Examining Adaptation in The Sweet Hereafter: Narrative Theory

There are a wide variety of theories that seek to examine narrative structure and seek to explain the way stories can be told and broken down. Some theorists, such as Seymour Chatman in his book Story and Discourse, argue that stories inherently contain elements that are crucial to their narrative structure (which he calls kernels) as well as elements that can easily be removed without hurting the finished product (called satellites). He explains that the minor satellites embellish and enhance the major kernels, which are so important because they determine the way in which the plot advances (53-54). When applied to film adaptation, this would imply that the essential kernels must be preserved in order for a text to be adapted to film despite the different levels of fidelity, which may be pursued by a filmmaker.

Mieke Bal's Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative also analyzes different aspects of narrative, focusing specifically on the sequence of events and how they are presented in any particular story. Bal suggests that there are three layers to any narrative: stories (sequences of events), texts (versions of the stories), and fabula (the chronological way in which things are presented) (5). This idea is similar to Chatman's kernels and satellites because it examines the roles of the central story and the supporting details which make up a particular version of a story, yet Bal's concept of fabula is unique because it favors the importance of chronology in telling a story. The order in which events are told become quite important when a filmmaker adapts a narrative text because the actual chronological order of events in a story may not coincide with the order in which they are told in a text or shown in a film, as demonstrated in both Russell Banks' novel The Sweet Hereafter and Adom Egoyan's film adaptation of the same title.

 

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