List of narrative techniques
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A literary technique (also known as literary device) is any standardized method an author uses to convey his or her message.
Literary techniques pertaining to setting
| Name | Definition | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Back-story | Story that precedes events in the story being told—past events or background that add meaning to current circumstances. | Though "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy takes place towards the end of the Third Age, the narration in the beginning of the movie trilogy gives glimpses of the mythological/historical events which took place in the First and Second Age. |
| Infodumping (also, plot dump) | The author puts a concentrated amount of background material, all at once, into the story, often in the form of a conversation between two characters, both of whom should already know the material under discussion. This is the opposite of Incluing. | The so-called "As you know, Bob" conversation.
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Literary techniques pertaining to plots
| Name | Definition | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Back-story | Story that precedes events in the story being told—past events or background that add meaning to current circumstances | Though "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy takes place towards the end of the Third Age, the narration gives glimpses of the mythological/historical events which took place in the First and Second Age. |
| Chekhov's gun | Insertion of an apparently irrelevant object early in a narrative for a purpose only revealed later. See foreshadowing and repetitive designation. | In each plot of a James Bond story, there are always a number of gadgets whose uses are not immediately clear. The audience cannot necessarily understand in what manner each device would be use, but in all instances, the secret agent finds himself multiple situations in which these devices are used once. |
| Cliffhanger | The narrative ends unresolved, to draw the audience back to a future episode for the resolution. | In almost every episode of the TV shows like Dexter and Breaking Bad ends with one of the characters in a predicament (About to be caught by thugs, about to be exposed by the authority, or a family member or a friend finds out the main character's dirty secret). |
| Cut-up technique | The cut-up technique is an aleatory literary technique in which a text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. Most commonly, cut-ups are used to offer a non-linear alternative to traditional reading and writing. | Tristan Tzara created poetry on the spot incorporating random clips of cut-up newspaper in such a way that the short excerpt of the news becomes the backbone of the "poetic plot" in the process of creation. |
| Deus ex machina (a machination, or act of god) | Resolving the primary conflict by a means unrelated to the story (e.g., a god appears and solves everything). This device dates back to ancient Greek theater, but can be a clumsy method that frustrates the audience. | An example occurs in Mighty Aphrodite. |
| Eucatastrophe | Coined by J. R. R. Tolkien, a climactic event through which the protagonist appears to be facing a catastrophic change. However, this change does not materialize and the protagonist finds himself as the benefactor of such a climatic event; contrast peripety/peripateia. | At the end of The Lord of the Rings, Gollum forcibly takes away the Ring from Frodo, suggesting that Sauron would eventually take over middle earth. However, Gollum celebrates too eagerly and clumsily and falls into the lava to his death which causes the end of Sauron. In a way, Gollum does what Frodo and the Fellowship of the Ring intended to do through the whole plot of the trilogy, which was to throw the ring into the lake of fire in the heart of Mount Doom. |
| Flashback (or analeptic reference) | General term for altering time sequences, taking characters back to the beginning of the tale, for instance | The story of "The Three Apples" in Arabian Nights tale begins with the discovery of a young woman's dead body. After the murderer later reveals himself, he narrates his reasons for the murder as a flashback of events leading up to the discovery of her dead body at the beginning of the story. |
| Flashforward | Also called prolepsis, an interjected scene that temporarily jumps the narrative forward in time. Flashforwards often represent events expected, projected, or imagined to occur in the future. They may also reveal significant parts of the story that have not yet occurred, but soon will in greater detail. | This has been highly popularized by the television series Lost. |
| Foreshadowing | Implicit yet intentional efforts of an author to suggest events which have yet to take place in the process of narration. See also repetitive designation and Chekhov's gun | A narration might begin with a male character who has to break up a schoolyard fight among some boys who are vying the for attention of a girl, which was introduce to foreshadow the events leading to a dinner time squabble between the character and his twin brother over a woman, whom both are courting at the same time. |
| Frame story, or a story within a story | A main story that organizes a series of shorter stories. | Early examples include Panchatantra, Arabian Nights and The Decameron. A more modern example is Brian Jacques The Legend of Luke. |
| Framing device | A single action, scene, event, setting, or any element of significance at the beginning and end of a work. The use of framing devices allow for frame stories to exist. | In Arabian Nights, Scheherazade, the newly wed wife to the King, is the framing device. As a character, she is telling the "1,001 stories" to the King, in order to delay her execution nights upon nights. However, as a framing device her purpose for existing is to tell the same 1,001 stories to the reader. |
