A narrative (or story) is any account that presents connected events,^[1] and may be organized into various categories: non-fiction (e.g. New Journalism, creative non-fiction, biographies, and historiography); fictionalized accounts of historical events (e.g. anecdotes, myths, and legends); and fiction proper (i.e. literature in prose, such as short stories and novels, and sometimes in poetry and drama, although in drama the events are primarily being shown instead of told). Narrative is found in all forms of human creativity and art, including speech, writing, songs, film, television, video games, photography, theatre, and visual arts such as painting (with the modern art movements refusing the narrative in favour of the abstract and conceptual) that describes a sequence of events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to tell", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled".^[2]

The word "story" may be used as a synonym of "narrative". It can also be used to refer to the sequence of events described in a narrative. Narratives may also be nested within other narratives, such as narratives told by unreliable narrator (a character) typically found in noir fiction genre. An important part of narration is the narrative mode, the set of methods used to communicate the narrative through a process narration (see also "Narrative Aesthetics" below).

Along with exposition, argumentation, and description, narration, broadly defined, is one of four rhetorical modes of discourse. More narrowly defined, it is the fiction-writing mode whereby the narrator communicates directly to the reader.

Narrative and Human Nature [edit]

Owen Flanagan of Duke University, a leading consciousness researcher, writes that "Evidence strongly suggests that humans in all cultures come to cast their own identity in some sort of narrative form. We are inveterate storytellers."^[3] 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.^{[citation needed]}

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; and semantics, 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 argues that literature does not exist 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 analysed the plots used in traditional folk-tales and identified 31 distinct functional components.^[4] 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 epistemological questions:

• What is text?
• What is its role in the contextual culture?
• How is it manifested as art, cinema, theatre, or literature?
• Why is narrative divided into different genres, such as poetry, short stories, and novels?
• Why are narratives put into literature?

Literary theory [edit]

There is a distinction between first-person and third-person narrative, which Gérard Genette refers to as homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrative, respectively. A homodiegetic narrator describes own personal experiences as a character in the story. Such a narrator cannot know more about other characters than what their actions reveal. A heterodiegetic narrator, in contrast, describes the experiences of the characters that appear in the story. A narrative wherein events are seen through the eyes of a third-person internal focaliser is said to be figural. In some stories, the author may be omniscient and employ multiple points of view as well and comment on events as they occur.

"Narratology" is a term coined by Tzvetan Todorov in 1969, and generally refers to the structuralist analysis of narrative. In this process, the narrative is divided into its constituent parts in order to determine their function(s) and relationships. Here "story" refers to what is narrated (usually a chronological sequence of events) and "plot" refers to the logical and causal structure of a story, explaining why its events occur. The term discourse is used to describe the stylistic choices that determine how the narrative text or performance finally appears to the audience.

Narrative aesthetics [edit]

The art of narrative is by definition a highly aesthetic enterprise. There are a number of aesthetic elements that typically interact in well-developed stories. Such elements include the essential idea of narrative structure, with identifiable beginnings, middles and ends, or exposition-development-climax-denouement, with important inciting incidents, normally constructed into coherent plot lines; a strong focus on temporality that includes retention of the past, attention to present action and protention/future anticipation; a substantial focus on characters and characterization which is "arguably the most important single component of the novel" (David Lodge The Art of Fiction 67); a given heterogloss of different voices dialogically at play, "the sound of the human voice, or many voices, speaking in a variety of accents, rhythms and registers" (Lodge The Art of Fiction 97; see also the theory of Mikhail Bakhtin for expansion of this idea); possesses a narrator or narrator-like voice, which by definition "addresses" and "interacts with" reading audiences (see Reader Response theory); communicates with a Wayne Booth-esque rhetorical thrust, a dialectic process of interpretation, which is at times beneath the surface, conditioning a plotted narrative, and at other times much more visible, "arguing" for and against various positions; relies substantially on now-standard aesthetic figuration, particularly including the use of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony (see Hayden White, Metahistory for expansion of this idea); is often enmeshed in intertextuality, with copious connections, references, allusions, similarities, parallels, etc. to other literatures; and commonly demonstrates an effort toward bildungsroman, a description of identity development with an effort to evince becoming in character and community.^[jargon]

Narration as a fiction-writing mode [edit]

As with many words in the English language, narration has more than one meaning. In its broadest context narration encompasses all written fiction, or simply "story-telling." As one of the four rhetorical modes of discourse, the purpose of narration is to tell a story or to narrate an event or series of events. Narrative may exist in a variety of forms, including biographies, anecdotes, short stories and novels. In this context, all written fiction may be viewed as narration.

Narrowly defined, narration is the fiction-writing mode whereby the narrator is communicating directly to the reader. If, however, the broad definition of narration includes all written fiction, and the narrow definition is limited merely to that which is directly communicated to the reader, what comprises the rest of written fiction? The remainder of written fiction would be in the form of any of the other fiction-writing modes, such as description, exposition, summarization, etc.

