Narrative

A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences,[1][2] whether non-fictional (memoir, biography, news report, documentary, travelogue, etc.)

[10] Narrative is found in all mediums of human creativity, art, and entertainment, including speech, literature, theatre, music and song, comics, journalism, film, television, animation 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.

[11] The category of narratives includes both the shortest accounts of events (for example, the cat sat on the mat or a brief news item) and the most extended historical or biographical works, diaries, travelogues, and so forth, as well as novels, ballads, epics, short stories, and other fictional forms.

[14] The movement of the plot forward often corresponds to protagonists encountering or realizing the conflict, and then working to resolve it, creating emotional stakes for the characters as well as the audience.

Themes are more abstract than other elements and are subjective: open to discussion by the audience who, by the story's end, can argue about which big ideas or messages were explored, what conclusions can be drawn, and which ones the work's creator intended.

[17][18] Owen Flanagan of Duke University, a leading consciousness researcher, writes, "Evidence strongly suggests that humans in all cultures come to cast their own identity in some sort of narrative form.

This is first seen in Russian Formalism through Victor Shklovsky's analysis of the relationship between composition and style, and in the work of Vladimir Propp, who analyzed the plots used in traditional folk-tales and identified 31 distinct functional components.

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).

[22] The school of literary criticism known as Russian formalism has applied methods that are more often used to analyse narrative fiction, to non-fictional texts such as political speeches.

Such elements include the idea of narrative structure, with identifiable beginnings, middles, and ends, or the process of exposition-development-climax-denouement, with coherent plot lines; a strong focus on temporality including retention of the past, attention to present action, and future anticipation; a substantial focus on character and characterization, "arguably the most important single component of the novel" (David Lodge The Art of Fiction 67); different voices interacting, "the sound of the human voice, or many voices, speaking in a variety of accents, rhythms, and registers" (Lodge The Art of Fiction 97; see also the theory of Mikhail Bakhtin for expansion of this idea); a narrator or narrator-like voice, which "addresses" and "interacts with" reading audiences (see Reader Response theory); communicates with a Wayne Booth-esque rhetorical thrust, a dialectic process of interpretation, which is at times beneath the surface, forming a plotted narrative, and at other times much more visible, "arguing" for and against various positions; relies substantially on the use of literary tropes (see Hayden White, Metahistory for expansion of this idea); is often intertextual with other literatures; and commonly demonstrates an effort toward Bildungsroman, a description of identity development with an effort to evince becoming in character and community.

[jargon] Within philosophy of mind, the social sciences, and various clinical fields including medicine, narrative can refer to aspects of human psychology.

[26][27] The breakdown of a coherent or positive narrative has been implicated in the development of psychosis and mental disorders, and its repair said to play an important role in journeys of recovery.

Narratives thus lie at the 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.

Research using narrative methods in the social sciences has been described as still being in its infancy[33] but this perspective has several advantages such as access to an existing, rich vocabulary of analytical terms: plot, genre, subtext, epic, hero/heroine, story arc (e.g., beginning–middle–end), and so on.

Another benefit is it emphasizes that even apparently non-fictional documents (speeches, policies, legislation) are still fictions, in the sense they are authored and usually have an intended audience in mind.

[47] 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.

[52] Considering how mythologies have historically been transmitted and passed down through oral retellings, there is no qualitative or reliable method to precisely trace exactly where and when a tale originated; and since myths are rooted in a remote past, and are viewed as a factual account of happenings within the culture it originated from, the worldview present in many oral mythologies is from a cosmological perspective—one that is told from a voice that has no physical embodiment, and is passed down and modified from generation to generation.

Frazer states: "If these definitions be accepted, we may say that myth has its source in reason, legend in memory, and folk-tale in imagination; and that the three riper products of the human mind which correspond to these its crude creations are science, history, and romance.

Prose narratives tend to be relatively linear regarding the time period they occur in, and are traditionally marked by its natural flow of speech as opposed to the rhythmic structure found in various forms of literature such as poetry and haikus.

Dumèzil's theory suggests that through these myths, concepts of universal wisdom and justice were able to be communicated to the Nordic people in the form of a mythological narrative.

This second function reflects Indo-European cultures' high regard for the warrior class, and explains the belief in an afterlife that rewards a valiant death on the battlefield; for the Norse mythology, this is represented by Valhalla.

These gods often presided over the realms of healing, prosperity, fertility, wealth, luxury, and youth—any kind of function that was easily related to by the common peasant farmer in a society.

Just as a farmer would live and sustain themselves off their land, the gods of the third function were responsible for the prosperity of their crops, and were also in charge of other forms of everyday life that would never be observed by the status of kings and warriors, such as mischievousness and promiscuity.

Additionally, Dumèzil proposed that his theory stood at the foundation of the modern understanding of the Christian Trinity, citing that the three key deities of Odin, Thor, and Freyr were often depicted together in a trio—seen by many as an overarching representation of what would be known today as "divinity".

[64] Alaskan Indigenous Natives state that narratives teach children where they fit in, what their society expects of them, how to create a peaceful living environment, and to be responsible, worthy members of their communities.

[67] Lastly, elders from Alaskan Native communities claim that the use of animals as metaphors allow children to form their own perspectives while at the same time self-reflecting on their own lives.

American Indian community members emphasize to children that the method of obtaining knowledge can be found in stories passed down through each generation.

Likewise, a key component of the battle of the narratives is to succeed in establishing the reasons for and potential outcomes of the conflict, on terms favorable to one's efforts.

Stone defined narrative as organized chronologically; focused on a single coherent story; descriptive rather than analytical; concerned with people not abstract circumstances; and dealing with the particular and specific rather than the collective and statistical.

Historians committed to a social science approach, however, have criticized the narrowness of narrative and its preference for anecdote over analysis, and clever examples rather than statistical regularities.