Stranger Things: Narratology Essay

Stranger things follows a multi-strand narrative, which means the show is telling us multiple different stories that are all in some way connected. We have our main story line and then sub story lines. The main story in Stranger things would be the disappearance of Will Byers as from the first episode alone majority of the screen time is given to Will Byers & his disappearance. The next storyline would be the mystery of Eleven and how she escapes authority figures. Two minor strands would be the growing relationship between Nancy Wheeler & Steve Harrington and the developing relationship between Jim Hopper & Joyce Byers.

Todorov’s Narratology theory suggests that in every long form TV drama the audience should be able to Identify the equilibrium that begins the story and the disequilibrium that moves the story forward and the restoration that will end the equilibrium. The equilibrium in stranger things starts off in the Wheeler household; the children are downstairs playing games together. Nancy, being a teenage girl it would be typical of her to be out and not at home which suggests she’s not fully involved with Steve Harrington yet, keeps that childhood quality to her in this equilibrium.

The disruption to this equilibrium would be Will Byers getting kidnapped. The significance of the kidnappee being Will Byers is because he doesn't have a strong family; when he goes home to escape there's no one there to help him. Another disruption would be Eleven escaping and Steve Harrington getting involved with Nancy Wheeler’s purity/innocence.

Todorov suggests that there will always be a new equilibrium at the end to fix the existing equilibrium. We don’t really get a true new equilibrium at the end of episode one but we get some form of an answer. Some questions remain unsolved; Eleven is out from the facility, we don’t know what really happened to Will Byers and Steve and Nancy aren’t really together. But we do find out that Will is alive, Eleven almost gets captured but escapes and Nancy sort of rejects Steve's advances. Thus a new narrative enigma emerges new narrative enigma is given; Eleven & Who is she? what is her significance? or Where is Will?

The ideology here is that the working class Byers family depicted less positively than the Middle class Wheeler family. Will disappearing suggests that he's more vulnerable as a weak latchkey kid, reinforcing social norms around the 'nuclear family'.  However, this subverts as the season goes on with the Wheelers caring less to what their children are up to and Joyce Byers going into the upside down herself to rescue her son. The recognition of the disturbed equilibrium is focused around the masculine authority of Hopper and the police.

The binaries we see in Stranger things are; Adult/Child, Male/Female. Popular/Outsider, Science/Paranormal, Middle Class/Working Class, Known/Unknown, Authority/Powerless and many more. Claude Levi-Strauss suggests that society leads us to believe one binary is better than the other. The character of Eleven is an anomaly amongst these binaries, doesn't fit within these binaries. Mistaken as a boy in first episode. In later episodes she has to learn to be a female.