary flirtation that Emily saw as something more?
These are some of the possible questions that come to
mind when visiting and revisiting one of falkner's timeless classics.