narrative

The tradition & historical record

A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether non-fictional (memoir, biography, news report, documentary, travelogue, etc.) or fictional (fairy tale, fable, legend, thriller, novel, etc.). Narratives can be presented through a sequence of written or spoken words, through still or moving images, or through any combination of these. Narrative is expressed in all mediums of human creativity, art, and entertainment, including speech (oral literature), literature, theatre, dance, music and song, comics, journalism, animation, video (including film and television), video games, radio, structured and unstructured recreation, and potentially even purely static visual art like painting, sculpture, drawing, and photography, as long as a sequence of events is presented. The social and cultural activity of humans sharing narratives is called storytelling, the vast majority of which has taken the form of oral storytelling. Since the rise of literate societies however, many narratives have been additionally recorded, created, or otherwise passed down in written form. The formal and literary process of constructing a narrative — narration — is one of the four traditional rhetorical modes of discourse, along with argumentation, description, and exposition. ¹

A narrative is the telling of some actual or fictitious sequence of connected events to an audience, by a narrator in some cases (and in all cases of written narratives). A personal narrative is any narrative in prose in which the speaker or writer presents, usually informally and in a spontaneous moment, their own personal experiences, such as in casual face-to-face conversation or in text messaging. Narratives are to be distinguished from simple descriptions of qualities, states, or situations without any particular individuals involved. Narratives range all the way from the shortest accounts of events (for example, the simple sentence "the cat sat on the mat" or a brief news item) to the most extended works, in the form of long and complex series that contain multiple books, films, television episodes, etc. The topic of narrative can be organized into a number of thematic or formal categories. Nonfiction includes creative nonfiction, biography, journalism, historiography, and other storytelling forms grounded fully in facts and history. Fiction, however, departs from this complete basis in facts and history. For instance, fictionalization of historical events, such as myths, legends, works of historical fiction, and some anecdotes have a basis in past real-life events but add in imaginary or supernatural events or characters. Fiction in its other forms includes short stories, novels, most films, and imaginary narratives in other textual forms, games, or live or recorded performances. In the study of literary (written) fiction, it is usual to distinguish first-person from third-person narratives. Narrative poems and songs can be either fictional (like epics) or nonfictional (like transcript poems). ¹

Certain basic elements are necessary and sufficient to define all works of narrative, including, most well-studied, all fictional narrative works. Thus, scholars also commonly refer to the following essential elements of narrative as the elements of fiction. ¹

Characters are the individual persons inside a work of narrative; their choices and behaviors propel the plot forward. They typically are named humans whose actions and speech sometimes convey important motives. They may be entirely imaginary, they may be real-life individuals, or they may be roughly based on real-life individuals. The audience's first impressions are influential on how they perceive a fictional character, for example whether they empathize with a character or not, feeling for them as if they were real. The audience's familiarity with a character results in their expectations about how the character will behave in later scenes. Characters who behave contrary to their previous patterns of behavior (their characterization) can be confusing or jarring to the audience. Narratives contain main characters, called protagonists, around whom the story revolves, who encounter a central conflict, or who gain knowledge or grow significantly across the story. (Some narratives performed by actors contain a collection of equally showcased protagonists, known as an ensemble cast.) Certain stories may also have antagonists: characters who oppose, hinder, or fight against the protagonist(s). In many traditional narratives, the protagonist is specifically a hero: a sympathetic person who battles (often literally) for morally good causes. The hero may face a villain: an antagonist who fights against morally good causes and actively perpetrates evil. Many other ways of classifying broad types of characters exist too, which are known as stock characters or character archetypes. ¹

Broadly speaking, conflict is any tension that drives the thoughts and actions of characters. Narrowly speaking, the conflict of a story is the major problem encountered by the protagonist(s). Often, a protagonist additionally struggles with a sense of anxiety, insecurity, indecisiveness, or other emotional burden as a result of this conflict, which can be regarded as a secondary or internal conflict. Longer works of narrative typically involve many conflicts or smaller-level conflicts that occur alongside a main one. Conflict can be classified into a variety of common types, with the major ones being: character versus character, character versus nature, character versus society, character versus unavoidable circumstances (often termed fate or destiny), and character versus self. If the conflict is brought to an end by the end of the story, this is known as a resolution. ¹

The narrative mode is the set of choices and techniques the author or creator selects in framing their story: how the narrative is told. It includes the scope of information presented or withheld, the type or style of language used, the channel or medium through which the story is presented, the way and extent to which narrative exposition and other types of commentary are communicated, and the overall point of view or perspective. An example of narrative perspective is a first-person narrative, in which some character (often the main one) refers openly to the self, using pronouns like "I" and "me", in communicating the story to the audience. Contrarily, in a third-person narrative, such pronouns are avoided in the telling of the story, perhaps because the teller is merely an impersonal written commentary of the story rather than a personal character within it. Both of these explicit tellings of a narrative through a spoken or written commentary are examples of a technique called narration, which is required only in written narratives but optional in other types. Though narration is a narrower term, it is occasionally used as a synonym for narrative mode in a very broad sense. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Narrative”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

narrative is account of a series of related events or experiences in oral or written form, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 47 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²