Narrative

A Narrative is a report of connected events.

• AKA: Story.
• Context:
  • It can (typically) have a Story Beginning, and a Story End.
  • It can (typically) be created by a Story Creation Task (such as storytelling).
  • It can (typically) evoke emotional or intellectual responses from the audience.
  • It can (often) include multiple perspectives or interwoven plot lines, adding complexity to the storytelling.
  • It can be associated with a Narrative Genre.
  • It can range from being a Linguistic Story to being a Visual Story.
  • It can range from being a Fictional Story to being a Non-Fictional Narrative.
  • ...
• Example(s):
  • In Literature:
    • a Biography, such as the life story of Nelson Mandela.
    • a Historic Account, like The Diary of Anne Frank.
    • a Short Fictional Story, such as The Lottery by Shirley Jackson.
    • a Novel, like War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.
  • In Music:
    • a Story Song, like "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" by Gordon Lightfoot.
  • In Mythology:
    • an Epic Story, like The Epic of Gilgamesh.
  • In Film:
    • a Motion Picture that narrates a story, like Schindler's List.
  • ...
• Counter-Example(s):
  • a Written Journal, which typically includes personal reflections without a structured narrative.
  • a Forum Page, which consists of discussions and comments without a unified narrative structure.
  • ...
• See: Essay, Myth, Poem, Non-Fiction Document, Motion Picture, New Journalism, Creative Non-Fiction, Historiography, Anecdotes, Legend, Literature, Prose.

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References

2020

• (Wikipedia, 2020) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/narrative Retrieved:2020-5-4.
  • A narrative or story is an account of a series of related events, experiences, or the like, whether true (episode, vignette, travelogue, memoir, autobiography, biography) or fictitious (fairy tale, fable, story, epic, legend, novel). The word derives from the Latin verb narrare (to tell), which is derived from the adjective gnarus (knowing or skilled). 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. 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.

    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).

2020b

• (Greene, 2020) ⇒ Brian Greene. (2020). “Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in An Evolving Universe.” Knopf. ISBN:9781524731670
  • QUOTE: ... These are all ongoing stories, developed by thinkers hailing from a great range of distinct disciplines. Understandably so. A saga that ranges from quarks to consciousness is a hefty chronicle. Still, the different stories are interlaced. Don Quixote speaks to humankind’s yearning for the heroic, told through the fragile Alonso Quijano, a character created in the imagination of Miguel de Cervantes, a living, breathing, thinking, sensing, feeling collection of bone, tissue, and cells that, during his lifetime, supported organic processes of energy transformation and waste excretion, which themselves relied on atomic and molecular movements honed by billions of years of evolution on a planet forged from the detritus of supernova explosions scattered throughout a realm of space emerging from the big bang. Yet to read Don Quixote’s travails is to gain an understanding of human nature that would remain opaque if embedded in a description of the movements of the knight-­errant’s molecules and atoms or conveyed through an elaboration of the neuronal processes crackling in Cervantes’s mind while writing the novel. Connected though they surely are, different stories, told with different languages and focused on different levels of reality, provide vastly different insights.

2012

• (Gottschall, 2012) ⇒ Jonathan Gottschall. (2012). “The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human.” Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,
  • BOOK OVERVIEW: Humans live in landscapes of make-believe. We spin fantasies. We devour novels, films, and plays. Even sporting events and criminal trials unfold as narratives.

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