Narrative
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For other uses of "story", see Story (disambiguation).
A narrative, story or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences,
[1]
whether nonfictional (memoir, biography, news report, documentary, travelogue, etc.)
or fictional (fairy tale, fable, legend, thriller, novel, etc.).[2][3][4] Narratives can be presented
through a sequence of written or spoken words, still or moving images, or any
combination of these. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare (to tell), which is
derived from the adjective gnarus (knowing or skilled).[5][6] Along
with argumentation, description, and exposition, narration, broadly defined, is one of
four rhetorical modes of discourse. More narrowly defined, it is the fiction-writing
mode in which the narrator communicates directly to the reader.
Oral storytelling is the earliest method for sharing narratives. [7] During most people's
childhoods, narratives are used to guide them on proper behavior, cultural history,
formation of a communal identity and values, as especially studied
in anthropology today among traditional indigenous peoples.[8]
Narrative is found in all forms of human creativity, art, and entertainment,
including speech, literature, theatre, music and song, comics, journalism, film, television
and video, video games, radio, game-play, unstructured recreation and performance in
general, as well as some painting, sculpture, drawing, photography and other visual
arts, as long as a sequence of events is presented. Several art movements, such
as modern art, refuse the narrative in favor of the abstract and conceptual.
Narrative can be organized into a number of thematic or formal categories: non-
fiction (such as definitively including creative non-
fiction, biography, journalism, transcript poetry and historiography); fictionalization of
historical events (such as anecdote, myth, legend and historical fiction)
and fiction proper (such as literature in prose and sometimes poetry, such as short
stories, novels and narrative poems and songs, and imaginary narratives as portrayed
in other textual forms, games or live or recorded performances). Narratives may also be
nested within other narratives, such as narratives told by an unreliable
narrator (a character) typically found in the genre of noir fiction. An important part
of narration is the narrative mode, the set of methods used to communicate the
narrative through a process narration (see also "Aesthetics approach" below).
Contents
1Overview
2History
3Human nature
4Literary theory
5Types of narrators and their modes
o 5.1Multiple narrators
6Aesthetics approach
7Psychological approach
8Social-sciences approaches
o 8.1Inquiry approach
o 8.2Mathematical-sociology approach
8.2.1Bayesian narratives
9In music
10In film
11In mythology
o 11.1Structure
12In cultural storytelling
13Historiography
14Storytelling rights
15Other specific applications
16See also
17Notes
18References
19Further reading
20External links
Overview[edit]
A narrative is a telling of some true or fictitious event or connected sequence of events,
recounted by a narrator to a narratee (although there may be more than one of each).
Narratives are to be distinguished from descriptions of qualities, states, or situations,
and also from dramatic enactments of events (although a dramatic work may also
include narrative speeches). A narrative consists of a set of events (the story) recounted
in a process of narration (or discourse), in which the events are selected and arranged
in a particular order (the plot, which can also mean "story synopsis"). The category of
narratives includes both the shortest accounts of events (for example, the cat sat on the
mat, or a brief news item) and the longest historical or biographical works, diaries,
travelogues, and so forth, as well as novels, ballads, epics, short stories, and other
fictional forms. In the study of fiction, it is usual to divide novels and shorter stories into
first-person narratives and third-person narratives. As an adjective, "narrative" means
"characterized by or relating to storytelling": thus narrative technique is the method of
telling stories, and narrative poetry is the class of poems (including ballads, epics, and
verse romances) that tell stories, as distinct from dramatic and lyric poetry. Some
theorists of narratology have attempted to isolate the quality or set of properties that
distinguishes narrative from non-narrative writings: this is called narrativity.[9]
History[edit]
In India, archaeological evidences of presence of stories, are found at Indus valley
civilization site Lothal. On one large vessel, the artist depicts birds with fish in their
beaks, resting in a tree, while a fox-like animal stands below. This scene bears
resemblance to the story of The Fox and the Crow in the Panchatantra. On a miniature
jar, the story of the thirsty crow and deer is depicted – of how the deer could not drink
from the narrow-mouth of the jar, while the crow succeeded by dropping stones in the
jar. The features of the animals are clear and graceful. [10][11]
Human nature[edit]
Owen Flanagan of Duke University, a leading consciousness researcher, writes,
"Evidence strongly suggests that humans in all cultures come to cast their own identity
in some sort of narrative form. We are inveterate storytellers." [12] Stories are an important
aspect of culture. Many works of art and most works of literature tell stories; indeed,
most of the humanities involve stories.[13] Stories are of ancient origin, existing in ancient
Egyptian, ancient Greek, Chinese and Indian cultures and their myths. Stories are also
a ubiquitous component of human communication, used as parables and examples to
illustrate points. Storytelling was probably one of the earliest forms of entertainment. As
noted by Owen Flanagan, narrative may also refer to psychological processes in self-
identity, memory and meaning-making.
Semiotics begins with the individual building blocks
of meaning called signs; semantics is the way in which signs are combined
into codes to transmit messages. This is part of a general communication system using
both verbal and non-verbal elements, and creating a discourse with
different modalities and forms.
In On Realism in Art, Roman Jakobson attests that literature exists as a separate entity.
He and many other semioticians prefer the view that all texts, whether spoken or
written, are the same, except that some authors encode their texts with
distinctive literary qualities that distinguish them from other forms of discourse.
Nevertheless, there is a clear trend to address literary narrative forms as separable from
other forms. This is first seen in Russian Formalism through Victor Shklovsky's analysis
of the relationship between composition and style, and in the work of Vladimir Propp,
who analyzed the plots used in traditional folk-tales and identified 31 distinct functional
components.[14] This trend (or these trends) continued in the work of the Prague
School and of French scholars such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. It
leads to a structural analysis of narrative and an increasingly influential body of modern
work that raises important theoretical questions:
