What is Narrative?

A narrative can be defined as a story that has been created by a constructive format. There are countless vehicles of native which include literature, pictures, songs, television, films, theatre and etc. There is an extraordinary variety of genres within different forms of narrative. Narrative is present from myths to legend, from epic tales or history, from pantomime to stained glass windows. In Roland Barthes words, “There are countless forms of narrative in the world.” [1] The word Narrative can be traced back to the Latin verb narrare which means to recount. [2] It is important to understand that narration is the narrative mode within the four rhetorical modes of discourse. Historian Lawrence Stone defined narrative as;

It is organized chronologically; it is focused on a single coherent story; it is descriptive rather than analytical; it is concerned with people not abstract circumstances; and it deals with the particular and specific rather than the collective and statistical. [3]

Stories are an important characteristic of culture. Human history is defined in art and literature works from centuries ago. Humanity involves stories. Owen Flanagan wrote in his research that “evidence strongly suggests that human in all cultures come to cast their own identity in some sort of narrative form. We are inveterate story tellers.” [4] It is also imperative to know that stories are key component to human communications. Parables and myths are illustrated by ancient stories dating all the way back to Egypt, Greece, China and India. And it is through these narratives that humans have a better understanding of our origins.

“Narrative is the principal way in which our species organize its understanding of time.” [5] H. Porter Abbott believes that the gift of narrative has a range of benefits to man-kind. Since we are the only species on this planet that have both language and conscious awareness of time, therefore this explains the reason why we use narrative as a mechanism of expressing our consciousness of the passage of time.

Like the clock, these modes of organizing time are abstract in the sense that they provide a grid of regular intervals within which we can locate events. Narrative, by contrast, turns this process inside out, allowing events themselves to create the order of time. [5]

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[1] Barthes, Roland. Introduction to the Structural Analysis of the Narrative. Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Culture Studies, University of Birmingham, 1966. Print.

[2] Oxford English Dictionary Online, "narrate, v.". Oxford University Press, 2007

[3] Stone, Lawrence. "Sign In — Past and Present." Oxford Journals | Humanities | Past & Present. 16 June 1999. Web. 11 Jan. 2011. .

[4] Flanagan, Owen J. Consciousness Reconsidered. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1992. Print.

[5] Abbott, H. Porter. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2008. Print.