My storytelling sessions with my father remain a beloved part of my childhood memories which has come alive many years later when I retold ...
My storytelling sessions with my father remain a beloved part of my childhood memories which has come alive many years later when I retold the same story to my daughter when she was around six or seven years old. The story from the east in erstwhile Bengal travelled across the streets of Kolkata to the west in Pune, Maharashtra, where I now live with my family. The story had reinvented itself once again through a retelling, weaving in experiences from recent times and merging it with the original storyline.
A narration builds up its own repertoire, movement and through its general spontaneity, weaves a significant sense of association with the listener or the spectator. In terms of folklore, it is well understood that “actions” and “characters” are units of semantic analysis, where the “actions” highlight any process or variation which is relevant to the gradual development of the story and the “characters” undergo changes by the qualifications attributed to it, while remaining relatively permanent in time.
Both “characters” and “actions” in a storyline reflect themselves through a surface narrative as well as a deep narrative structure. While the former is reduced to a small number of categories, the latter sees the abstract...
