several near-, mid- or far-pasts). Consequently there are many questions you
might ask yourself about the organisation of any narrative. For example,
do you want to start in the present, and then go back to the far-past, and
progressively move forwards to the present? Or do you want to start in
the near-past, and move backwards to the far-past, and then shift into the
present. We saw in Chapter 3 how important it was to think of a structure in
terms of chunks of text which can be reordered. If you think of time as a
series of infinite points, infinitely divisible into segments, and if you think of
those segments as ones which could be endlessly rearrangeable, then you can
see just how flexible the structure of the narration can be. Of course, these are
not purely formal decisions but will depend on the subject matter.
‘The Empty Lunch-Tin’, by Australian author David Malouf (1986),
begins with a woman who sights a young man on her lawn. The young
man reminds her of her dead son, though he is quite different from him.
But the incident also triggers memories about the Depression in Australia
when she was a child, and of a school friend, Stevie Caine, who came from
an economically deprived background. He used to come to school with an
empty lunch-box, and died a young man during the war: she seems to have
felt a love for him which she has never fully acknowledged. During the
story the woman undergoes a process of rehabilitation (she makes her
son’s favourite biscuits which she has not done since he died), and takes
down the pictures which have remained for years on the walls of his
bedroom. She also realises that the young man on the lawn reminds her of
Stevie Caine. There is an implication that he is a ghost whose return she
welcomes, and who enables her to come to terms with her multiple losses.
The story is about the relationship between the past and the present,
because it is about working through memories. But this negotiation
between the past and present is also structured into the narrative. The
action begins in the present and moves forwards in the present: it also
shifts back to various different points in the past through the woman’s
consciousness. In fact, the story starts in the present, then goes to the
near-past (the death of Greg seven years ago), then the far-past (the Depres-
sion), then back into the present as the woman does her housework, makes
the biscuits and revisits her son’s old room. Through these actions the story
moves forwards in the present, but with references to the far-past (the
woman’s childhood) and the near-past (of Greg’s death). After that we
retreat into the far- to mid-past (the story of Stevie Caine), before moving
into the present again, now further on in time.
This is a very schematic account of the story, which does not do justice
to the way structure and content reinforce each other. In fact, Malouf
shows us the bearing the past has on the present in a very subtle way,
mainly by juxtaposing events and relationships from different points in
Narrative, narratology, power 105