Making Arbitrary Types
I’ve come across many different narratives that go about displaying their Meaning in different ways. To help myself better understand the process by which Meaning is revealed, I’m attempting to loosely organize them into numbered types.
I use the word Meaning here—capital M—very loosely. The Meaning could be the moral, or the narrative truth, or even the solution to a perplexing puzzle. Usually the Meaning itself depends on the genre of the narrative. In a murder mystery, for example, I use the word Meaning to describe the answer to the question of whodunnit.
There are probably many smarter people who have a better way of talking about and understanding the process by which Meaning is displayed in a narrative, and I’m open to hearing them all. This, however, is my current method of interpretation. Let’s go.
Type 0: No Meaning
In Type 0, there is no deeper Meaning to speak of. It can be said that this is impossible: everything has some Meaning, intentional or otherwise. I agree with that. But for the purposes of understanding how Meaning is conveyed, I need to make a baseline of zero Meaning. Think of something with zero Meaning as happening either unintentionally or, for whatever reason, made purely for entertainment value. If someone ever says to you, “this doesn’t have to mean anything, it can just be fun,” they are placing the narrative as Type 0. Some people might place Michael Bay movies in this type, or video games like Team Fortress 2 (2007) or Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988).
To be a Type 0 narrative, it must not make any attempt to have a Meaning.
Type 1: Meaning as Destination
In Type 1, it’s usually very clear what the Meaning is going to be from the onset. In these cases, it’s more of a journey towards that expected Meaning. A good example of this is the movie Liar Liar (1997). We know from the get-go that lying is bad, and there is nothing preventing us from understanding that Jim Carrey’s character will learn his lesson by the end. In this way, we can see the Meaning as a place we want to go, and the narrative is our journey that leads us directly to it. This also applies to in media res tropes like "I bet you're wondering how I got here." In that type of narrative, we know where we're going, and we just need to get there.
To be a Type 1 narrative, it must propose its Meaning early and then travel to that point by the end.
Type 2: Meaning as Revelation
Type 2 is similar to Type 1 in that there is a Meaning which will be revealed, and that much is usually very clear from the onset. However, it’s not clear what the Meaning might be. A good example of this is Aesop and his fables. In Aesop’s Fables, we understand that each story is going to teach us a lesson. However, we don’t know from the beginning what the lesson might be. In The Fox and the Grapes, it’s unclear until the end that the Meaning is to display how people might pretend to hate something they cannot obtain. Another great example is the murder mystery. You are told early on there is a solution, but the solution is not revealed until the resolution.
To be a Type 2 narrative, it must propose that it has a hidden Meaning, but withhold that Meaning until much later.
Type 3: Meaning as Twist
The Type 3 style has become very popular for how it feels like a surprise. Unlike Type 1 and Type 2, which propose to have a Meaning, Type 3 obfuscates its intent of Meaning. You are meant to go into this narrative without expectations. It presents as a Type 0—no Meaning at all—or "lies" about its Meaning by presenting itself as Type 1. But then, suddenly, the Meaning is revealed, and it's not what you thought!
Again, the use of the term Meaning is a bit loose in order to cover multiple genres, but you can understand it in terms of the feeling of surprise, or what we might now call a “twist.” This surprise can be shocking or banal, but what matters is that it is something you didn’t expect. The most accessible example is in The Sixth Sense (1999), which famously revealed that its main character was dead the whole time.
But this "twist" could also be a surprise moral, like discovering near the end of a narrative that it is really propaganda, an ad for a product, or a piece of satire about the genre itself. In the 2012 film Seven Psychopaths, the narrative takes a shift near the end to reveal that the whole experience is meant as a commentary towards Hollywood's (and the viewer's) obsession with psychopathic characters. Similarly, the video game Undertale (2015) feels like a regular entertainment narrative of adventure and exploration, but—surprise surprise!—your actions have consequences on the world around you.
Type 3 narratives also lend themselves well to unreliable narrators, like in Fight Club (1996) or Karoo (1998), but being an unreliable narrative does not in itself result in a Type 3 narrative, like in YIIK: A Postmodern RPG (2019) where the narrator's unreliability is left to player to piece together (see Type 4).
To be a Type 3 narrative, it must reveal a different Meaning than it initially pretended to.
Type 4: True Hidden Meaning?
Type 4 is the most artsy and the most difficult to digest. It comes full circle in that it openly presents no exact Meaning while also revealing no Meaning by the end. So what’s the difference between this and Type 0?
Type 4 narratives are deep, layered puzzles that rely on the audience to not only find the Meaning, but also to realize if there is any Meaning whatsoever. By simply omitting overt explanation, any Meaning can become buried and difficult to find. These narratives can feel obtuse, encoded, and confusing. Conversations around this type of narrative will often yo-yo between “this is deep” and “you're looking too much into it.”
This type is very common in literary fiction, which uses subtext and allusion to convey a secret Meaning beneath the story of the characters and plot. We might easily include the written works of Haruki Murakami, James Joyce, Cormac McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, etc., or any art that seems abstract, Dadaist, modernist, or overall provocatively unclear. In video games, works like Passage (2007), Braid (2008), and Inside (2016) often come up. Discussions around these artists and narratives often make us consider what art even is on top of questioning what is meant by the piece.
To be a Type 4 narrative, it must present implications of Meaning without ever fully admitting to any.
Blended Types
Like anything in life, there are no hard lines. An exercise of typing narratives is a tool for understanding things, not a rule. Because of this, many narratives can be seen as one type or another. Synecdoche, New York (2008) by Charlie Kaufman might be considered Type 4 for having no imperceptible Meaning, but also might be considered Type 2 for obviously having something deeper going on that is just hard to parse. In a case like this, it would depend on your perspective as the audience.
It could also be that multiple narrative typings are happening at once, or in succession. In Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), it could be said to follow Type 2 and Type 3 simultaneously. It's a Type 2 in that we are searching for a murderer which eventually gets revealed, but it's also a Type 3 in that the nature of the murderer is beyond what we would conventionally expect—a twist, as they say.
What Use Is This?
As a tool, this might be handy in understanding how to make a narrative. The Meaning of narratives is something that gets discussed quite a bit, but it's not often that I see the discussion of how certain types of narratives are put into action. In longer discussions of whether a work has Meaning or not, I think we often forget that there are multiple ways in which we can view this.
A narrative that proposes one thing and then does another might have a flaw in its storytelling, or it might just as well be a Type 3 narrative that is trying to mislead the audience before a reveal. A narrative that seems completely random might be a simple experiment of the Type 0 variety, or it might have a deeper meaning that we are meant to dig for a la Type 4.
In any case, it's another neat angle to view things, to get those thought juices flowing.
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