Narrative organisation in the novels of George Eliot

The segmentation of a novel into units of narrative modes and the analysis of their frequency and distribution yield valuable information about the text's narrative organisation and the writer's narrative method. Different taxonomies of narrative modes reveal several levels of complexities. Three novels by George Eliot--Silas Marner, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda--were subjected to a two-mode, a four-mode, and finally a seventeen-mode analysis. The quantitative approach to textual analysis, which views the text as made up of many small parcels of information, meant that the computer was ideally suited for this study. Once the kinds of packets of information have been decided upon (in this case the taxonomy of narrative modes) the units are individually tagged in the machine-readable texts.;An initial necessity for the study is a clear definition of terms. Accordingly, chapter 1 defines "mode" and "narrative mode," and looks at the implications of using the narrative mode as the elementary structural unit. In chapter 2, two modes (performative and evaluative) provide an outline of "map" of the narrative action in the three novels; a more detailed analysis of the text according to a four-mode division (report, speech, description, and comment) in chapter 3 gives coutour to this "map" by supplying a more detailed account of narrative organisation. Then a much finer discrimination of modes into seventeen different categories is used to reveal the subtler effects of George Eliot's narrative technique. The division of the text into a seventeen-mode taxonomy reveals narrative complexity (chapter 4), and helps explain how readers assimilate and categorise the many pieces of narrative information (Chapter 5).;Chapter 6 examines modal patterns (combinations of modes), their effects on the reader, and the "meaning" that we give to the text when we isolate such patterns. By evoking particular responses in the reader, patterns of narrative modes create narrative rhythms that the reader is able to perceive (either consciously or not). The identification of these rhythms exposes a text's underlying meanings (chapter 7) and reveals what George Eliot calls "the musicality of narrative."...