The Discourse of Communication

If communication is the discourse of society (Hardt 3), then narration is the method by which that discourse is understood (Abbott 39). As such, the vehicles through which narrations are communicated are both widespread and diverse (Barthes 237). Narrations, says H. Porter Abbott, are present in all meaningful rhetoric, whether artistic or useful (Abbott 1). In fact, it is important to distinguish the characteristics of a "story" from those of a narrative because while every story comprises the mold of a narrative, the "essence" of narrations are much more.

David Herman quotes the words of Gerald Prince perfectly in his argument that a narrative is truly synonymous with an explanation, an argument, a theory or an ideology, but in each of these cases the writer prefers to refer to the discourse as "narrative" because narrative presents each without previously construed connotations. Narrations simply convey the "representation of events" (Herman 22-3).

Roland Barthes argues people are faced with an infinite number of narratives in the forms of articulation, text, pictures, gestures, and song (Barthes 237-8). Thus to capture the center from which a narrative stems, appearance and medium must be stripped away to leave at the heart of the definition only substance and structure as a narration's defining characteristics. It must have meaning beyond aesthetics (Abbott 67). Narratives must embrace certain content, and fulfill a social function through the sequence of time-passing events. The events of the narration capture time in space, and as such narratives derive and provide meaning (Herman 24-5).

This diversity in context and content allows a narrative to serve a number of functions. Throughout history narrative has become synonymous with stories, and this conception is in error. A story combines the author and the narrator so, whether first or third person, the reader imagines their perspectives to align. A narrative on the other hand removes the bias of the creator from that of the narrator (Barthes 279.) A narrative is a pure discourse offset from perceived bias to instead dictate an implicit message captured in the pure representation of the information (Herman 25).

Abbott, H. Porter. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative; Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Barthes, Roland|Duisit, Lionel. New Literary History, Vol. 6, No. 2, On Narrative and Narratives (1975). Pp 237-272. The Johns Hopkins University Press. Web.

Herman, David. The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.