Today’s Rhymes With Orange, a fresh take on the Psychiatrist cartoon meme:
You don’t get a lot of narrative theory in cartoons, but here’s some basic stuff from Wikipedia:
Narration is the use of a written or spoken commentary to convey a story to an audience. Narration encompasses a set of techniques through which the creator of the story presents their story, including:
— Narrative point of view: the perspective (or type of personal or non-personal “lens”) through which a story is communicated
— Narrative voice: the format (or type presentational form) through which a story is communicated
— Narrative time: the grammatical placement of the story’s time-frame in the past, the present, or the future.
A narrator is a personal character or a non-personal voice that the creator (author) of the story develops to deliver information to the audience, particularly about the plot. In the case of most written narratives (novels, short stories, poems, etc.), the narrator typically functions to convey the story in its entirety. The narrator may be a voice devised by the author as an anonymous, non-personal, or stand-alone entity; as the author as a character; or as some other fictional or non-fictional character appearing and participating within their own story. The narrator is considered participant if he/she is a character within the story, and non-participant if he/she is an implied character or an omniscient or semi-omniscient being or voice that merely relates the story to the audience without being involved in the actual events. Some stories have multiple narrators to illustrate the storylines of various characters at the same, similar, or different times, thus allowing a more complex, non-singular point of view.
A nice touch: the omniscient narrator puts the therapist’s words (which are about the patient’s belief that he has an omniscient narrator following him around) into the narrator’s own speech balloon, leaving the disconcerted therapist with nothing to say.
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