What is a Narrative?

When attempting to explain what a narrative is, it is first necessary to look at what a narrative is expected to accomplish. From Roland Barthes writings it can be derived that a narrative's purpose is to exchange information by means of a "giver of narrative and a recipient of narrative" (Barthes, 260). This is a very general view of narrative, but for all intents and purposes, a largely correct and irrefutable description of a narrative's purpose. In a much more abstract interpretation, H. Porter Abbott postulates that "narrative is the principal way in which our species organizes its understanding time" (Abbott, 3). Whether using a broad or specific definition of the purpose of narrative, it is understood through the writings of Barthes and Abbott that narrative cannot be quantified into one all-encompassing definition. As Abbott says, "Narrativity is a vexed issue, and as with many issues in the study of narrative there is no definitive test that can tell us to what degree narrativity is present" (Abbott, 25).

In his essay "The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative", Abbott outlines how narrative adds a sense of "human time" (Abbott, 4) to a chain of events, in that a narrative shows time relative to the events it involves, as opposed to ordinary clock time. Still, despite the importance of time in a narrative, it is not necessarily chronological time, which, in addition to the lack of a narrating figure or point of view, is what differentiates a story from a narrative. However, this idea of the ordering of events or narrativity as vital to something being classified as a narrative remains an opinion on the part of H. Porter Abbott, albeit a very well defended and supported opinion. Similarly, the qualifiers of a narrative that Roland Barthes offers, such as syntax, event sequence, and again, narration, do not definitively qualify or disqualify something as a narrative. The best that can be said as an objective definition of a narrative is that it is the communication of an event or sequence of events from one party to another, via a variety of mediums.


[1] Abbot, H. Porter. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2002

[2] Barthes, Roland and Duisit, Lionel. An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative. New Literary History. Vol.6 No.2 (1975)