is definition has the flaw of limiting itself to literature by neglecting purely visual forms of narrative such as those found in painting, dance, or mime. In film, of course, there is usually a mixture of the visual and the verbal. But, as in 101 Dalmatians, narrative can, at times, proceed without the assistance of verbal means. Thus Richardson proposes that a better definition states that "narrative is a representation of a causally related series of events" (170). Causality is perhaps over-stressed in this definition, since narratives are not uncommon in which causality is of minor importance, as in a picaresque tale, or in which a great deal of non-related material exists comfortably alongside the causally related events. But for the purposes of the discussion of the sequence from 101 Dalmatians causality is a key element.
In any work featuring narrative, however, some particular type of narratological code is employed. The code is "a key that shows how the text itself works" and is "a privileged construct in a text that is supposed to open up or reveal the workings of the text or of a portion of the text" (Amiran 212). But, as the distinctions in the previous definitions of narrative show, there are marked differences between narratological codes in literature and in film. These narratological codes are not, of course, shared by all literary works or all films and different codes have been distinguished for different kinds of films. One of the most widely discussed forms of cinematic code is that associated with the so-called classical Hollywood film. The narration in this type of film--the type to which 101 Dalmatians is generally very true--"constitutes a particular configuration of normalized options for representing the story and manipulating composition and style" (Bordwell 17). In the film 101 Dalmatians it is the existence of these "normalized options" for representation that makes it possible for the Twiligh...