narrative

A narrative (or story) is any fictional or nonfictional report of connected events, presented in a sequence of written or spoken words, and/or in a sequence of (moving) pictures. Narrative can be organized in a number of thematic and/or formal, stylistic categories: non-fiction (e.g. New Journalism, creative non-fiction, biography, and historiography); fictionalized accounts of historical events (e.g. anecdote, myth, and legend); 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”. 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. 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. 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). Along with exposition, argumentation, and description, narration, broadly defined, is one of four rhetorical modes of discourse. More narrowly defined, it is the fiction-writing mode whereby the narrator communicates directly to the reader.