Temporal Analysis on Verb Tense, Narrative Viewpoint, Immediacy Perception, and Character Identification in Literary Reading

Abstract

Literary works as artefacts reflect the times and social context in which they are produced. Actively reading literature, questioning the texts, and identifying themes are the cornerstone of literary education and critical thinking. This study dwells into a comprehensive exploration of how verb tense and narrative perspective correlate with readers’ sense of immediacy and character identity in Contemporary Literature. Through an adapted evaluation tool, the stories’ perceptive impact and relatability will be measured under a nonexperimental descriptive research design. Selected SHS students from Colegio de San Juan de Letran were given a literary selection (transposed to multiple versions with varying verb tenses and narrative viewpoints) and an adapted rating tool administered post-reading. Since the Shapiro-Wilk test of normality revealed that the data are not normally distributed, Mann–Whitney U tests were conducted to investigate the differences in literary perceptions by tense and point of view. Findings showed that there were no significant differences in respondents’ immediacy perception and character identification between narratives written in the past tense and narratives written in the present tense since both p-values are more than 0.05 level of significance. This indicates that readers perceive the time of a selection regardless of verb tense used and relate or not to the characters regardless of the story’s narrative viewpoint. Contemporary Literature teachers and authors of literary works may then emphasize less the impact of verb tense and narrative viewpoint in both teaching and writing literature.