1. 1. In Chapter 6 of Literary Theory by Johnathan Culler, the author mentions that the 2 things that make up a story which are plot and discourse. In a story, plot is what determines the intro and the conclusion while discourse is through the point of view in which the story is being told through.
      
      One recent example I can think is from the animated movie called Promare. The basic plot is that there are humans that mutate into the Burnish, who are people who can wield fire. This causes a disaster and half of the world is destroyed. 30 years afterwards, we follow the story of a man called Galo Thymos who is a part of the Burning Rescue, a firefighting force. They usually respond to attacks by the Mad Burnish, a radical group of Burnish that seemingly attack for no reason. In Galo’s point of view, the Mad Burnish are seen as terrorists. However, later in the movie Lio Fotia (the leader of the Mad Burnish) reveals to him that they try and save people who turn into Burnish because if they leave them alone the government will capture them and use them in cruel experiments. In the conclusion, they do figure out how to stop the government and stop people turning into Burnish.
   2. In the section titled “What stories do”, Johnathan Culler says narratives are supposed to satisfy the reader in some way, whether its through enjoyment or through knowledge. I agree with him, as there is no point in reading a narrative otherwise.

I would like to talk about the movie called Green book,  the movie describes how a white man changes his mind about a black musician in a narrative way. Green Book is about the relationship between two real-life people: Donald Shirley and Tony “Lip” Vallelonga. Shirley was born in 1927 and grew up in a well-off black family in Florida, where he emerged as a classical piano prodigy: he possessed virtuosic technique and a firm grasp of both classical and pop repertoire. Vallelonga was born in 1930 to working-class Italian parents and grew up in the Bronx. As an adult, he worked as a bouncer, a maître d’, and a chauffeur. Shirley about to embark on a concert tour in the Deep South in 1962. In need of a driver and protection, Shirley recruits Tony Lip, a tough-talking bouncer from an Italian-American neighborhood in the Bronx. Despite their differences, the two men soon develop an unexpected bond while confronting racism and danger in an era of segregation. for example, After a bar incident leads to a group of white men threatening Don’s life, Tony rescues him by threatening to pull a gun on them. He instructs Don not to go out without him for the rest of the tour.     

 Culler mentions narrative give pleasure, to amuse listeners by giving a new twist to familiar situations. the pleasure of the narrative is linked to the desire. plots tell of desire and what befalls it, but the movement of narrative itself is driven by a desire. stories also have the function that teaching us about the word, showing us how it works, enabling us through the devices of focalization to see things from other vantage points and to understand others. novels in the western tradition show how aspirations are tamed and desires adjusted to social reality. narratives also provide a mode of social criticism, they expose the hollowness of worldly success, the world’s corruption, they expose the predicaments of the oppressed.

I tried to write a few plays because of my major. I think the biggest difficulty in making a story is to create contradictions or conflicts in the story. When I saw that the stories I had written before had some problems, especially the conflicts in the stories. The most fascinating part of a story is the problems that arise in the story. Because there is a problem in the story, both the reader and the character will think something. How to deal with this problem? Or who is going to deal with this problem? It is easy to establish the plot of a story and the emotions of the characters in the story. But it is also the most difficult part of writing. Writers with little creative experience, like myself, often describe the problems that arise in a story as very large or without obvious twists and turns. Overstating the problems that arise in the story will make the story impractical, because the character will break away from the original story while someone is dealing with the problems. The conflict in the story is not described, leaving the reader bored.

Culler explains in the “What stories do” section, that narrative is used to :

1. People have a desire for cognition. They are curious about the unknown things and eager to find out the truth so as to satisfy their desire.
2. Stories are created by imitating real life.Twisting real life plots gives people a sense of pleasure.
3. Stories bring people knowledge to know the world. The author describes the world in a story because the author has unique skills to observe the world, and readers learn to understand the world from more angles through reading.

When I first started writing, I found it difficult to consider this as a lot of topics to be considered stories. Because I’m hard to read books, to make a lot of heroes, space and stories. Because I think it’s a warm job from life, at the same time it’s hard to meet the job based on good plans. I think reading and experience are important, but it is relatively easy to write with many training. The first article I tried that was a report of a small Roman novel. It was going through a couple of young people’s series, but my story is simple, which I could mean, which is very different from my thoughts. Because contrary to this, I think that my story is not too high and I think I don’t feel alternative.