Psychological narrative [edit]

Within philosophy of mind, the social sciences and various clinical fields including medicine, narrative can refer to aspects of human psychology.^[5] A personal narrative process is involved in a person's sense of personal or cultural identity, and in the creation and construction of memories; it is thought by some to be the fundamental nature of the self.^[6][7] The breakdown of a coherent or positive narrative has been implicated in the development of psychosis and mental disorder, and its repair said to play an important role in journeys of recovery.^[8] Narrative Therapy is a school of (family) psychotherapy.

Illness narratives are a way for a person affected by an illness to make sense of his or her experiences.^[9] They typically follow one of several set patterns: restitution, chaos, or quest narratives. In the restitution narrative, the person sees the illness as a temporary detour. The primary goal is to return permanently to normal life and normal health. These may also be called cure narratives. In the chaos narrative, the person sees the illness as a permanent state that will inexorably get worse, with no redeeming virtues. This is typical of diseases like Alzheimer's disease: the patient gets worse and worse, and there is no hope of returning to normal life. The third major type, the quest narrative, positions the illness experience as an opportunity to transform oneself into a better person through overcoming adversity and re-learning what is most important in life; the physical outcome of the illness is less important than the spiritual and psychological transformation. This is typical of the triumphant view of cancer survivorship in the breast cancer culture.^[9]

Personality traits, more specifically the Big Five personality traits, appear to be associated with the type of language or patterns of word use found in an individual's self-narrative.^[10] In other words, language use in self-narratives accurately reflects human personality. The linguistic correlates of each Big Five trait are as follows:

• Extraversion - positively correlated with words referring to humans, social processes and family;
• Agreeableness - positively correlated with family, inclusiveness and certainty; negatively correlated with anger and body (i.e., few negative comments about health/body);
• Conscientiousness - positively correlated with achievement and work; negatively related to body, death, anger and exclusiveness;
• Neuroticism - positively correlated with sadness, negative emotion, body, anger, home and anxiety; negatively correlated with work;
• Openness - positively correlated with perceptual processes, hearing and exclusiveness

Narrative case studies in the social sciences [edit]

Narrative is often used in case study research in the social sciences. Here it has been found that the dense, contextual, and interpenetrating nature of social forces uncovered by detailed narratives is often more interesting and useful for both social theory and social policy than other forms of social inquiry.

Narrative inquiry [edit]

Narrative inquiry runs deeper than being a research tool used in case studies. "Narrative inquiry rests on the epistemological assumption that we as human beings make sense of random experience by the imposition of story structures."^[11] Narrative inquiry makes valuable contributions to the social sciences because of its "open-ended, experiential and quest-like qualities." ^[12] Narratives are not productions of individuals, but rather are "shaped by social, cultural, and historical conventions" and the relationship between the story-teller and recorder (even if it’s an invisible audience).^[13] Therefore, the details of story structures and contents reveal much about the social, cultural, and historical context in which the story-teller exists.,^[11][14] Narrative inquiry is conducted with the understanding that stories that people tell are often at the surface of a more complex underlying story.^[11] The qualities of narrative inquiry and the potential contextual information that stories may reveal make narrative inquiry beneficial to several disciplines including psychology, anthropology, and education,.^{[11][12][13][14][15]}

Narrative inquiry research, like any other research tool or methodology, has advantages and limitations. According to Bell (2002), the benefits of narrative inquiry include the following: narrative provides the researcher with an understanding of an experience; narrative gives the researcher access to stories or themes that the story teller may not even be conscious of; narrative highlights changing perspectives and understanding of people and events as a function of time in the evaluation of an experience.^[11] Another advantage of narrative inquiry is that the process is as important at the product.^[12] In terms of educational research, the stories investigated by teachers and graduate students "became the objects of their research and the medium for their professional development," adding another dimension to the benefits of narrative inquiry.^[12]

Limitations, according to Bell (2002), include the amount time needed to commit to extensive in-depth research, as well as the researcher’s (unavoidable) imposition of meaning on the subject’s story.^[11] "Hardened stories," or "narratives that become context-free, portable and ready to be used anywhere and anytime for illustrative purposes," jeopardize narrative inquiry by "killing the spirit of inquiry" and freezing the story in time.^[12] Because stories are complex, the story’s truth is constructed and the researcher is subjective, it is necessary to determine what the assessment criteria should be for narrative inquiry research.^[11] Conle (2001), in researching the role and rationality of narrative inquiry in teacher education at multiple levels—as a method and as a tool for personal and professional development, offers criteria for assessing the validity of narrative research.^[15] It is, she says, fair to challenge a narrative inquirer in four ways: the objective truth of the story, the emotional truth of the story, the social/moral appropriateness of the story, and the clarity of the story.^[15] In challenging the narrative inquirer in these ways, a person is "asking for ‘more narrative,’ [which] is the ideal way to challenge a claim of truthfulness" and to determine if reader is interpreting the story according to how the narrative inquirer intended the story to be interpreted.^[15]

