Breaking the Boundaries of Timeframe: A Narratological Appraisal of Pratibha Ray’s Yajnaseni

Abstract

Storytelling is an art that keeps in mind the interest of the audience. So to keep them engaged,
the storytellers, calculatedly make significant changes in the linearity of the plot of their
narrative. This disruption in the temporal order of the narrative is an interesting aspect of the
study of narrative devices employed in novels. The study becomes more worthwhile when it is
based on a retelling of one of the grandest narratives in literature – the Mahabharata. The
paper attempts to make an appraisal of narrative time in the novel Yajnaseni. The study is
concerned with the unusual narrative structure in terms of time of narration employed in the
novel. Many theorists such as Genette, MiekeBal and Ricoeur have proposed a scientific
application of time in narratives. The concepts introduced by them have been used here as a
framework to explore the mode of presentation of time in Yajnaseni.