• DOI:10.1073/pnas.2006465117
• Corpus ID: 226241918

Narrative structure of A Song of Ice and Fire creates a fictional world with realistic measures of social complexity

@article{GesseyJones2020NarrativeSO,
  title={Narrative structure of A Song of Ice and Fire creates a fictional world with realistic measures of social complexity},
  author={T. Gessey-Jones and Colm Connaughton and Robin I. M. Dunbar and Ralph Kenna and P{\'a}draig MacCarron and Cathal O'Conchobhair and Joseph Yose},
  journal={Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America},
  year={2020},
  volume={117},
  pages={28582 - 28588}
}

• T. Gessey-Jones, C. Connaughton, +4 authors Joseph Yose
• Published 2 November 2020
• Psychology
• Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Significance We use mathematical and statistical methods to probe how a sprawling, dynamic, complex narrative of massive scale achieved broad accessibility and acclaim without surrendering to the need for reductionist simplifications. Subtle narrational tricks such as how natural social networks are mirrored and how significant events are scheduled are unveiled. The narrative network matches evolved cognitive abilities to enable complex messages be conveyed in accessible ways while story time and discourse time are carefully distinguished in ways matching theories of narratology. This marriage of science and humanities opens avenues to comparative literary studies. It provides quantitative support, for example, for the widespread view that deaths appear to be randomly distributed throughout the narrative even though, in fact, they are not. Network science and data analytics are used to quantify static and dynamic structures in George R. R. Martin’s epic novels, A Song of Ice and Fire, works noted for their scale and complexity. By tracking the network of character interactions as the story unfolds, it is found that structural properties remain approximately stable and comparable to real-world social networks. Furthermore, the degrees of the most connected characters reflect a cognitive limit on the number of concurrent social connections that humans tend to maintain. We also analyze the distribution of time intervals between significant deaths measured with respect to the in-story timeline. These are consistent with power-law distributions commonly found in interevent times for a range of nonviolent human activities in the real world. We propose that structural features in the narrative that are reflected in our actual social world help readers to follow and to relate to the story, despite its sprawling extent. It is also found that the distribution of intervals between significant deaths in chapters is different to that for the in-story timeline; it is geometric rather than power law. Geometric distributions are memoryless in that the time since the last death does not inform as to the time to the next. This provides measurable support for the widely held view that significant deaths in A Song of Ice and Fire are unpredictable chapter by chapter.