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A narrative (or play) is any account of connected events, presented to the person reading or listener in a sequence of written or spoken words, or in a sequence of (moving) pictures.[1]

Narrative can be organized in a number of thematic and/or formal/stylistic 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, games, photography, theatre, roleplaying games and visual arts such as painting (with the modern art movements refusing the narrative in favor of the abstract and conceptual) that describes a sequence of events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to tell", which is derived from the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled".[2]

Narrative can also be found in oral storytelling processes, as seen in many Indigenous American communities. Narrative storytelling is used to guide children on proper behavior, cultural history, formation of a communal identity, and values.[3] Narratives also act as living entities through cultural stories, as they are passed on from generation to generation. Because the narrative storytelling is often left without explicit meanings, children act as participants in the storytelling process by delving deeper into the open-ended story and making their own interpretations.[4]

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 an 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).


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."[5] 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.



  • What is text?
  • What is its role (culture)?
  • How is it manifested as art, cinema, theater, or literature?
  • Why are narratives put into literature?

Literary theory[edit]

In literary theoretic approach, narrative is being narrowly defined as fiction-writing mode in which the narrator is communicating directly to the reader. Until the late 19th century, literary criticism as an academic exercise dealt solely with poetry (including epic poems like the Iliad and Paradise Lost, and poetic drama like Shakespeare). Most poems did not have a narrator distinct from the author.

But novels, lending a number of voices to several characters in addition to narrator's, created a possibility of narrator's views differing significantly from the author's views. With the rise of the novel in the 18th century, the concept of the narrator (as opposed to "author") made the question of narrator a prominent one for literary theory. It has been proposed that perspective and interpretive knowledge are the essential characteristics, while focalization and structure are lateral characteristics of the narrator.[according to whom?]

Types of narrators and their modes[edit]

A writer's choice in the narrator is crucial for the way a work of fiction is perceived by the reader. 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.

Most narrators present their story from one of the following perspectives (called narrative modes): first-person, or third-person limited or omniscient. Generally, a first-person narrator brings greater focus on the feelings, opinions, and perceptions of a particular character in a story, and on how the character views the world and the views of other characters. If the writer's intention is to get inside the world of a character, then it is a good choice, although a third-person limited narrator is an alternative that does not require the writer to reveal all that a first-person character would know. By contrast, a third-person omniscient narrator gives a panoramic view of the world of the story, looking into many characters and into the broader background of a story. A third-person omniscient narrator can be an animal or an object, or it can be a more abstract instance that does not refer to itself. For stories in which the context and the views of many characters are important, a third-person narrator is a better choice. However, a third-person narrator does not need to be an omnipresent guide, but instead may merely be the protagonist referring to himself in the third person (also known as third person limited narrator).

Multiple narrators

A writer may choose to let several narrators tell the story from different points of view. Then it is up to the reader to decide which narrator seems most reliable for each part of the story. It may refer to the style of the writer in which he/she expresses the paragraph written. See for instance the works of Louise Erdrich. William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is a prime example of the use of multiple narrators. Faulkner employs stream of consciousness by narrating the story from various perspectives.

In Indigenous American communities, narratives and storytelling are often told by a number of elders in the community. In this way, the stories are never static because they are shaped by the relationship between narrator and audience. Thus, each individual story may have countless variations. Narrators often incorporate minor changes in the story in order to tailor the story to different audiences.[7]

Aesthetics approach[edit]


Psychological approach[edit]

Within philosophy of mind, the social sciences and various clinical fields including medicine, narrative can refer to aspects of human psychology.[8] 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.[9][10] 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.[11] Narrative Therapy is a school of (family) psychotherapy.


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.[13] 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

Social sciences approaches[edit]

Human beings often claim to understand events when they manage to formulate a coherent story or narrative explaining how they believe the event was generated. Narratives thus lie at foundations of our cognitive procedures and also provide an explanatory framework for the social sciences, particularly when it is difficult to assemble enough cases to permit statistical analysis. 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.

