ShmoopTube
Where Monty Python meets your 10th grade teacher.
Search Thousands of Shmoop Videos
Drugs and Alcohol Videos 24 videos
You might be hearing a chorus of farewells if you recommend A Farewell to Arms as the next read for your Fabulously Feisty Feminist Book Club.
Brave New World is supposed be an exciting book about a negative utopia and the corrupt powers of authority. So where’s the big car chase? What's...
Crime and Punishment is all about a boy killing for money, literally, and then spending the rest of the book trying to hide it. Although the book c...
Dracula Part 6: The Narrative Structure 1002 Views
Share It!
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 ]
Related Videos
They say that honesty is the best policy, but Jack lies about his identity and still gets the girl. Does that mean we should all lie to get what we...
Ever wish you could remember everything that you ever studied? How about everything that everyone has ever studied? Yeah, pretty sure our brains ju...
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is an American classic. Hope you're not expecting any exciting shower scenes though. It's not that kind of book.
Do not go gentle into that good night. In fact, if it's past your curfew, don't go at all into that good night. You just stay in your good bed and...
