Fabula and syuzhet

Fabula (Russian: фабула) and syuzhet (сюжет, also romanised as sjuzhet, sujet, sjužet, siuzhet or suzet) are terms originating in Russian formalism and employed in narratology that describe narrative construction. Syuzhet is an employment of narrative and fabula is the chronological order of the events contained in the story. They were first used in this sense by Vladimir Propp and Viktor Shklovsky.

The fabula is "the raw material of a story", and syuzhet is "the way a story is organized". Since Aristotle (Poetics 1450b25) narrative plots are supposed to have a beginning, middle, and end. For example, the film Citizen Kane starts with the death of the main character, and then tells his life through flashbacks interspersed with a journalist's present-time investigation of Kane's life. This is often achieved in film and novels via flashbacks or flashforwards. Therefore, the fabula of the film is the actual story of Kane's life the way it happened in chronological order; while the syuzhet is the way the story is told throughout the movie, including flashbacks.

Jonathan Culler in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (1981) notes a certain contradiction in assigning priority to either fabula or syuzhet (170-172). The operative assumption amongst many literary critics is that fabula precedes the syuzhet, which provides one of many ways of rendering what took place in the story. Culler argues that one can also understand fabula as a production of the syuzhet, whereby certain events are created and ordered at the level of story in order to produce a meaningful narrative. Critics, he argues, subscribe to a view in which fabula precedes syuzhet when debating the significance of a character's actions, but adopt the opposite view (in which syuzhet precedes fabula) when they discuss the "appropriateness" of a narrative's ending (178).

Jacques Derrida (1979) is also critical of the logocentric hierarchic ordering of syuzhet and fabula. He raises the question, "What if there are story ways of telling as well as narrative ways of telling? And if so, how is it that narrative in the American-European tradition has become privileged over story?" One answer is that narrative is both syuzhet (employment) and a subjection of fabula (the stuff of story, represented through narrative). For example, Derrida views narrative as having a terrible secret, in its way of oppressing story:

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