Resumen

MEDINA GUILARTE, Jesús Antonio. The nature of the art of narration: An approach to William Laboy's model in a story of O. Henry. Letras [online]. 2011, vol.53, n.85, pp.52-60. ISSN 0459-1283.

The aim of this paper is to study the parallelism found between the narrative form of literary texts and that present in everyday life. To do so, I have chosen the support of the theory proposed by the sociolinguist William Labov (1972). He based his model on a series of testimonies obtained from inhabitants of the Bronx (New York). Labov made it evident that a series of recurrent structures exists in each of the narrations compiled. Such structures were named as: abstract, orientation, complication and evaluation. These structures, though generally present in non-literary texts, are applicable to literature. For this reason, I have decided to employ this model for the analysis of the story “The furnished room”, of the North American writer O. Henry. The art of “literary narration” and the art of everyday narrating are somehow linked. This might be due to the fact that, in some way or another, the latter is the origin of the former.

Palabras clave : narratology; William Labov; O. Henry; short story; sociolinguistics.