| In medias res | Beginning the story in the middle of a sequence of events. A specific form of narrative hook. | The Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer are prime examples. The latter work begins with the return of Odysseus to his home of Ithaka and then in flashbacks tells of his ten years of wandering following the Trojan War. |
| Narrative hook | Story opening that "hooks" readers' attention so they will keep reading | "In media res" is an example. |
| Plot device | Object or character whose sole purpose is to advance the plot | Indiana Jones chasing after some mystical object is a good example. The mere knowledge that a mystical device exists is what makes the plot progress. This is in contrast to the Ring in the LOTR plot. Whether The One Ring to Rule Them All can be considered a mere plot device is debatable because more than the Ring itself is Sauron's initiative to conquer Middle Earth that the character must do the things to progress the plot. In addition to driving the plot along, the Ring ends up representing a sinister symbol of the human greed for power. |
| Plot twist | Unexpected change ("twist") in the direction or expected outcome of the plot. See also twist ending. | An example occurs in The Crying Game. |
| Poetic justice | Virtue ultimately rewarded, or vice punished, by an ironic twist of fate related to the character's own conduct | Wile E. Coyote coming up with a contraption to catch the Road Runner, only to be foiled and caught by his own devices. Each sin's punishment in Dante's Inferno is a symbolic instance of poetic justice. |
| Predestination paradox | Time travel paradox where a time traveler is caught in a loop of events that "predestines" them to travel back in time | In Dr. Who, the main character repeatedly finds himself under the obligation of having to travel back in time because of something his future character had done. |
| Quibble | Plot device based on an argument that an agreement's intended meaning holds no legal value, and that only the exact, literal words agreed on apply. | For example, William Shakespeare used a quibble in The Merchant of Venice: Portia saves Antonio in a court of law by pointing out that the agreement called for a pound of flesh, but no blood, so Shylock can collect only if he sheds no blood. |
| Red herring | A rhetorical tactic of diverting attention away from an item of significance. | For example, in mystery fiction, an innocent party may be purposefully cast as highly suspicious through emphasis or descriptive techniques to divert attention from the true guilty party. |
| Repetitive designation | Repeated references to a character or object that appears insignificant at first, but later suddenly intrudes in the narrative. | Arabian Nights. See also foreshadowing and Chekhov's gun. |
| Self-fulfilling prophecy | Prediction that, by being made, makes itself come true. | Early examples include the legend of Oedipus, and the story of Krishna in the Mahabharata. There is also an example of this in Harry Potter. |
| Midquel | Background narrative that explains the world of the main story. | Examples include Mahabharata, Ramayana, Gundam, Doctor Who and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon |
| Story within a story (Hypodiegesis) | A story told within another story. See also frame story. | |
| Ticking clock scenario | Threat of impending disaster—often used in thrillers where salvation and escape are essential elements | In the TV show "24", the main character, Jack Bauer often finds himself interrogating a terrorist who is caught in order to disarm a bomb. |
| Unreliable narrator | The narrator of the story is not sincere, or introduces a bias in his narration and possibly misleads the reader, hiding or minimizing events, characters, or motivations. | An example is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd |
Literary techniques pertaining to narrative perspective
| Name | Definition | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Author surrogate | Character who speaks for the author—sometimes an intentionally or unintentionally idealized version of the author. A well known variation is the Mary Sue or Gary Stu (self-insertion). | Socrates in the writings of Plato. |
| Breaking the fourth wall | An author or character addresses the audience directly (also known as direct address). This may acknowledge to the reader or audience that what is being presented is fiction, or may seek to extend the world of the story to provide the illusion that they are included in it. | The characters in Sesame Street often break the fourth wall when they address their viewers as part of the ongoing storyline, which is possible because of the high level of suspension of belief afforded by its audience - children. |
| Defamiliarization | Forcing the reader to recognize common things in an unfamiliar or strange way, to enhance perception of the familiar. | A character who is trapped in a winter mountain cabin runs out of food and cooks his leather boots. While he is eating his own boots, he realizes how tough the leather of his boots were. |
| Epiphany | A sudden perspective or insight which is revealed to the reader (directly or through the epiphany that a character experiences) onto a problem which had previously eluded all attempts at understanding, which in turn, changes the interpretation of the plot, character, narrative perspective, tone, and/or the style of writing. Epiphanies occur spontaneously through an additional external stimulus or through an internal reflection of a recurring thought from a new perspective. | Archimedes bathing in a pool of water and realizing the solution to the problem of estimating the volume of a given object. |
| First Person Narration | A text presented from the point of view of a character (esp. the protagonist) and written in the first person: Text written similarly to a diary. | Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. |
