I would like to discuss one of my favorite movies – Zelary.
The narrative is set up as a story of a young, ambitious nurse who decided out of her own moral and ethical urge to cooperate against nazists during the second world war. Consequences resulting from her bravery bring the audience a unique chance to understand the unprecedented time around the second world war and empathize with the complicated, emotionally challenging emergences and dilemma, which the nurse had to face.
The entire story does not have a set up the narrator. The plots are showing a difficult part of the nurse’s life from her own perspective.

The movie’s narrative contains three basics of the plots, beginning, middle, and end.
The beginning shows the nurse’s life before changing her successful life and escaping to a small village in the mountain.
The middle part describes living under a new identity in a fundamentally different environment, forced by the circumstances forget everything that she knew before, and be identified with that she will never again come back to her previous life.
The end shows what happened when the war ended.
The movie’s narrative is a very engaging set of plots that are portraying the atmosphere of that time and describe an unexpectable love story with many overlaps showing humanity, compassion, bravery, belonging to society, and sacrifice so often forgotten in our modern world.

I would also like to use a trailer of this movie as an example. The narrator is set up just for the preview, not involved in the story, but is putting forward narrative to capture potential viewers’ interest.

What does Culler say about narrative in the “What stories do” section What do you think about what he says?

I would definitely say that narratives have the value of knowledge. Minimally in the sense of learning some important life skill sets. For instance, through narratives, we can learn how to be more empathetic, have better imagination, learn from others’ mistakes, understand better others, and connect with others. We can also better connect to historical events and get a deeper look at what effect it had on people, not only historical facts. As it was said in the part about what stories do: “Stories are teaching us about the world, showing how it works or that novels are a powerful device of internalization” (Culler, chapter 6, page 92).

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