Actantial Analysis is the analysis of the narrative in terms of actants, abstract functions, located at the level of the deep structure.
For narratologists such as Roland Barthes and A.J. Greimas narrative discourse has both a superficial and a deep structure. What happens on the surface of the narrative is usually described in terms of the characters (actors), events, happenings, etc.; what lies below belongs to grammar – a series of rules according to which the elementary units of narrative discourse (often called narremes) are formed and combined.
Actantial analysis is an approach to narrative discourse, inspired by the success of structuralist approaches to such obviously different phenomena as language, culture, kinship, culinary art, etc.
