Fabula

The Raw Material of Narrative 뼈

Fabula is the essential counterpart to syuzhet in the framework of Russian Formalist narrative theory. If the syuzhet is the finished, artfully constructed building, the fabula is the complete pile of raw materials—the bricks, mortar, and timber—from which that building is made.

The fabula, which can be translated as ‘story,’ is the ‘what’ of the narrative. It is the complete, chronological, cause-and-effect sequence of all the events that happen in the story’s world, from the absolute beginning to the absolute end.

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A Mental Reconstruction

Crucially, the audience is almost never presented with the pure fabula. The fabula is an abstract concept; it’s the version of the story that the viewer or reader pieces together in their own mind after they have experienced the syuzhet (the plot). We take the scrambled pieces of the plot as they are given to us and mentally rearrange them into a coherent timeline to make sense of the story.

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An Example: Memento

Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) provides a clear and extreme example of the difference between the two terms.

• The fabula is a simple, linear detective story: Leonard’s wife is killed, he suffers a head injury, and he begins a chronological investigation to find her killer.
• The syuzhet is the complex and fragmented plot that the audience experiences: a series of color scenes presented in reverse chronological order, intercut with a series of black-and-white scenes presented in chronological order.

Our primary cognitive task as viewers of Memento is to try and reconstruct the simple fabula from the bewildering syuzhet. The gap between the two is what creates the film’s central mystery and allows us to experience the world in the same disoriented way as the protagonist. The distinction between fabula and syuzhet is a fundamental tool for understanding how all narratives, from the simplest to the most complex, are constructed.