Time In the Gutter: A Narratological Approach to the Comics Medium

Abstract

In this text, submitted as my master’s thesis, I seek to examine the way that narrative in the comics medium is produced from a series of static illustrations and lexia using narratological methods that have either been previously discarded as having little to no value in the study of comics or that have been overlooked. The first chapter of the text, however, is most faithful to the established tradition of comics studies; in this first chapter, I argue that narrative is distributed visually within comics, essentially becoming part of the text’s visual field of representation. In the second chapter, I deploy Paul Ricoeur’s concept of mimesis to argue that the production of narrative is dependent on the interaction between distinct but related temporal levels. Through the interaction of these temporal levels, which, in comics, rely on the intervention of the visual space of the text, narrative is produced and reproduced by the active participation of the reader, who is responsible for creating connections between textual moments. Finally, in the third chapter, I seek to balance the subjectivity produced by the application of Ricoeur’s system to the comics medium by deploying Genette’s concepts of order, duration, and frequency in an effort to re-introduce some sense of determinateness and objectivity, suggesting that there are overarching patterns that comics narratives do tend to follow.