Narrative is how humans organize and understand time through relating events in sequence. Narrative time is fluid and event-based rather than measured by regular intervals like clock time. Humans have a propensity to fit scenes and experiences into narrative form by inserting narrative time. A story is a sequence of events, while narrative discourse is how a story is conveyed or ordered for a reader/audience and can reorder events non-linearly. Narrative mediates our construction of a story through voice, style, or other interpretive forms.

1. Defining Narrative
Introduction to Narrative

2. Time & Narrative
• “Narrative is the principle way in which our species organizes its understanding of
time” (3)
• Narrative is a mechanism for expressing our “conscious awareness of the passage
of time” (3)
• Clock time vs. narrative time: Clock time: natural/abstract modes of organizing time
(clocks, seasons, sun); “always relates to itself,” so one speaks in terms of regular
intervals (seconds, fractions, multiples). Clock time marked off at regular intervals.
• Narrative time “relates to events or incidents” (5). Narrative time isn’t necessarily
any length at all.
• Narrative time is fluid. “we have always been shaping and reshaping time as a
succession of events, that is, as narrative” (5)
• Narrative turns the the “regular intervals within which we can locate events” inside
out, allowing events themselves to create the order of time.

3. Narrative Perception
• Narrative perception: we insert narrative time into static, immobile scenes
• Human beings have a “propensity to narrativize” (8)
• We often try to comprehend a scene by “fitting it within a narrative in
progress” (11)
• Narrative gives shape to time:
• “wherever we look in this world, we seek to grasp what we see not just in
space but in time as well. Narrative gives us this understanding; it gives us
what could be called the shape of time” (11)
• Narrative is a universal tool for knowing and telling—“for absorbing
knowledge as well as expressing it” (11)

4. Story & Narrative Discourse
Definitions & Terms
• Narrative is “the representation of an event or a series of events”
• events/actions - without them, you have description/explanation, not narrative
• Distinction between Story & Narrative Discourse (a distinction between two kinds of
time and order). This distinction gives narrative its “doubly temporal logic” (14)
• Story (the event or sequence of events; also called fabula)
• Order in which events are supposed to occur
• Every story consists of events and entities (i.e., characters)
• Narrative discourse (how the story is conveyed; also called sjuzet)
• Order in which things are read; the way events are ordered in a. narrative
• “narrative discourse is infinitely malleable”—can expand, contract, leap
backward and forward, reconstruct in any shape or fashion

5. The mediation (construction) of story
• “story is always mediated (constructed) by narrative discourse” (19)
• “The story is always mediated—by a voice, a style of writing, camera
angles, actors’ interpretations—so that what we call the story is really
something that we construct” (17)
• Ambiguity here: the story appears “both to precede and to come after
narrative discourse”
• Constituent and supplementary events
• Constituent events (“nuclei,” “kernels”) are “events that are necessary
fro the story, driving it forward”
• Supplementary events (“catalyzers,” “satellites”) are “events that do
not drive the story forward and without which the story would still
remain intact

6. Framing narratives
The Borders of Narrative
• Framing narratives, or frame-tales, are narratives the
contain or embed other narratives, called embedded
narratives
• Framing narratives play a vital role in the
narratives they frame
• Paratexts: material that lies on the threshold of the
narrative (i.e., material associated with but distinct
from the main body of a book, movie, game, etc.)