Eyvazi, Mojgan et al.
International Journal on Studies in English Language and Literature (IJSELL) Page | 6
scientific approach to the grammar of folktales of his country; not just on the suzhet but also on the
character types and elements of narratives. He identified sequence of 31 functions, 5 elements of
narration and 7 broad character functions in the 100 tales. Present study briefly will go through these
classifications and will represent these structures on a video game called God of War and mostly
focused on the last story of this trilogy.
2. DISCUSSION
There are two main streams in the structuralism school, one on the linguistic field continuing what
Practical Criticism and New Criticism left off by focusing on the individual meaning of individual
texts, and the other one following Formalism with their endeavor to discover general laws_ the more
general, the better. Structuralism base on Ferdinand de Saussure‟s linguistic insights into the structure
of language as a system (langue) continued former schools. That is why “structuralism takes language
seriously. But they most take language for granted” (Bertens 120). Later on the time, structuralists no
more limited themselves only to find general rules in language system and started to find general
structures on the sentences, genres and narratives as a whole.
Present study intends to extend the realm of narratives analysis to other modes of narrations like video
games or any mode narrating a narrative. For the first part, genre of GOW will be analyzed based on
the Frye‟s theory of analysis and then narrative will be analyzed based on the Propp‟s structures.
These two figures are core figures of structuralist schools on the narrative theory and the rest are those
who try to improve those established rules or make them more general and abridged.
2.1. Structure of Genre
It is good to start the present discussion of structuralist approach to genre of video games with a
simplified and summarized version of one of the most complex and sweeping examples what which
Northrop Frye calls his „Theory of Myths‟, and indeed it is a theory of genres that searches the
structural principles underlying in the all literary tradition. “Mythoi (plural of mythos) is a term Frye
uses to refer to the four narrative patterns that, he argues, structure myth. These mythoi, he claims,
reveal the structural principles underlying literary genres: specifically, comedy, romance, tragedy, and
irony/satire. According to Frye, human beings project their narrative imaginations in two fundamental
ways: in representations of an ideal world and in representations of the real world” (Tyson 221).
Based on Frye‟s definitions and his later explanation in his essay Anatomy of Criticism, the real world
is world of experience, uncertainty and failure; therefore, Frye calls it the mythos of winter. He relates
it with both genres of irony/satire. Irony is the real world but overwhelmed with tragic situations and
their heroes can be/are defeated by the forces of universe. They may do their best to be heroic,
powerful, righteous and all, but they never achieve their goals. And as Frye puts it in a sentence they
are human like us, so they suffer. Examples of such works include Animal Farm (1945), Twelfth Night
(1601) for satire and The Story of an Hour (1894) and Rape of the Lock (1714) for irony.
While romance occurs within an ideal world and irony/satire occurs within the real world, the
remaining two mythoi involve a movement from one of these worlds to the other. Tragedy
involves a movement from the ideal world to the real world, from innocence to experience, from
the mythos of summer to the mythos of winter, and therefore Frye calls tragedy the mythos of
autumn. In tragedy, a hero with the potential to be superior, like a romantic hero, falls from his
romantic height into the real world, the world of loss and defeat, from which he can never rise.
Well-known examples of tragedy include Sophocles‟ Oedipus the King (5th century B.C.) and
Shakespeare‟s Hamlet (1601) (Tyson 221).
This description of Frye‟s framework is merely a skeletal map of his detailed analysis of each mythos
and the genre to which it is related. He argues that each genre identifies itself with a particular
repertoire of themes, character types, moods, kinds of action, and versions of the plot formulas. Frye
notes that the traditional quest has four structural components: conflict, catastrophe, disorder and
confusion, and triumph. Conflict, he observes, is the basis of romance, which consists of a series of
fantastic adventures in which superheroes encounter obstacles. Catastrophe is the basis of tragedy,
which consists of the hero‟s downfall. Disorder and confusion are the basis of irony and satire, which
require that confusion and anarchy reign supreme and that effective action be impossible. And
triumph is the basis of comedy, in which the protagonist and his or her beloved become the
centerpiece of some sort of improved social order. Taken together, then, the genres of romance,
tragedy, irony/satire, and comedy—in that order—spell out the structure of what Frye calls a „total