Narrative Item

A Narrative Item is a structured sequence of events that conveys a perspective.

• AKA: Story.
• Context:
  • It can (typically) be created by a Story Creation Task (such as storytelling).
  • It can (typically) involve constructing and visualizing a sequence of events, ideas, or scenarios.
  • It can (often) evoke Emotional Responses.
  • It can (often) evoke Intellectual Responses.
  • It can (often) have a Narrative Beginning, a Narrative Middle, and a Narrative End.
  • ...
  • It can range from being a Short Narrative to being a Long Narrative.
  • It can range form being a Mental Narrative to being an Uttered Narrative.
  • It can range from being an Undocumented Narrative to being a Documented Narrative in media such as: slideshow narratives, book narratives, film narratives, digital narrative, ...
  • It can range from being a Linguistic Narrative (oral narrative, written narrative) to being a Visual Narrative.
  • It can range from being a Fictional Narrative to being a Non-Fictional Narrative.
  • It can range from being a Simple Narrative to being a Complex Narrative.
  • It can range from being a Linear Narrative to being a Nonlinear Narrative.
  • ...
  • It can be associated with a Narrative Genre, such as Fantasy, Mystery, or Historical Fiction.
  • It can be used for a Narrative Purpose, such as: entertainment purpose, knowledge sharing purpose, education purpose, persuasion purpose, or cultural preservation purpose.
  • ...

Understood. I'll restructure the examples to follow this pattern:

• Example(s):
  • Literature Narratives, such as:
    • a Novel like Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace", which is a historical epic that interweaves the lives of multiple aristocrats and commoners against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, exploring themes of war, peace, love, and society in 19th century Russia.
    • a Short Fictional Story like Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery", which is a dark allegory set in a small American town, where a seemingly ordinary village tradition culminates in a shocking and brutal act of violence, revealing the hidden cruelty and conformity in human society.
    • a Biography like Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela, which is a detailed biography chronicling the life of Nelson Mandela, from his early childhood and activism against apartheid in South Africa to his 27 years in prison and eventual election as the first black President of South Africa.
    • a Historical Account like The Diary of Anne Frank, which is a firsthand account of a young Jewish girl's experiences hiding from the Nazis during World War II in occupied Netherlands, providing an intimate glimpse into the horrors of the Holocaust and the resilience of the human spirit.
  • Comedic Narratives, such as:
    • Comic Strips like Gary Larson's "The Far Side", which are single-panel comics that feature bizarre and witty captions, often involving talking animals or eccentric people, offering a satirical take on everyday events and human behavior.
    • Stand-Up Comedy Routines like those from George Carlin, which are live comedy acts that blend biting observations on politics, religion, and social norms, delivered with ironic humor and a cynical edge, challenging audience perceptions and encouraging reflection.
    • Sitcom Episodes from series like Friends, which are episodic stories centered around a close-knit group of friends living in Manhattan, where humorous situations often arise from their interpersonal relationships and daily lives, typically resolving with a light-hearted or happy ending.
  • Video Narratives (that primarily use visual and auditory elements in a video format), such as:
    • Film Narratives like Schindler's List, which is a historical motion picture directed by Steven Spielberg, telling the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved over a thousand Jewish lives during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories, a powerful depiction of human compassion amidst the atrocities of World War II.
    • Lifestyle Videos, such as Video Days (1991), which is a skateboarding short subculture avant-garde documentary video directed by Spike Jonze, that captures five young skateboarders' skateboarding skills, skateboarding lifestyle, and youth culture in early 1990s Los Angeles, featuring representative music and urban landscapes that have made it an iconic piece of skateboarding culture.
  • Music Narratives, such as:
    • a Story Song like Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald", which is a balladic narrative recounting the tragic sinking of the Great Lakes freighter, poignantly depicting the fate of the crew against the backdrop of a severe storm on Lake Superior, becoming an iconic tribute to the maritime tragedy.
  • Mythological Narratives, such as:
    • an Epic Story like The Epic of Gilgamesh, which is an ancient Mesopotamian epic that follows the journey of King Gilgamesh, exploring timeless themes of friendship, mortality, and the search for eternal life, serving as one of the earliest examples of literature and influencing countless stories throughout history.
  • Comic Book Narratives, such as:
    • a Graphic Novel like Alan Moore's "Watchmen", which is a deconstructive superhero story that blends complex psychology, moral questions, and political commentary, using a multi-layered narrative structure to explore the consequences of vigilante justice in an alternate history setting.
    • a Webcomic like "xkcd", which is an online comic created by Randall Munroe, featuring self-contained humorous strips that often blend science, technology, and pop culture with intellectual humor, appealing to a nerd-oriented audience.
  • Video Game Narratives, such as:
    • a Role-Playing Game like "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim", which is an open-world role-playing game that allows players to explore a vast fantasy world with multiple interwoven storylines, offering a player-driven experience where choices affect the outcome of the story.
    • an Interactive Story like "The Walking Dead" video game series by Telltale Games, which is a choice-based interactive adventure, where players' decisions directly influence the development and outcome of the story, set in a post-apocalyptic world overrun by zombies.
  • Mental Narratives, such as:
    • a Daydream Narrative where someone imagines achieving a significant life goal, such as owning a home, having grandchildren, or giving a successful speech or winning an award.
    • a Replayed Argument Narrative where a person mentally revisits a recent disagreement, rehearsing different responses they could have made.
    • an Anticipatory Mental Narrative where someone imagines the sequence leading up to an upcoming event, such as a job interview, first date, or family gathering.
    • a Regretful Memory Narrative where a person mentally relives a past mistake, contemplating how things could have been different.
    • a Success Visualization Narrative used by an athlete who mentally practices winning a race, focusing on each phase from start to finish.
    • a Fantasized Adventure Narrative where an individual imagines exploring a distant world, full of magical creatures and perilous adventures.
  • Visual Narratives, such as:
    • a Comic Book like Art Spiegelman's "Maus", which is a graphic novel that uses anthropomorphic mice and cats to tell the story of the author's father's experiences as a Holocaust survivor, combining visual elements with text to create a powerful historical narrative and memoir.
    • a Storyboard for a film like Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho", which is a sequence of illustrated panels that visually outline the key scenes and shot compositions of the movie, serving as a visual script and planning tool for the film production.
    • a Photo Essay like W. Eugene Smith's "Country Doctor", which is a series of photographs that documents the daily life and work of a rural doctor, telling a visual story through carefully sequenced images with minimal text.
    • a Silent Film like Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times", which tells a comedic and socially critical narrative primarily through visual gags, physical comedy, and pantomime, with occasional intertitles to provide context or dialogue.
  • ...
• Counter-Example(s):
  • Written Journals, which typically includes personal reflections without a structured narrative.
  • Forum Pages, which consists of discussions and comments without a unified narrative structure.
  • Expository Writing, which presents facts and information without necessarily forming a narrative structure.
  • Procedural Text, which provides instructions or steps to follow, rather than telling a story.
  • Data Report, which organizes and presents data without the connected sequence of events typical of a narrative.
• See: Essay, Myth, Poem, Non-Fiction Document, Motion Picture, New Journalism, Creative Non-Fiction, Historiography, Anecdotes, Legend, Literature, Prose.

