The metadiegetic level of a narrative involves stories within stories. The diegetic level may be seen as the level of the story itself where characters interact, events in the plot occur, and so on. The extradiegetic may be seen as the level where a narrator who is not part of the action of the story exists-an omniscient narrator, for example, rarely takes part in the story he or she is telling. Diegetic levels can be divided into the extradiegetic, diegetic, and the metadiegetic levels. Stories may have many levels of narration embedded in them, so instead of using the tricky notions of fiction and reality, it is often preferable to talk about movement between the diegetic levels of a narrative-diegesis (telling) has been juxtaposed with mimesis (showing) since Platonic philosophy and Aristotelian poetics. This is often achieved by drawing the reader’s attention to the means of representation, the medium of the story. Metalepsis is a slightly more complicated term, but broadly speaking it involves the interplay between the realms of fiction and reality. That is, zero focalization means no one perspective is privileged, internal focalization lets the reader see the world of the story through the eyes of individual characters or focalizers, while external focalization maintains an air of objective description. External focalization corresponds to a narrator who is restricted to reporting the events of the story and the utterances of characters. Internal focalization corresponds to the conventional reliable narrator who has access to the thoughts of characters. The first of these corresponds to what is known as the omniscient narrator whose voice is not experiential in the same way as is that of his or her characters. There are three basic types of focalization in relation to different types of narrators: zero, internal, and external. It includes the various ways in which authors represent how the events of a given story are experienced. The term focalization was coined by Gérard Genette in order to avoid the visual connotations of the virtually synonymous term “point of view” (Genette, Narrative Discourse 189). The device is normally understood as the means by which authors create the point of view of narrators and characters for readers to interpret. After defining the terms, we will discuss examples of their interlinked use.įocalization in The Invisibles takes advantage of possibilities only available to the medium of comics. Although new typologies and variations are still being debated, the terms are well established and, once they are familiar to readers, they become useful tools with which to discuss Morrison’s interwoven narratives. Two conceptual tools borrowed from narratology, focalization and metalepsis, are helpful in grasping what happens in the course of its swirling storylines. To complicate matters further, it takes readers into hallucinatory worlds without providing a reassuring zero level of reality against which it would be possible to reorient oneself whenever one is overtaken by the peculiar ontological vertigo produced by the story. It involves a large cast of characters who are all heroes of their own interconnected storylines. Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles is a notoriously complex comic.
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