ABSTRACT
Paul Ricoeur's work as a whole provides a bridge between narratology, contemporary theology and existential philosophy. He is one of the most important practitioners of the hermeneutic philosophy inaugurated by Martin Heidegger in his Being and Time. Although Muller's and Genette's approaches are widely different, they coincide in articulating their analyses of fictional time at two levels: the time of the act of narrating and the time that is narrated. Utterance, for its part, does indeed come out of the self-referential character of discourse and refers to the person who is narrating. Narratology, however, strives to record only the marks of narration found in the text. In Genette's terminology the diegetic and the utterance designate nothing external to the text. The relation between the statement and what is recounted is assimilated to the relation between signifier and signified in Saussurean linguistics.
