ABSTRACT
A term originated by the Russian Formalists (see Formalism), fabula is one of two basic categories within narratology (the other being syuzhet). It describes the actions of the narrative as they unfold independent of a speaker’s intervention. In the fabula, events would take place in chronological order, just as they would in real life, unaffected by the act of organizing and telling them. Because a literary or cinematic text is always already arranged and given a distinct point of view, the fabula never exists within the work itself, but only as an imaginary construct put together by the spectator.
