Narrative Structure in Martin Amis’s Other People: A Mystery Story

The present study is an investigation of how the analysis of the mutual relationships among the narrative layers exposes the process of character composition in Amis’s novels. To investigate the narrative structure of Other People: A Mystery Story needs a multi-dimension scrutiny. The scrutiny tends to deal with different categories of Gerard Genette’s narratological model. What is to be considered here is the narrative structure to show different topographies of the characters specially protagonists in the novel. Anachronies, ellipses, summaries along with repetitions and iterations, as Genette describes in his narrative model, have been analyzed in Other People. The article reveals that each character is comprehended through an analysis of these relationships with all his or her psychological and physical attributes. It has been found that anachronies, ellipses, summaries as well as repetitions and iterations that Genette defines in his narrative model can be designed in such a way that they could give necessary and functional information about characters. This study opens a new way for understanding Amis’s novel because it uses a practical way which makes it easier to grasp the novel’s idea. The investigation of Narrative structure of the novel related to the study of the general behavior of the characters in different situations is the main focus of the current article, while it has led to the categorization of a number of phenomena in the novel all of which have been examined in the light of Gerard Genette’s ideas.