Uncovering accessible narration underpinning adaption of literary novels based on character network

A narrative is a co-operative result of multiple factors such as the behaviors for audiences and makers and the circumstances, storing subsequently rich information on relevant facts. In this work, we are interested in the influence of age on the characteristics of a narrative. As a case study, the original, the youth and the children’s versions for the famous novel entitled “Don Quixote†are compared. We extract the static character networks from the whole novels, and the temporal networks from slices of the whole novels. The topological properties such as the degree distribution and the clustering coefficients are adopted to represent their structural behaviors. It is found that the character networks for the original and youth versions have simultaneously scale-free, small-world and rich-club behaviors, being similar with that for social networks in reality. Compared with the character network for the original version, the structures of the character networks for the youth and children’s versions are simpler, evolve less dramatically, are composed of less number of communities. What is more, the status of main protagonists in these two adapted versions evolves less dramatically.