Narrative
A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether non-fictional or fictional. Narratives can be presented through a sequence of written or spoken words, through still or moving images, or through any combination of these.
Narrative is expressed in all mediums of human creativity, art, and entertainment, including speech, literature, theatre, dance, music and song, comics, journalism, animation, video, video games, radio, structured and unstructured recreation, and potentially even purely visual arts like painting, sculpture, drawing, and photography, as long as a sequence of events is presented.
The social and cultural activity of humans sharing narratives is called storytelling, the vast majority of which has taken the form of oral storytelling. Since the rise of literate societies however, many narratives have been additionally recorded, created, or otherwise passed down in written form. The formal and literary process of constructing a narrative — narration — is one of the four traditional rhetorical modes of discourse, along with argumentation, description, and exposition. This is a somewhat distinct usage from narration in the narrower sense of a commentary used to convey a story, alongside various additional narrative techniques used to build and enhance any given story.
The noun narration and adjective narrative entered English from French in the 15th century; narrative became usable as a noun in the following century. These words ultimately derive from the Latin verb narrare, itself derived from the adjective gnarus.
Overview
A narrative is the telling of some actual or fictitious sequence of connected events to an audience, by a narrator in some cases. A personal narrative is any narrative in prose in which the speaker or writer presents, usually informally and in a spontaneous moment, their own personal experiences, such as in casual face-to-face conversation or in text messaging. Narratives are to be distinguished from simple descriptions of qualities, states, or situations without any particular individuals involved. Narratives range all the way from the shortest accounts of events to the most extended works, in the form of long and complex series that contain multiple books, films, television episodes, etc.The topic of narrative can be organized into a number of thematic or formal categories. Nonfiction includes creative nonfiction, biography, journalism, historiography, and other storytelling forms grounded fully in facts and history. Fiction, however, departs from this complete basis in facts and history. For instance, fictionalization of historical events, such as myths, legends, works of historical fiction, and some anecdotes have a basis in past real-life events but add in imaginary or supernatural events or characters. Fiction in its other forms includes short stories, novels, most films, and imaginary narratives in other textual forms, games, or live or recorded performances. In the study of literary fiction, it is usual to distinguish first-person from third-person narratives. Narrative poems and songs can be either fictional or nonfictional. Narrative poetry is distinct from lyric poetry, which focuses on the speaker's emotions and lacks a plot, setting, or other required narrative elements. Furthermore, nearly all dramatic enactments are narratives.
Basic elements
Certain basic elements are necessary and sufficient to define all works of narrative, including, most well-studied, all fictional narrative works. Thus, scholars also commonly refer to the following essential elements of narrative as the elements of fiction.Character
Characters are the individual persons inside a work of narrative; their choices and behaviors propel the plot forward. They typically are named humans whose actions and speech sometimes convey important motives. They may be entirely imaginary, they may be real-life individuals, or they may be roughly based on real-life individuals. The audience's first impressions are influential on how they perceive a fictional character, for example whether they empathize with a character or not, feeling for them as if they were real. The audience's familiarity with a character results in their expectations about how characters will behave in later scenes. Characters who behave contrary to their previous patterns of behavior can be confusing or jarring to the audience.Narratives contain main characters, called protagonists, whom the story revolves around, who encounter a central conflict, or who gain knowledge or grow significantly across the story. Certain stories may also have antagonists: characters who oppose, hinder, or fight against the protagonist. In many traditional narratives, the protagonist is specifically a hero: a sympathetic person who battles for morally good causes. The hero may face a villain: an antagonist who fights against morally good causes and actively perpetrates evil. Many other ways of classifying broad types of characters exist too, which are known as stock characters or character archetypes.
Conflict
Broadly speaking, conflict is any tension that drives the thoughts and actions of characters. Narrowly speaking, the conflict of a story is the major problem encountered by the protagonist. Often, a protagonist additionally struggles with a sense of anxiety, insecurity, indecisiveness, or other emotional burden as result of this conflict, which can be regarded as a secondary or internal conflict. Longer works of narrative typically involve many conflicts or smaller-level conflicts that occur alongside a main one. Conflict can be classified into a variety of common types, with the major ones being: character versus character, character versus nature, character versus society, character versus unavoidable circumstances, and character versus self. If the conflict is brought to an end by the end of the story, this is known as a resolution.Narrative mode
The narrative mode is the set of choices and techniques the author or creator selects in framing their story: how the narrative is told. It includes the scope of information presented or withheld, the type or style of language used, the channel or medium through which the story is presented, the way and extent to which narrative exposition and other types of commentary are communicated, and the overall point of view or perspective. An example of narrative perspective is a first-person narrative, in which some character refers openly to the self, using pronouns like "I" and "me", in communicating the story to the audience. Contrarily, in a third-person narrative, such pronouns are avoided in the telling of the story, perhaps because the teller is merely an impersonal written commentary of the story rather than a personal character within it. Both of these explicit tellings of a narrative through a spoken or written commentary are examples of a technique called narration, which is required only in written narratives but optional in other types. Though narration is a narrower term, it is occasionally used as a synonym for narrative mode in a very broad sense.Plot
The plot is the sequence of events that occurs in a narrative from the beginning to the middle to the end. It typically occurs through a process of cause and effect, in which characters' actions or other events produce reactions that allow the story to progress. Put another way, plot is structured through a series of scenes in which related events occur that lead to subsequent scenes. These events form plot points, moments of change that affect the characters' understandings, decisions, and actions. 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. The process of storytellers structuring and ordering a narrative's events is known in academia as plotting or emplotment.Setting
The setting is the time, place, and context in which a story takes place. It includes the physical and temporal surroundings that the characters inhabit and can also include the social or cultural conventions that affect characters. Sometimes, the setting may resemble a character in the sense that it has specific traits, undergoes actions that affect the plot, and develops over the course of the story.Theme
Themes are the major underlying ideas presented by a story, generally left open to the audience's own interpretation. 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. Thus, the audience may come to different conclusions about a work's themes than what the creator intended or regardless of what the creator intended. They can also develop new ideas about its themes as the work progresses.History
Stories are a defining component of human culture, predating recorded history. Written narratives survive from ancient civilizations, detailing for example the histories and mythologies of ancient Egyptian, Greek, Chinese, and Indian cultures. Storytelling, probably one of the earliest forms of entertainment, is a ubiquitous component of everyday human communication, also used as parables and examples to illustrate points, teach lessons, etc.In India, archaeological evidence of the presence of stories is found at the Indus Valley Civilization site, Lothal. On one large vessel, the artist depicts birds with fish in their beaks resting in a tree, while a fox-like animal stands below. This scene bears resemblance to the story of The Fox and the Crow in the Panchatantra. On a miniature jar, the story of the thirsty crow and deer is depicted, of how the deer could not drink from the narrow mouth of the jar, while the crow succeeded by dropping stones into the jar. The features of the animals are clear and graceful.