Voice over narration is sort of an established “no-no” in screenwriting workshops and dogma. But often, I find myself drawn to it none the less. Director Danny Boyle’s film Trainspotting is an adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel of the same name, which is more or less a collection of loosely related events which only really converge toward the end. Much of the discourse comes from internal monologue and 1st person narration, inextricably linked with dialect, time and place. By using voice over narration, the fragmented narrative structure is maintained, while utilizing a tool unify the disparate parts. Kozloff defines voice over narration as “oral statements, conveying any portion of a narrative, spoken by an unseen speaker situated in a space and time other than that simultaneously being presented by the images on the screen” (Invisible Story Tellers page 2). In Trainspotting, both embedded and framing narration are used to narrate the story. The embedded narration comes from characters within the film trying to communicate their own version of a set of events, and the framing narrative comes from a more authoritative voice which re-interprets ad presents these subjective events. These instances in the film are told from several perspectives, presented with varying degrees of subjectivity. By using voice over narration paired with various visual re-interpretations of the same event, the film creates a dialogue with itself as well as with the audience. Criticism of voice over narration is often centered around the argument that it is a fall back, a replacement for competent visual and dramatic rendering. But when we consider the possibilities of communication from the film to the viewer and for characters within the film itself, various types of voice over narration provide an interesting reflexive dimension to narrative. Voice over in the case of Trainspotting helps to clarify situations by showing their causality and relationship, maintain the language of the book, and also to give it a certain style unique to films that make use of voice over. It employes aspects of both 1st and 3rd person narration in that one of the characters, Renton, refers to himself in the narration as “young Renton” which makes his narrative discourse reflexive rather than purely subjective or objective. The surrealistic quality of many of the events, such as diving deep into the depths of a toilet bowl, allow for the narrative to be hallucinatory or unrealistic at times, which works in accordance to the various and often unreliable voice overs as well. The concept of narrative discourse when distilled into voice over narration is useful in locating the narrative voice behind the camera, as well as providing a reflexive layer to explore the implications of narrative meaning. 

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