How do bodies function in narrative?

'Bodies,' defined by the OED as "the complete physical form of a person or animal; the assemblage of parts, organs, and tissues that constitutes a whole organism," function to further the narrative in some way. My way of thinking about bodies in a narrative was to equate them with characters, so bodies "perform various functions in the progression" of a narrative (Phelan and Rabinowitz 111). The bodies in a narrative, instead of being made up of organs or tissues, are made up of "marks on a page … the alphabetical characters that spell out 'who' they are" (Warhol 119).

They can function within the narrative to advance the overall message or thesis of the narrative. As Warhol acknowledges, "the familiar configuration of characters … [can also be] a framework on which to build a plot" (120). How an author makes use of a familiar stable of certain kinds of characters can either conform to the readers' expectations or stick to a known master plot, or the author can attempt to subvert readers expectations by placing these familiar characters in unfamiliar situations (see Lizzie Bennett, zombie killer).

However, it seems to me that bodies can also function outside the narrative, by working on the reader in a different way. In accidentally re-reading Lanser's "Sexing the Narrative" this week, I happened upon a quote that brought to mind this week's prompt. Lanser discusses the fact that the way a body in a narrative acts can act in conflict with a reader's established world view: "in a culture where a cat's sitting on a mat were considered transgressive behavior, the first version might be more conflict-intense than the second, and in a culture that did not set up cats and dogs as potential enemies the second might not suggest conflict at all" (91). Lanser's focuses her discussion on gender and sexuality, but this argument could be applied to almost all uses of bodies in a text. Whenever a body is put in a situation and given a decision to make, there will probably be someone who disagrees with that decision, even if the author does not frame it as a decision.

So, it seems that bodies, when they function well, in a narrative further the overall intended message of the narrative, but they can also function outside the narrative by inspiring strong feelings in readers. Lanser discusses it as conflict, but Warhol's discussion of Austen in Narrative Theory shows that bodies in a narrative can inspire such strength of feeling that readers begin to think of them as real people, which is a mistake because, for the most part, bodies are purely signifiers used as a tool.