What characterizes the narrative structure of the diary?
Like many other forms of narrative, a diary tells a story; unlike other forms, however, a diary need not be plot driven. Many diaries are not, as Helen M. Buss points out in her study of diaries by nineteenth-century Canadian women. Buss notes a phrase that she has come across in several diaries: “as they say in novels.” She emphasizes the irony in a diarists use of this phrase, given “all the ways in which this and similar accounts are different from novels, all the ways in which they do not fulfill the novelistic assumptions of the reader, all the ways in which they demand a different relationship with the reader” (1993, 57). Some publishers and readers, however, expect that diaries, like fictional narratives, must be plot driven to have literary merit, an expectation that can result in its being forced into a traditional narrative frame, with an artificial emphasis on “literariness” to the exclusion of other concerns. The problem, as Kathryn Carter explains, is this: “The concept of
