Narratives, Pervade Human Life. Narratives

¶ … narratives, pervade human life. Narratives are not just based on human experience; they also guide actions and decisions. Plot structures are often imposed on events, often artificially. History is written with the underlying assumption that events will gel into narrative form. Even the hard sciences invent narratives to explain everything from how the universe began to how a cell mutates. Evolution is told as a story with a plot, and all religions have at their heart a vast library of oral or written tales.

Social and political struggles are also conveyed in narrative form such as the narrative of class struggles in various human societies. Narratives do not fictionalize reality; they are just a familiar and comfortable means to communicate ideas. Narratives are defined as a series of events that occur in a specific order including a beginning, a middle, and an end. Even if a story is not told chronologically, its narrative structure will reveal events that unfold over time.

Narratives can be easily contrasted with poetry, which concerns itself with immediate emotional impact or lyrical content that is not dependent on narrative structure. Events that occur in narratives are necessarily connected at some point in time, whereas images in a poem are not. Not all stories have a straightforward chronology and many authors play with time in their writing by creating what are known as anachronisms. Anachronisms include flashback, flash-forward, and other distortions of linear time used to enhance the literary quality of the story.

Time is crucial to a narrative's structure but so is causality. A narrative is not a simple recounting of events that occur in linear time. Rather, a narrative must include links between those events that suggest how one event caused another. Detective stories offer an especially poignant use of cause and effect relationships in a narrative: postponing the revelation of the cause until after the events are told. Furthermore, narratives are teleological: the ending is critical.

A poem does not depend on endings as much as a story because stories must wrap themselves up. Readers expect resolutions to the conflicts that arise during the course of a tale. Compelling narratives use literary tools like purposeful digression to create suspense and to introduce the element of surprise. The key to a good narrative is balancing the right amount of digression or tension with the right amount of progress toward the end.

A narrative structure usually progresses from a state of stasis, through a disruption of the stability, and at the end returns back to a point of equilibrium accompanied by a deeper level of understanding. "Epistemophilia," or the desire to know, is what drives readers to stay with the story. The end of a story usually provides answers to questions that are raised during the course of the narrative and especially during the period of disruption.

However, the literal ending of a story is not necessarily the answer; the answer may be cloaked in the symbols of the narrative itself. Narrative theory suggests that stories are dual-layered. On the surface is the level of the story itself:.