Bumping into the Novelistic Scaffolding: Narrative Structure in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels

Abstract

Abstract This article aims to arrive at a thematics of emplotment by scrutinizing Elena Ferrante’s use of plot in the Neapolitan Novels. It investigates theories of structure and narrative advanced by critics like Hannah Arendt, Peter Brooks, Adriana Cavarero, and Henry James to examine these texts’ narrative complexity. It contends that the novels exhibit a liminal narrative orientation: looking outward, from the inside of the plotted ground, onto the forces that threaten to disintegrate plot. To support this contention, the article finds narrative correlatives for certain phenomena of disintegration that Ferrante has discussed at length, proceeding to examine the novels’ strongest moment of smarginatura (dissolving margins) – the earthquake – in an effort to understand how the novels incorporate or indirectly address forces that are antithetical to plot.