Ontological and Epistemological Approaches to the Category of Event in a Narrative
The article analyzes a story by the English writer J. Archer with a view to revealing the two-fold nature of an event as a text category and thus proving the importance of considering it in terms of both ontology and epistemology. An event is viewed as an occurrence with concrete temporal and spatial characteristics, often referred to in various contexts. In a narrative a cultural episode is usually an important text-formation element that is static and is merely described in the text; or is linguistically constructed, thus becoming dynamic and acquiring the status of an event. The mechanism underlying the whole process of transformation is defocusing that serves to create a new perspective. The chosen theoretical assumptions are exemplified by the cultural event Christmas which creates the background of the story, and due to focus shifts first becomes the most significant event in the main character’s life and then serves to create a new perspective in the text and to construct the event of The Trial of Jesus. Research has shown that structuring an event in a narrative often goes along with creating a new perspective, which - in the final analysis - may lay the basis for structuring another cultural event without explicit reference to it.