Narrative fallacy [edit]

Narrative appears to exist in all human societies, ancient and modern, and has been argued to be the most fundamental form of sensemaking for humans to understand their experience. Narrative thus seems to be not simply the creation of the storyteller. It seems to be an expression of inherent relationships in the human mind, which people use to make sense of the world by constructing it as narrative. This predisposition for narrative involves a danger, however, of what has been called the narrative fallacy. This fallacy consists of a human propensity to simplify data through a predilection for compact stories over complex data sets. It is easier for the human mind to remember and make decisions on the basis of stories with meaning, than to remember strings of data. This is one reason why narratives are so powerful and why many of the classics in the humanities and social sciences are written in the narrative format. But humans read meaning into data and compose stories, even where this is unwarranted. In narrative inquiry, the way to avoid the narrative fallacy is no different from the way to avoid other error in scholarly research, i.e., by applying the usual methodical checks for validity and reliability in how data are collected, analyzed, and presented.^{[citation needed]}

Narrative in music [edit]

Linearity is one of several narrative qualities that can be found in a musical composition.^[16] As noted by American musicologist, Edward Cone, narrative terms are also present in the analytical language about music.^[17] The different components of a fugue — subject, answer, exposition, discussion and summary — can be cited as an example.^[18] However, there are several views on the concept of narrative in music and the role it plays. One theory is that of Theodore Adorno, who has suggested that ‘music recites itself, is its own context, narrates without narrative’.^[18] Another, is that of Carolyn Abbate, who has suggested that ‘certain gestures experienced in music constitute a narrating voice’.^[17] Still others have argued that narrative is a semiotic enterprise that can enrich musical analysis.^[18] The French musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez contends that ‘the narrative, strictly speaking, is not in the music, but in the plot imagined and constructed by the listeners’.^[19] He argues that discussing music in terms of narrativity is simply metaphorical and that the ‘imagined plot’ may be influenced by the works title or other programmatic information provided by the composer.^[19] However, Abbate has revealed numerous examples of musical devices that function as narrative voices, by limiting music’s ability to narrate to rare ‘moments that can be identified by their bizarre and disruptive effect’.^[19] Various theorists share this view of narrative appearing in disruptive rather than normative moments in music. The final word is yet to be said, regarding narratives in music, as there is still much to be determined.

Historiography [edit]

In historiography, according to Lawrence Stone, narrative has traditionally been the main rhetorical device used by historians. In 1979, at a time when the new Social History was demanding a social-science model of analysis, Stone detected a move back toward the narrative. Stone defined narrative as organized chronologically; focused on a single coherent story; descriptive rather than analytical; concerned with people not abstract circumstances; and dealing with the particular and specific rather than the collective and statistical. He reported that, "More and more of the 'new historians' are now trying to discover what was going on inside people's heads in the past, and what it was like to live in the past, questions which inevitably lead back to the use of narrative."^[20]

Historians committed to a social science approach, however, have criticized the narrowness of narrative and its preference for anecdote over analysis, and clever examples rather than statistical regularities.^[21]

Other specific applications [edit]

• A narrative case study is a case study that tells a story.
• Narrative environment is a contested term that has been used for techniques of architectural or exhibition design in which 'stories are told in space' and also for the virtual environments in which computer games are played and which are invented by the computer game authors.
• Narrative film uses filmed reality to tell a story, often as a feature film.
• Narrative history is a genre of factual historical writing that uses chronology as its framework (as opposed to a thematic treatment of a historical subject).
• Narrative poetry is poetry that tells a story.
• A narrative verdict is a verdict available to coroners in England and Wales following an inquest.
• Metanarrative, sometimes also known as master- or grand narrative, is a higher-level cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience you've had in life.

See also [edit]

• Folklore
• Monogatari
• Narrative thread
• Narreme as the basic unit of narrative structure
• Organizational storytelling

References [edit]

Sources [edit]

• Kelley, Stephanie R, Rumors in Iraq: A Guide to Winning Hearts and Minds. Storming Media, 2004. ISBN 1-4235-2249-4
• Asimov, Nanette. "Researchers help U.S. Military track, defuse rumors." San Francisco Chronicle. October 14, 2011.
• Hardin, Jayson. The Rumor Bomb: Theorizing the convergence of New and Old Trends in Mediated U.S. Politics, Southern Review: Communication, Politics & Culture 39, no. I (2006): 84–110

Further reading [edit]

External links [edit]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Story

Wikiversity has learning materials about storytelling

• Manfred Jahn. Narratology: A Guide to the Theory of Narrative
• Narrative and Referential Activity
• Some Ideas about Narrative – notes on narrative from an academic perspective
• New cinema chair studies "narrative IEDs" SF State News. 09/29/11
• DOC Film Institute