Narrative Theory - Strauss

2. HIS THEORY…
Claude Levi Strauss studied hundreds of myths and legends all around the world,
from that he found out that we as humans make sense of the world, people
and events by seeing and using binary opposites.
He found out that narratives are arranged around the conflict of binary
opposites.
In the mid-20th century, two major European academic thinks, Claude Levi
Strauss and Roland Barthes, came together and discovered that the way we
understand certain words does not depend so much on the meaning that they
directly contain, but much more by our understanding of the difference
between the word and its ‘opposite’ or, as they called it ‘binary opposite.’
They realised that words simply act as symbols for society’s ideas and that they
meaning of words was a relationship rather then a fixed thing, just a
relationship between opposing ideas.

3. EXAMPLES OF BINARY OPPOSITES…
 Good vs Evil,
 Black vs White,
 Peace vs War,
 Young vs Old,
 Protagonist vs Antagonist,
 Strong vs Weak,
 East vs West,
 Boy vs Girl,
 Democracy vs Dictatorship
SUMMARY…
Basically, Claude Levi Strauss though t that conflict is based around binary
opposites and that the binary opposites are the central climax of narrative
structure.