Developmental Reading Lesson 5 Narrative Structures

2. NARRATIVE STRUCTURES

3. Narrative structure
• A literary element
• Structural framework that underlies the order
and manner in which a narrative is presented to
a reader, listener, or viewer
• The content of a story and the form used to tell
the story

4. Kinds of Narrative Structure in
Short Stories
• Linear Narration
• Flashbacks and Stream of
Consciousness
• Parallel and Frame structures
• Circular stories

5. Linear Narration/Chronological Structure
• most common and most straightforward of the narrative
structures
• written in chronological order with little or no variation
• does not include flashbacks or dream sequences but
relate the story as it is happening
• Focus remains in the present rather than the past or the
future

6. Flashbacks and Stream of Consciousness
• Nonlinear narrative structures
• Not concerned with chronological
sequencing of events
Flashback- often portrays stories of one’s
youth, such as personal growth or innocence
lost, using time-altering devices
Stream of Consciousness- an author pays
no heed to time, outside stimuli, or
traditional conventions

7. Parallel and Frame Structures
• Rely heavily on the role of the narrators to
convey layers of meaning
Parallel structure- refers to two distinctly
different, yet closely related storylines that
occur simultaneously
Frame and embedded narratives- consist
of many smaller stories within the context,
or frame, of a larger story

8. Narrative framing

9. Circular stories
• Conclude where it began
• Achieved by literal repetition of phrases or syntax from
the start or returning the narrator to a setting of
importance

10. Multiple Narration
• The same action is narrated by different
characters with very different perspectives.

11. Epiphany
• Structured around one critical moment of
understanding or decision and that moment
shapes the life or future of the protagonist

12. Retrospective Narrative
• The older character looks back with the benefit
of hindsight on his own story or a story in which
he has a role

33. The Mountain
There were two warring tribes in the
Andes, one that lived in the lowlands and
the other high in the mountains. The
mountain people invaded the lowlanders
one day, and as part of their plundering of
the people, they kidnapped a baby of one of
the lowlander families and took the infant
with them back up into the mountains.

34. The lowlanders didn’t know how to climb the
mountain. They didn’t know any of the trails that the
mountain people used, and they didn’t know where
to find the mountain people or how to track them in
the steep terrain.
Even so, they sent out their best party of
fighting men to climb the mountain and bring the
baby home.
The men tried first one method of climbing
and then another. They tried one trail and then
another. After several days of effort, however, they
had climbed only several hundred feet.

35. Feeling hopeless and helpless, the lowlander
men decided that the cause was lost, and they
prepared to return to their village below.
As they were packing their gear for the descent,
they saw the baby’s mother walking toward them. They
realized that she was coming down the mountain that
they hadn’t figured out how to climb.
And then they saw that she had the baby
strapped to her back. How could that be?
one man greeted her and said, “We couldn’t
climb this mountain. How did you do this when we, the
strongest and most able men in the village, couldn’t do
it?”
She shrugged her shoulders and said, “It wasn’t
your baby.”
Source: www.chickensoup.com/book-story/52515/moving-mountains

36. DYAD ACTIVITY
Using one narrative
structure employing
one literary device,
write a short story.

37. TO GOD BE THE GLORY!