| Magical realism | Describing events realistically, but in a magical haze of strange local customs and beliefs. | Particularly popular with Latin American authors like Gabriel García Márquez. Elsewhere, Salman Rushdie's work provides good examples. |
| Mooreeffoc (also written Moor Eeffoc) | Coined by Charles Dickens and, as used by G. K. Chesterton, meaning "the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle." | Entering through the door, the writer realized that the words Coffee Room spelled backwards was Moor Eeffoc. Inside, he sat down by the table and stared at the letters standing in mirror image and thought about what Moor Eeffoc could stand to mean. |
| Second-person Narration | A text written in the style of a direct address, in the second-person. An example is Rape: A Love Story. | |
| Stream of consciousness | Technique where the author writes down their thoughts as fast as they come, typically to create an interior monologue, characterized by leaps in syntax and punctuation that trace a character's fragmentary thoughts and sensory feelings. The outcome is a highly lucid perspective with a plot that is somewhat like story-within-story. | An example is "Ulysses". |
| Unreliable narrator | The narrator of the story is not sincere, or introduces a bias in his narration and possibly misleads the reader, hiding or minimizing events, characters, or motivations. | An example is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd |
Literary techniques pertaining to style
| Name | Definition | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Asyndeton | When sentences do not use conjunctions (e.g.: and, or, nor) to separate clauses, but run clauses into one another, usually marking the separation of clauses with punctuation. | An example is when John F. Kennedy said on January the 20th 1961 "...that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty." |
| Alliteration | Repeating the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words. | In the film, V for Vendetta the main character performs a couple of soliloquys with a heavy use of alliteration. i.e. "Voilà ! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is it vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished, as the once vital voice of the verisimilitude now venerates what they once vilified. However, this valorous visitation of a bygone vexation stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose vis-à -vis an introduction, and so it is my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V." |
| Bathos | Mood that overstates its own pathos or drama. | |
| Caesura | A break, especially a sense pause, usually near the middle of a verse, and marked in scansion by a double vertical line. This technique frequently occurs within a poetic line grammatically connected to the end of the previous line by enjambment. | i.e. in "Know then thyself. ‖ Presume not God to scan." |
| Dionysian imitatio | The literary method of copying and improving on material provided by previous writers. | In Ancient Greece was first formulated by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and the subsequent Latin rhetoricians adopted this literary method instead of Aristotle's mere imitation of nature. |
| Distancing Effect | Alienating or distancing the audience from a play's emotional content. | Popularized by 20th century playwright Bertolt Brecht. |
| Dramatic visualization | Representing an object or character with abundant descriptive detail, or mimetically rendering gestures and dialogue to make a scene more visual or imaginatively present to an audience. | This technique appears at least as far back as the Arabian Nights. |
| Euphuism | An artificial, highly elaborate way of writing or speaking. Named from Euphues (1579) the prose romance by John Lyly. | "Is it not far better to abhor sins by the remembrance of others' faults, than by repentance of thine own follies?" (Euphues, 1, lecture by the wise Neapolitan) |
| Hyperbole | Exaggeration used to evoke strong feelings or create an impression which is not meant to be taken literally. | Sally could no longer hide her secret. Her pregnant belly was bigger than the planet on which she stood. |
| Imagery | Forming mental images of a scene using descriptive words, especially making use of the human senses. | When the boots came off his feet with a leathery squeak, a smell of ferment and fish market immediately filled the small tent. The skin of his toes were red and raw and sensitive. The malodorous air was so toxic he thought he could almost taste his toes. |
| Leitwortstil | Purposefully repeating words that usually express a motif or theme important to the story. | This dates back at least to the Arabian Nights. |
| Metonymy | Word or phrase in a figure of speech in which a noun is referenced by something closely associated with it, rather than explicitly by the noun itself. This is not to be confused with synecdoche, in which a part of the whole stands for the thing itself. | Metonomy: The boxer threw in the towel. Synecdoche: She gave her hand in marriage. |
| Overstatement | Exaggerating something, often for emphasis (also known as hyperbole) | Sally's pregnant belly most likely weighed as much as the scooter she used to ride before she got pregnant. |
| Onomatopoeia | Word that sounds the same as, or similar to what the word means. | "Boom goes the dynamite." |
| Oxymoron | A term made of two words that deliberately or coincidentally imply each other's opposite. | "terrible beauty" |
| Paradox | A phrase that describes an idea composed of concepts that conflict. | "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." (A Tale of Two Cities) |
| Parody | Ridicule by overstated imitation, usually humorous. | MAD Magazine |
| Pastiche | Using forms and styles from another author, generally as an affectionate tribute. | Such as the many stories featuring Sherlock Holmes not written by Arthur Conan Doyle, or much of the Cthulhu Mythos. |