Sociologists Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein have contributed to the formation of a constructionist approach to narrative in sociology. From their book The Self We Live By: Narrative Identity in a Postmodern World (2000), to more recent texts such as Analyzing Narrative Reality (2009)and Varieties of Narrative Analysis (2012), they have developed an analytic framework for researching stories and storytelling that is centered on the interplay of institutional discourses (big stories) on the one hand, and everyday accounts (little stories) on the other. The goal is the sociological understanding of formal and lived texts of experience, featuring the production, practices, and communication of accounts.

Inquiry approach[edit]

In order to avoid "hardened stories," or "narratives that become context-free, portable and ready to be used anywhere and anytime for illustrative purposes" and are being used as conceptual metaphors as defined by linguist George Lakoff, an approach called narrative inquiry was proposed, resting on the epistemological assumption that human beings make sense of random or complex multicausal experience by the imposition of story structures."[14][15] Human propensity to simplify data through a predilection for narratives over complex data sets typically leads to narrative fallacy. 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] Several criteria for assessing the validity of narrative research was proposed, including the objective aspect, the emotional aspect, the social/moral aspect, and the clarity of the story.

Mathematical sociology approach[edit]

In mathematical sociology, the theory of comparative narratives was devised in order to describe and compare the structures (expressed as "and" in a directed graph where multiple causal links incident into a node are conjoined) of action-driven sequential events.[16][17][18]

Narratives so conceived comprise the following ingredients:

  • A finite set of state descriptions of the world S, the components of which are weakly ordered in time;
  • A finite set of actors/agents (individual or collective), P;
  • A finite set of actions A;
  • A mapping of P onto A;

The structure (directed graph) is generated by letting the nodes stand for the states and the directed edges represent how the states are changed by specified actions. The action skeleton can then be abstracted, comprising a further digraph where the actions are depicted as nodes and edges take the form "action a co-determined (in context of other actions) action b".

Narratives can be both abstracted and generalised by imposing an algebra upon their structures and thence defining homomorphism between the algebras. The insertion of action-driven causal links in a narrative can be achieved using the method of Bayesian narratives.

Bayesian narratives

Developed by Peter Abell, the theory of Comparative Narratives conceives a narrative as a directed graph comprising multiple causal links (social interactions) of the general form: "action a causes action b in a specified context". In the absence of sufficient comparative cases to enable statistical treatment of the causal links, items of evidence in support and against a particular causal link are assembled and used to compute the Bayesian likelihood ratio of the link. Subjective causal statements of the form "I/she did b because of a" and subjective counterfactuals "if it had not been for a I/she would not have done b" are notable items of evidence.[18][19][20]

In music[edit]

Linearity is one of several narrative qualities that can be found in a musical composition.[21] As noted by American musicologist, Edward Cone, narrative terms are also present in the analytical language about music.[22] The different components of a fugue — subject, answer, exposition, discussion and summary — can be cited as an example.[23] 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’.[23] Another, is that of Carolyn Abbate, who has suggested that ‘certain gestures experienced in music constitute a narrating voice’.[22] Still others have argued that narrative is a semiotic enterprise that can enrich musical analysis.[23] 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’.[24] He argues that discussing music in terms of narrativity is simply metaphorical and that the ‘imagined plot’ may be influenced by the work's title or other programmatic information provided by the composer.[24] 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’.[24] 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.

In cultural storytelling[edit]

A narrative can take on the shape of a story, which gives listeners an entertaining and collaborative avenue for acquiring knowledge. Many cultures use storytelling as a way to record histories, myths, and values. These stories can be seen as living entities of narrative among cultural communities, as they carry the shared experience and history of the culture within them. Stories are often used within indigenous cultures in order to share knowledge to the younger generation.[25] Due to indigenous narratives leaving room for open-ended interpretation, native stories often engage children in the storytelling process so that they can make their own meaning and explanations within the story. This promotes holistic thinking among native children, which works towards merging an individual and world identity. Such an identity upholds native epistemology and gives children a sense of belonging as their cultural identity develops through the sharing and passing on of stories.[26]

For example, a number of indigenous stories are used to illustrate a value or lesson. In the Western Apache tribe, stories can be used to warn of the misfortune that befalls people when they do not follow acceptable behavior. One story speaks to the offense of a mother's meddling in her married son's life. In the story, the Western Apache tribe is under attack from a neighboring tribe, the Pimas. The Apache mother hears a scream. Thinking it is her son's wife screaming, she tries to intervene by yelling at him. This alerts the Pima tribe to her location, and she is promptly killed due to intervening in her son's life. [27]



Some philosophers identify narratives with a type of explanation. Mark Bevir argues, for example, that narratives explain actions by appealing to the beliefs and desires of actors and by locating webs of beliefs in the context of historical traditions. Narrative is an alternative form of explanation to that associated with natural science.


