The Narrative Event as an Occasion of Emergence

Some recent approaches to narratology have presented the event as a basic constitutive element of narrativity. The event is considered either a primitive term or something that just happens or may happen, a change from one state to another. The underlying concepts are identity, state, and being. The article describes the event in general and the narrative event in particular from the perspective of the primacy of becoming, change, and flow, employing especially Whitehead's philosophy of process and also certain concepts developed by reception aesthetics. The narrative event is analyzed in the context of the following concatenation: the event - interconnected events - plot - fictional world - the real world and its potentiality. The aim is to understand a narrative event not as an interruption of the receptive flow, but as its change of course among levels of emergence.