Narratology and Narrative Techniques in Thucydides*

Abstract

Abstract In his classic book The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne Booth speaks of ‘the rhetoric that makes me believe in Thucydides’ History as a report of actual events’. The remark is an aside, specifically a disclaimer: Booth is actually saying that he has not discussed, and does not propose to discuss, the rhetoric which is found in narrative history. But he implies that such an analysis is possible. By contrast, Gerard Génette, in his Narrative Discourse, scarcely glanced at historiography at all. Genette returns in his more recent Fiction et diction to the difference between fictional and factual writing and concludes that fictional writing is parasitic on factual; and that narratology should be willing to cross the boundary between fiction and fact.

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