Basic Elements of Narrative
Chapter One
Getting Started
A Thumbnail Sketch of the Approach
Toward a Working Definition of Narrative
One of the main goals of this book is to develop an account of what
stories are and how they work by analyzing narrative into its basic
elements, thereby differentiating between storytelling and other modes
of representation. Here at the outset, it may be helpful to provide an
orienting statement of features that I take to be characteristic of narrative.
A relatively coarse-grained version of the working definition
of narrative on which I will rely in this study, and that I spell out in more
detail as I proceed, runs as follows: rather than focusing on general,
abstract situations or trends, stories are accounts of what happened to
particular people - and of what it was like for them to experience what
happened - in particular circumstances and with specific consequences.
Narrative, in other words, is a basic human strategy for coming to terms
with time, process, and change - a strategy th ... read full excerpt from Basic Elements of Narrative ebook