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References

2020

• (Wikipedia, 2020) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/narrative Retrieved:2020-5-4.
  • A narrative or story is an account of a series of related events, experiences, or the like, whether true (episode, vignette, travelogue, memoir, autobiography, biography) or fictitious (fairy tale, fable, story, epic, legend, novel). The word derives from the Latin verb narrare (to tell), which is derived from the adjective gnarus (knowing or skilled). Along with argumentation, description, and exposition, narration, broadly defined, is one of four rhetorical modes of discourse. More narrowly defined, it is the fiction-writing mode in which the narrator communicates directly to the reader. Oral storytelling is the earliest method for sharing narratives. During most people's childhoods, narratives are used to guide them on proper behavior, cultural history, formation of a communal identity and values, as especially studied in anthropology today among traditional indigenous peoples.

    Narrative is found in all forms of human creativity, art, and entertainment, including speech, literature, theatre, music and song, comics, journalism, film, television and video, video games, radio, game play, unstructured recreation and performance in general, as well as some painting, sculpture, drawing, photography and other visual arts, as long as a sequence of events is presented. Several art movements, such as modern art, refuse the narrative in favor of the abstract and conceptual.

    Narrative can be organized into a number of thematic or formal categories: non-fiction (such as definitively including creative non-fiction, biography, journalism, transcript poetry and historiography); fictionalization of historical events (such as anecdote, myth, legend and historical fiction) and fiction proper (such as literature in prose and sometimes poetry, such as short stories, novels and narrative poems and songs, and imaginary narratives as portrayed in other textual forms, games or live or recorded performances). Narratives may also be nested within other narratives, such as narratives told by an unreliable narrator (a character) typically found in the genre of noir fiction. An important part of narration is the narrative mode, the set of methods used to communicate the narrative through a process narration (see also “Aesthetics approach” below).

2020b

• (Greene, 2020) ⇒ Brian Greene. (2020). “Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in An Evolving Universe.” Knopf. ISBN:9781524731670
  • QUOTE: ... These are all ongoing stories, developed by thinkers hailing from a great range of distinct disciplines. Understandably so. A saga that ranges from quarks to consciousness is a hefty chronicle. Still, the different stories are interlaced. Don Quixote speaks to humankind’s yearning for the heroic, told through the fragile Alonso Quijano, a character created in the imagination of Miguel de Cervantes, a living, breathing, thinking, sensing, feeling collection of bone, tissue, and cells that, during his lifetime, supported organic processes of energy transformation and waste excretion, which themselves relied on atomic and molecular movements honed by billions of years of evolution on a planet forged from the detritus of supernova explosions scattered throughout a realm of space emerging from the big bang. Yet to read Don Quixote’s travails is to gain an understanding of human nature that would remain opaque if embedded in a description of the movements of the knight-­errant’s molecules and atoms or conveyed through an elaboration of the neuronal processes crackling in Cervantes’s mind while writing the novel. Connected though they surely are, different stories, told with different languages and focused on different levels of reality, provide vastly different insights.

2012

• (Gottschall, 2012) ⇒ Jonathan Gottschall. (2012). “The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human.” Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,
  • BOOK OVERVIEW: Humans live in landscapes of make-believe. We spin fantasies. We devour novels, films, and plays. Even sporting events and criminal trials unfold as narratives.

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