What is a Narrative?

Narrative is a discourse (spoken, read, or thought), consisting of events and characters, that organizes human perceptions of the world into temporal and spatial contexts. According to H. Porter Abbott, “narrative is the principal way in which our species organizes its understanding of time” (The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 3). Narrative is essentially our ability to decipher and categorize every event, action, or feeling we experience into the chronological phases of our lives. Narrative is an ever-present entity because humans have an inherent need for an explanation or classification of every aspect of human existence in order to perceive events as ‘positive,’ ‘negative,’ ‘socially condoned,’ or ‘socially abhorred.’ Abbott states, “And without understanding the narrative…We cannot find the meaning” (10). Thus, it is only through the construction of a narrative that meaning is deciphered and applied to our experiences.

According to Abbott, narrative is divided into the ‘story’ and the ‘discourse.’ The story is the event or sequence of events in their natural form and the discourse is the conveyance of these events through a narrator (which can be an orator, a camera lens, a writing style, or even a paintbrush) (15). Thus, one’s comprehension of a narrative depends on the representation of the story. Not only does the mode of narration have the authority to influence our inferences and perceptions of the events (37), the notion that events and characters are being “re-presented” implies that ‘story’ (events and characters) is an absolute in nature and preexists narrative.

Considering the notion that every narrative is a discourse that represents a story in its natural state (its existence prior to interpretation or the application of meaning), are there any “true narratives?” According to Abbott, the fact that a story is mediated by a mode of narration exemplifies the narrator’s role in constructing the story (20), which highlights humanity’s innate distance from ‘the story’ as it exists in nature. Abbott states, “…we know them in story form only as they are recounted…So if things are really happening in the world, we nonetheless cannot pick them up…without adding, framing…inflecting those events in a multitude of ways” (37). Thus, a narrative is always framed and always reflects a recreation and specific interpretation of the event, ejecting the story from its natural state and defining it with a ‘meaning.’

In David Herman’s edition of The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, he poses the question, “If a story…can be rendered in more than one way and even in more than one medium, how do we know it is the same story when we see it again? Or is it always a new story in every rendering?” (41). From a macrocosmic perspective, nature has one overarching creation story and there are multitudes of interpretations or perceptions of this story. Thus, it can be argued that the elements of the story remain the same in every new rendering, but the different perspective of the narrator creates outlets for new inferences and new applications of meaning to the events in their absolute existence.

Works Cited

Abbott, H. Porter. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Print.

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