Narratological time in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart And Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not, Child

Abstract

The production and proliferation of the novel and its associated innovative modes of narration in the modern corpus of literature require critical appraisal especially with regard to narratological issues. Crucial is the concern for the function of and the indispensable role of narratological time in narratives. This study explores Time with its complexity in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not, Child. As its theoretical framework, the research applies Genette’s Narrative Discourse. In so doing, the study interrogates how the two novelists make use of Genette’s category of Time with its sub-categories of Order, Duration and Frequency and their respective sub-divisions in the dissemination of their messages. It is revealed that the two novelists do not follow chronological order in the presentation of the events in their respective works. This leads to deliberate discordance in the two temporal orders of Story Time and Narrative Time. It also comes to the fore that Achebe’s narration is more of telling and hence diegetic. Ngugi, on the other hand, is more into showing, a technique that renders his work mimetic. With regard to Frequency, Achebe and Ngugi use Repetitive Frequency to foreground some pressing issues or events in the narrative. The study recommends that further studies are carried into the selected novels to analyse their narrative Mood and Voice. It is also suggested that other researchers could take other novels by each of the authors and treat the Narrative Time in them.