| Pathos | Emotional appeal, one of the three modes of persuasion in rhetoric that the author uses to inspire pity or sorrow towards a character—typically does not counterbalance the target character's suffering with a positive outcome, as in Tragedy. | In Romeo and Juliet, the two main characters each commit suicide at the sight of the supposedly dead lover, however the audience knows these actions to be rash and unnecessary. Therefore, Shakespeare makes for the emotional appeal for the unnecessary tragedy behind the young characters' rash interpretations about love and life. |
| Polyptoton | Using words derived from similar roots or origins with different meanings or roles within the sentence. | An example of polyptoton which by the nature of the root word used also contains alliteration and rhyme: His ambulation was not amble. It was more of a wobble and stumble. |
| Polysyndeton | Polysyndeton is the use of several conjunctions in close succession, this provides a sense of exaggeration designed to wear down the audience. | An example of this is in the first chapter of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens: "A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin". |
| Satire | The use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices. | An example is Network. |
| Sensory detail | Imagery: sight, sound, taste, touch, smell | The boot was tough and sinewy between his hard-biting teeth. There was no flavor to speak of except for the blandness of all the dirt that the boot had soaked up over the years. The only thing the boot reminded him of was the smell of a wet-dog. |
| Tone | Overall attitude an author appears to hold toward key elements of the work. Strictly speaking, tone is generally an effect of literary techniques, on the level of a work's overall meaning or effect. The tone of a whole work is not itself a literary technique. However, the tone of a work, especially in a discrete section, may help create the overall tone, effect, or meaning of the work. | The novel Candide makes fun of its characters' suffering, while The Sorrows of Young Werther takes its protagonist's suffering very seriously. |
| Understatement | A diminishing or softening of a theme or effect. | The broken ends of the long bone was sticking through the bleeding skin, but it wasn't something that always killed a man. |
| Word play | Sounds of words used as an aspect of the work. | A pun is a common example of word play. |
Literary techniques pertaining to theme
| Name | Definition | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Conceit | An extended metaphor associated with metaphysical poetry that pushes the imagination's limits to portray something indescribable. | |
| Irony | This discrepancy between expectation and reality occurs in three forms: situational irony, where a situation features a discrepancy between what is expected and what is actualized; dramatic irony, where a character is unaware of pivotal information already revealed to the audience (the discrepancy here lies in the two levels of awareness between the character and the audience); and verbal irony, where one states one thing while meaning another. The difference between verbal irony and sarcasm is exquisitely subtle and often contested. The concept of irony is too often misunderstood in popular usage. Unfortunate circumstances and coincidences do not constitute irony (nor do they qualify as being tragic). See the Usage controversy section under irony, and the term tragedy. | A person hears a prophecy about himself. His endeavor to stop the prophecy from coming true, makes it come true. |
| Symbolism | One thing stands for another. | In The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, all doodads are very crooked. This is because everything in the story is later revealed to be a dream. |
| Thematic patterning | Distributing recurrent thematic concepts and moralistic motifs among various incidents and frames of a story. In a skillfully crafted tale, thematic patterning may emphasize the unifying argument or salient idea disparate events and disparate frames have in common. | Each of the chapters of Ulysses by James Joyce. |
Literary techniques pertaining to character
| Name | Type | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropomorphism | Personification | Form of personification that applies human-like characteristics to animals or objects |
| Hamartia | The character flaw or error of a tragic hero that leads to his downfall. | Oedipus kills his own father because he doesn't understand his true parentage. |
| Pathetic fallacy | Reflecting a character's (usually the protagonist) mood in the atmosphere or inanimate objects. Related to anthropomorphism and projection | For example, the storm in William Shakespeare's King Lear, which mirrors Lear's mental deterioration. |
| Personification | Using comparative metaphors and similes to give living characteristics to non-living objects. | A talking rock. |
Literary techniques pertaining to genre
| Bildungsroman | A type of novel concerned with education, development, and maturation of a young protagonist. Essentially, a bildungsroman traces the formation of a protagonist's maturity (the passage from childhood to adulthood) by following the development of his/her mind and character. | An example is Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. |
| Epistolary novel | Novel in the form of a series of documents (letters, e-mails, etc.) exchanged between characters. | Classic examples include Pamela by Samuel Richardson (1740), The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett (1771), Les Liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (1782) and Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897). |
| Roman à clef | A fictitious novel in which representations of real people and real events are disguised. The "key" lists the relationship between the nonfiction characters and the fiction characters. | Examples include The Bell Jar and Primary Colors. |
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