Max Payne is a third-person shooter video game; the design is strongly influenced by the aesthetics of neo-noir and graphic novel. © Niranjan, 2004 on flickr under CC BY 2.0 https://www.flickr.com/photos/shany_410/11254934962004

      The design dimensions described here can, of course, also be deliberately undermined. Thus, the concept of mimesis is called into question when a narrative figure becomes aware of its status as a narrated character – and thus communicates to the recipients that it is not taken from life but from a book or a film, like Harold Crick, the protagonist of the film Stranger than Fiction or Max Payne, the hero of the game series of the same name. Some storytellers even refrain from designing their characters with a clearly defined identity, such as Salman Rushdie, whose protagonist Gibreel from The Satanic Verses has several identities and is at the same time a Bollywood actor as well as the archangel Gabriel. In Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the protagonists Vladimir and Estragon no longer have a consistent identity at all, and thus no thematic or mimetic credibility, nor a function within the plot. What would be perceived as a mistake in a prototypical narrative is, in this case, a consciously-set, artistic means of expression. Here the creator is actively working against the willing suspension of disbelief of the viewers in COLERIDGE’s sense. Intertextual procedures also reveal the artificiality of the text and the figures. For example, Turgenev in King Lear of the Steppes or Akira Kurosawa in Throne of Blood use figures that come from Shakespeare’s dramas as a reference to the original narrative and thus also to reveal their origin as imaginary figures that do not come from life.

      Although this type of figure design is increasingly used in postmodern literature and contemporary drama, it would be wrong to see it as a narrative strategy. Empirical research suggests that a text must have an anthropomorphic, goal-oriented protagonist in order to be perceived as a narrative. In this respect, such design methods are to be regarded as anti-narrative; they are used to achieve an artistic effect, as shown by the example of the Beckett drama. However, they work with figures that are not to be regarded as prototypically narrative for this purpose.

       Chapter 2 summary:

      The imitation of acting people is foundational for a narrative, as Aristotle states. A narrative figure is a representation of a human character, which would describe the mimetic dimension, but there is also a functional dimension that describes the purpose of the narrative figure in the plot of the narrative. The thematic dimension describes a figure that represents a particular ideological or philosophical worldview. Such figures appear most often in narratives in which the center of the plot is the main character gaining knowledge. Most narrative figures unite all three dimensions of figure design, whereby the respective weighting differs according to the type of story and genre. In some narratives, this character design is undermined for artistic reasons, in which, for example, a figure is not assigned a clearly defined identity or is conscious of its status as a narrated character, thus questioning the mimetic dimension of the figure.

      3 Setting – The Narrative Space

      A story is spatially located – this statement is almost commonplace in narratology. It means that the actions and events of a narrative take place in one or more places – what is referred to as the setting in a dramaturgical terminology. But is the design of a narrative space subject to a narrative specificity or is it a purely descriptive representation because a story presupposes the space in which it takes place? In this case, a route description or driver directions would also fulfil all the criteria for defining a story. The driver, as a protagonist, is following directions, following a map, where they cross a given space and finally arrive at their destination. It’s likely that they must also overcome obstacles on the way that trigger conflicts, e.g. in the form of construction sites or traffic restrictions. A travelogue in a book or newspaper article could also be considered a narrative. Intuitively, however, such a text would not necessarily be defined as a story.

      In this respect, one has to ask whether there are special strategies of narrative spatial design. As was already clear from the description of the narrative figure, the representation of a character of a story is subject to different design principles than in a purely descriptive text. This also applies to narratively depicted spaces.

      For a long time, narrative spatial design was hardly an issue for structuralist narratology. One reason for this was probably to be found in the roots of narratology in linguistics and literary studies and the associated focus on literary narratives, thus, in turn, there is a focus on questions of temporality, narrator position, and narrative perspective. In fact, in contrast to visual narrative media such as film, comics or games, verbally conveyed narratives can even completely dispense with description of places. In jokes, for example, as a short form of narrative, often a dialogue takes place without a locality being depicted. Even if this may be a theoretical option in literature, narratologist GERARD GENETTE refers to the possibility of telling a story without location, while it would not be possible to situate it without temporal reference in the present, past, or future. Genette concludes that the temporal determinations of narration are more important than the spatial ones.

      3.1 Juri Lotman and Semantic Space

      The semiotician JURI LOTMAN, on the other hand, points out for the first time that it is precisely the design of space that is of decisive importance in the production of meaning.

      “The most general social, religious, political, and ethical models of the world, with whose help man comprehends the world around him at various stages in his spiritual development, are invariably invested with spatial characteristics […] This property of spatial models is extremely important for art.” (318)

      Lotman does not define more precisely what he understands as an artistic text, but since he develops his model paradigmatically through narrative texts, it can be assumed that he links his considerations to the narrative form. He calls the narrative text a “plot,” whereby for him this plot consists of three necessary elements:

      Put simply, Lotman formulates a minimal definition of a narrative. For him, this consists of two spaces separated by a border and a protagonist, whom he calls “hero.” The most important and defining step in the plot is the hero-agent’s crossing of a border.

      What is particularly important here is the concept of the “semantic field,” (97) which describes