NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES IN THE STORIES OF MANOJ DAS

Telling stories and listening to them are age -old phenomena. With the learning of speech by the primitive man and the evolution of language, human being started telling stories, narrating their experiences, expressing their thoughts and feelings. But story or fiction as a genre of literature is a fairly modern creation. Though stories were used systematically by the great teachers of the world, like Christ and Buddha, modern fiction is a product of later time. Modern fiction is different from the older tales in many ways, in form as well as in style and techniques of narration. The various devices of storytelling are called Narrative Techniques. The study of narrative and narrative techniques as an autonomous object of analysis emerged in the Twentieth Century. It began with Henry James, in his fictional narratives and his discussions in the Prefaces to the New York Editions of his novels (1909-10), and developed through the works of Russian Formalists, the New Critics, the Chicago Neo- Aristotelians, the Structuralist narratologists and post- classical narratologists like Mary Patricia Martin, James Phelan and Gerard Genette. Most approaches to narrative recognize the utility of a general division between ‘what' (the domains of states, existence, characters, and events) and ‘how' (the domains of techniques, voice, vision, temporality, a point of view etc.)