Other specific applications[edit]

  • Narrative film usually uses images and sounds on film (or, more recently, on analogue or digital video media) to convey a story. Narrative film is usually thought of in terms of fiction but it may also assemble stories from filmed reality, as in some documentary film, but narrative film may also use animation.
  • Narrative poetry is poetry that tells a story.
  • Narrative photography is photography used to tell stories or in conjunction with stories.

See also[edit]


  1. ^ Oxford English Dictionary (online): Definition of "narrative"
  4. ^ Owen Flanagan Consciousness Reconsidered 198
  5. ^ Owen Flanagan Consciousness Reconsidered 198
  7. ^ Piquemal, 2003. From Native North American Oral Traditions to Western Literacy: Storytelling in Education.
  10. ^ Dan McAdams (2004). "Redemptive Self: Narrative Identity in America Today". The Self and Memory 1 (3): 95–116. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195176933.001.0001. 
  16. ^ Abell. P. (1987) The Syntax of Social Life: the theory and Method of Comparative Narratives, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
  17. ^ Abell, P. (1993) Some Aspects of Narrative Method, Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 18. 1-25.
  18. ^ a b Abell, P. (2009) A Case for Cases, Comparative Narratives in Sociological Explanation, Sociological Methods and Research, 32, 1-33.
  19. ^ Abell, P. (2011) Singular Mechanisms and Bayesian Narratives in ed. Pierre Demeulenaere, Analytical Sociology and Social Mechanisms Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
  20. ^ Abell, P. (2009) History, Case Studies, Statistics and Causal Inference, European Sociological review, 25, 561–569
  22. ^ a b Beard and Gloag, Musicology, 113–117
  23. ^ a b c Beard and Gloag, Musicology, 115
  24. ^ a b c Beard and Gloag, Musicology, 116
  25. ^ and-the-future
  26. ^ Piquemal, N. 2003. From Native North American Oral Traditions to Western Literacy: Storytelling in Education.
  27. ^ Basso, 1984. "Stalking with Stories". Names, Places, and Moral Narratives Among the Western Apache.
  29. ^ J. Morgan Kousser, "The Revivalism of Narrative: A Response to Recent Criticisms of Quantitative History," Social Science History vol 8, no. 2 (Spring 1984): 133–49; Eric H. Monkkonen, "The Dangers of Synthesis," American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1146–57.



Further reading[edit]

  • Bal, Mieke. (1985). Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: Toronto University Press.
  • Gubrium, Jaber F. & James A. Holstein. (2009). Analyzing Narrative Reality. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
  • Holstein, James A. & Jaber F. Gubrium. (2000). The Self We Live By: Narrative Identity in a Postmodern World. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Holstein, James A. & Jaber F. Gubrium, eds. (2012). Varieties of Narrative Analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
  • Hunter, Kathryn Montgomery (1991). Doctors' Stories: The Narrative Structure of Medical Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
  • Ranjbar Vahid. (2011) The Narrator, Iran:Baqney
  • Quackenbush, S.W. (2005). "Remythologizing culture: Narrativity, justification, and the politics of personalization" (PDF). Journal of Clinical Psychology 61: 67–80. doi:10.1002/jclp.20091. 
  • Salmon, Christian. (2010). "Storytelling, bewitching the modern mind." London, Verso.
  • Toolan, Michael (2001). "Narrative: a Critical Linguistic Introduction"
  • Review of The Cambridge companion to narrative
  • Turner, Mark (1996). "The Literary Mind"
  • Ranjbar Vahid. The Narrator, Iran:Baqney 2011 (summary in english)
  • White, Hayden (2010). The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957–2007. Ed. Robert Doran. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

External links[edit]