Good explanation of Narrative

http://www.itpmag.demon.co.uk/Downloads/NarrativeRing.pdf

This was a really good website I found when researching for genre and narrative definitions :)


Narrative


‘Narrative’ is a theoretical term used to describe a specific meaning of the much looser term ‘story’. A story is usually a retelling of a series of events in a particular order with a fi nal conclusion of some sort. A story could be a joke, a reminiscence, an alibi for a murder (“What’s your story then?”), a history of a famous person, a ‘news’ story or a ‘moral tale’. The same story could be used for several different purposes and the qualities that make it a story are hard to pin down – stories are all around us.

Narrative refers primarily to the ‘structure’ of the story and it has been defi ned in slightly different terms according to the different media in which it is constructed. Film narrative has usefully been defi ned as:

… a chain of events in cause-effect relationship, occurring in time and space.(Bordwell and Thompson 1997)