What is a narrative?

The definition of narrative have often been questioned and attempted by many. One appealing definition out of the bunch was the one H. Porter Abbott defined. According to H. Porter Abbott, "Narrative is the representation of an event or a series of events." By this definition in order for something to be consider a narrative there is a need for an action to occur and without an action it would be just a description. But the existent of the action alone is not enough to call something a narrative.

According to H. Porter Abbott, the reader needs to be aware of the time of the reading and the order in which things are read. Therefore for something to be called a narrative the reader should be able to determine the chronological order of the story even if it was told backwards or from different points of view.

The next question most people tackle is size. But an exact answer is next to near impossible to arrive at. The same problem is often tackled in what defines a poem. For a lot of people the first image of a poem will be something and possibly containing only five to seven lines. But then there is also the existence of epic poems which is opposite of that image. So thus poems have often been associated as the most condensed form of literature. By condense it is not meant that it has to be small, but rather that the information contained is to the minimal. The same can be said about narrative, size alone should not be a determinant of whether or not it qualifies to be a narrative.

Thus the later definition that H. Porter Abbott arrived at contained three distinction. "Narrative is the representation of events, consisting of story and narrative discourse; story is an event or sequence of events(the action); and narrative discourse is those events as represented."

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