Narrative

  A narrative is a speech or written document that recounts of series of events.  There are non-fiction narratives such as travelogues, histories, biographies, and radio, film, or television documentaries.  Fictional narratives include fables, novels, and short stories as well as film or stage dramas.  Every narrative has extension in time. It recounts a sequence of events which can be located on a time-line. The narrator may choose to tell us about the events of the story in the order in which they occur; he or she may, however, choose to recount those same events in a different order. He or she may do this in order to create suspense or for dramatic effect. Beginning a narrative near the end of the time-line may create interest in the earlier events, as we wish to understand the circumstances which led to the later events. Many narratives begin in medias res (in the middle), a technique which eliminates the temptation to begin with a relatively-uninteresting preamble.

The organizing principle behind a narrative is not logical but temporal. Narratives are diachronic--they flow through time. Descriptions, conversely, are often synchronic--they present a tableau of objects or characters removed from time. Descriptions are often organized spatially, just as narratives are organized temporally.

Transitions within a narrative are often marked by temporal connectives such as "next", "later", "after a few minutes had passed", "on Tuesday", or "that same afternoon".

Modes of narration

One of the most important decisions a fiction writer makes is how to tell the story.  The way in which we tell the story is the mode of narration.

A narrative has a narrator (a voice which tells the story); the narrator may tell the story from the first-, second-, or third-person perspectives. A first-person narrator is character in the story; he or she narrates the story from "inside" the world of the story. A second-person narrator addresses someone inside the story, someone who is, in effect, the reader. A third-person narrator tells us about events which happen to someone else, someone who is a character in the story.  An omniscient narrator has a god-like perspective on the action of the story:  he or she sees everything that happens in the fictional world of the story; he or she can move freely in space or time.  He or she can narrate events which happen to any of the characters.  A limited-omniscient narrator also sees the action of the story from an "external" perspective--he or she is not a character in the story but simply a voice which tells us about the characters.  Unlike a fully-omniscient narrator, however, a limited-omniscient narrator must follow one character through the events of the story; he or she is "stuck" to that character's perspective.

Extra- and intra-diegetic narration

An extra-diegetic narrator is one who exists outside the story. An omniscient narrator is extra-diegetic; a first-person narrator is intra-diegetic.  The "colour" of the language which a narrator employs will be determined to some extent by whether the narrator is intra- or extra-diegetic. Ideally, an extra-diegetic narrator uses "colourless' (i.e. standard) English prose. This, however, is rarely the case. An intra-diegetic narrator will use language which is appropriate to his or her character--that is, coloured by her or his thought-patterns, dialect, use of slang and jargon, etc.

Narrative angle 

The narrator is the reader's portal into the story; through his or her description of scenes and narration of events, the narrator provides us with the information we need to perceive the world of the story.  The narrator is our "senses"--through the narrator's words, we can see, feel, hear, smell, and taste the world of the story.  Inevitably (and intentionally), the narrator "colours" our perceptions; this is particularly true of our perceptions of the characters we encounter in the story.  Every narrator, whether first- or third-person, conveys to the reader a sense of his/her opinion of the characters.  The narrator may, for example, consider a character to be heroic, or he/she may consider the character to be a fool.  More commonly, he or she will consider the character to be an ordinary human being with a balance of strengths and weakness, virtues and flaws--this realistic perspective might be called a "neutral" narrative angle.  The degree to which the narrator's (and thus the reader's) perceptions of the character deviate from "neutral" is a measure of the "angle" from which we perceive the characters of the story.  If the narrator invites us to "look up to" a character (i.e. to see him or her as better than most people), then we see the character at a "positive" narrative angle; if we are invited to "look down on" the character--the see him or her as less than human--the narrative angle is "negative".

Some sub-genres of fiction characteristically employ a particular narrative angle, as the table below demonstrates.

Looking "up" or "down" at the characters--perceiving them as super-human or sub-human--tends (rather obviously) to limit their humanity; they become "flat" characters, two-dimensional figures who represent virtues or vices.  Only a "neutral" narrative angle really allows us to develop our characters as complete, three-dimensional beings--to create them "in the round".  Not surprisingly, a neutral narrative angle is characteristic of modern realistic literary fiction, as stories of that sort concentrate on the development of realistic, psychologically-complex characters.

Narration and focalization

Every narrative has not only a narrator but also a focalizer. The narrator tells what the focalizer sees. In a first-person retrospective narrative, the narrator is an older version of the focalizer; that is, the narrator is located in the present, talking about the past. He or she is speaking "now" about events that happened to an earlier version of him- or herself "then". As a lot of stories are built around the act of remembering, the use of a split narrator/focailizer is an important technique to master.

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