Narration and the Social Milieu: The Contract of Efficiency in the Critical Activity

Scholars generally devote formal studies to questions related to narration (voice, style, point of view) excluding the social significance that any mode of communication passes/vehicles. Thus narratology, for instance, which deals with both the narration and narrative, is considered by French critic Pierre Zima as too formalist, which means that it is a theory whose focus is only formal aspects of language, excluding its semantic basis. For him, indeed, it is at the semantic level that social concerns are articulated in human language. (Zima 2000: 120). Based on the idea that any formal discourse is rooted in the social milieu, this study aims at showing how narratives address factual elements. Using the texts of two great American fictions— The Great Gatsby (1950) by F Scott Fitzgerald and Dessa Rose (1986) by Sherley Anne Williams— this study examines how some key events in American life –slavery and human bondage, individualism—are featured in the formal structure of narrative discourses.