An Analysis of the Narrative Structure of Three American Short Stories

The present work aims at introducing narrative discourse and analysing the narrative structure of three short stories by the American Short Story writer, O. Henry. The short stories are ‘A Strange Story’, ‘The Robe of Peace’ and ‘The Ransom of Red Chief’. To achieve these aims, the following hypotheses are made: (1)Narrative texts can be regarded as long sentences. Sentence structure and narrative structure share common features. (2)The structure of oral narratives is, to some extent, similar to that of written ones. In order to test the first hypothesis, Greimas’ (1966) and Genette’s (1972) structural models are to be adopted. Labov’s (1972) linguistic model is to be followed for testing the second one.