Chapter 1

Narrative tense

One of the curious and most striking features of the contemporary English language novel is the prominent shift to present-tense narrative, in which the present tense, instead of the conventional past tense, is consistently used to tell story events. In present-tense narrative, it often appears that events are being narrated as they occur, and this apparent temporal overlap between events and narrating can obscure the distinction between the time of telling the story and the time of the story events. However, the stylistic effects generated by the use of the present tense for the base narrative mode have yet to be explored systematically. In this book, we employ a corpus stylistic method to make comparative analyses of present- and past-tense narrative in order to identify the distinctive linguistic and stylistic features of contemporary present-tense novels, focusing on speech, writing and thought presentation in each of the two narrative modes. This opening chapter provides a brief overview of the theoretical issues surrounding present-tense narrative, exploring the relationship between time and tense in narrative.