I agree with Culler view that the narration is the meaning of the story is. I see the main purpose of the stories is to discover more about the joy, knowledge, and more about the daily life they live. The narrative of any story can live you with the pain, it can live with happiness and forever. It can make people understand what real life can do and what it can to do from them. Finally, the best imaginative story tells us that we will not be recognized in real life because the fiction of the fiction that is always about us.

According to chapter 6, plot is the significant element that tell what happened in the story, which would shape the story and makes it genius, and it can be narrated in many different ways through discourse. These are very common to be used in the suspense novel, to promote the story, picture the situation, enhance readers’ emotion, and raise question and thinking. For example, if a crime was committed, readers are going to identify who is the criminal and how did he/she make it. Except some of the information are hidden temporary, the author would promote reader’s perspective with some hints, like the perspective of the novel’s characters, or a third person perspective like camera, sometimes even the thought of criminal, to state the plot from different angles and help readers to better understand the details, or lead to misunderstanding. Overall, most of the information must be related to the plot, which for the story to maintain its logic, otherwise, the story would not make sense.

In the “the stories do?” section, Culler said that storyteller would provide the pleasure and satisfaction to readers through literature, but reader’s mind should not be bonded with it. For me, I agree that what reader want to gain from literature is knowledge, or inspiration for them to gain knowledge. Gaining knowledge might not be happy and attracted, but it can make us wiser, once people stop just relying on what they see, and start to think the meaning behind words and superficies, we are truly ready to grow.

1. A film that I recently watched in which the narrative included a plot and discourse as introduced by Jonathan Culler in Chapter 6 of “Narrative” is Parasite by Bong Joon-Ho. The plot of Parasite circles around two families of different social classes. The Kims are a family of four that live in a dark and grungy basement who get entangled with a family of excessive wealth when the son of the Kim family Ki-Woo gets an opportunity to tutor the daughter of the wealthy Park family. The Kim family takes this window of opportunity to get the entire family working for the wealthy Park family for their own advantage. The naive Park family hires the father as the driver, mother as the housekeeper and daughter as the sons English tutor. The entire Kim family swiftly entwined themselves into the Park family to live off their wealth, enormous mansion and lavish amenities. However, things go awry for the Kim family as their plan of new-found fortune gets interrupted as it turns out they weren’t the only con-artists leeching off the Park families wealth.  The narrative of the movie completely changes from this point on.  The plot of the movie goes through a change from a lighthearted comedy following a family of con-artists into a plot of a suspenseful, creepy thriller that reveals the monsters people will turn into in order to leech off others success and fortune.
2. Culler discusses narrative in “What Stories do” as giving pleasure to its audience. Culler discusses narrative as almost a craving that audiences get because it gives a surge of desire for its audience to want to uncover the truth of the narrative. Culler suggests that narratives place within us the internalization of social norms which lead us to believe that scenarios of heterosexual desire, love and youthful illusions are foundations of our true identity. However, Culler questions that fictional narratives may have a misleading effect to its audience. He questions if narratives are a source of knowledge or illusion. Culler says we do not know the answer to if narratives are a source of knowledge or illusion and I agree. I believe that narratives pose a false sense of expectations in reality for many of us. We tend to romanticize many parts of our lives that I believe may stem from the exposure to fictional narratives as we grow up. However, I also believe that as humans we are given the abilities to distinguish ideas to reality.

I find it is seriously difficult to write a novel as a narrator. First, I should think about what kind of story is, who the characters are, and where it happens. It should be logical. The author says that the plot is the most basic feature of narrative and is the structure of a story, and a plot requires a transformation. I like to watch horror and crime movies because you can hardly infer what is going on and what is going to happen. Every plot is very amazing and you can not predict. When I watch these kinds of movies, I will concentrate on watching it and be addicted to it. As if I am also the crime. Plots are ever-changing, and the results may be unexpected. I think these changes are transformations. I remember a movie, a man is killed by his four friends, but the police think he died of natural causes. His wife remarried to one of the four friends, the wife poison in the food to her new husband every time. Their daughter is bringing by her grandparents. Many years later, the daughter’s stepfather dies, her Mather is the crime. She tries to find the evidence, but she finds the fact is that her Mather is killed her stepfather. However, she chooses to cover the truth as a prosecutor and says that the stepfather died of natural causes. Finally, her Mather was acquitted. From the perspective of human nature, her choice is correct. 

I learn what focalization is about from chapter 6. The focalization includes temporal, distance and speed, and limitations of knowledge. The stories give pleasure to readers, and the pleasure of the narrative is linked to desire. Events, plot(story), and discourse are both important parts of the novel.