Description
Narrative analysis has drawn much attention in the field of linguistics. Analysis of Vietnamese narrative, especially of its oral version, however, has not received sufficient consideration. Thus, this present study expects to reveal some of the most important characteristics of Vietnamese tradition of oral narrative. The goal of this study is to look at the structure, the evaluation element, and the narrator perspective of Vietnamese oral narratives. Twenty Vietnamese narratives of the Pear story were collected. They were analyzed in comparison with twenty American narratives of the Pear story. The analyses of narrative structure, narrative?s evaluation element, and narrator perspective yield some valuable results of the differences and similarities between Vietnamese and American narrative, as well as some features of Vietnamese oral narrative. The study found that even though Vietnamese and American narrators resemble each other in their uses of evaluative comments, they differ in a number of other aspects. Vietnamese narrators tell stories of better narrative structure, that is, with elements that are necessary for a good story: abstract, orientation, complication, resolution, and coda. American narrators, however, are more concerned with the task of retelling of all the details from the movie rather than picking out the most relevant ones like the Vietnamese narrators do. In comparison with American narrators, Vietnamese narrators interpret the story more often and they vary more in interpreting it. These differences may be resulted from another finding of how the narrators view themselves and their narratives. Vietnamese narrators consider themselves story-tellers and the narratives a performance. In their opinion, the storytellers must be invisible in the process of narrating so that the performance may receive full attention. Meanwhile, American narrators consider themselves as movie reviewers and their narratives movie reviews. To American narrators, their narratives are to be embedded in the conversations whose topic is movie viewing. These different strategies in narrating imply the dissimilarities in narrative conventions of the Vietnamese and the American speakers.
