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Playlist Dracula: Shmoopversations 16 videos
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Dracula Part 6: The Narrative Structure 1002 Views
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Description:
Mina must be a wonderful scrapbooker if she was able to put Dracula together using nothing more than letters, journals entries, and newspaper articles. We’d let her join our mom’s scrapbooking club, but something tells us scrapbooks full of undead horror wouldn’t fit in too well with “baby’s first Christmas” and “Lucy bakes her first pie!”
Transcript
- 00:01
We speak student!
- 00:06
Dracula
- 00:09
The Narrative Structure
- 00:11
a la Shmoop
- 00:13
Take us through the narrative structure of Dracula.
Full Transcript
- 00:17
How is the narrative of Dracula structured?
- 00:20
Yeah, so Dracula is an interesting narrative experiment.
- 00:23
It doesn't have an omniscient narrator
- 00:25
like most Victorian novels.
- 00:27
It consists of
- 00:29
a variety of epistolary documents.
- 00:33
So, the epistolary --
- 00:35
So, an epistle is a letter.
- 00:37
- Like a letter like, "Dear Bob..." - "Dear Bob."
- 00:40
"I no longer want you in my life."
- 00:42
- "Sincerely, Lucy." - Yeah, right.
- 00:44
So it consists of
- 00:46
journal entries, diary entries,
- 00:49
letter correspondence between two people,
- 00:53
phonographic records,
- 00:55
bits of newspaper.
- 00:58
So there's no master narrator who narrates all of this.
- 01:02
[ manic giggle ]
- 01:04
There's a...
- 01:06
beginning intro to the novel that says that everything here has been collated,
- 01:12
presumably by Mina Harker.
- 01:14
So it's just really all the documents relating to Dracula
- 01:17
that have been organized in a narrative form.
- 01:20
- A few recorded Skype sessions. - Yeah, basically.
- 01:23
If it was today, it would be Skype sessions.
- 01:25
[ groan ]
- 01:28
[ whoop ]
- 01:29
How is the narrative of Dracula structured?
- 01:35
[ angelic harmony ]
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