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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.

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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