In the quiz, What is narrative?, we asked you the following question:
Using our definition of narrative as the representation of an event or sequence of events that takes place in time, try to identify which of the following three passages is a narrative (there is only one correct answer):
1. In the photograph, the station was a haven of beauty and tranquillity. Against a backdrop of misty mountains, candy floss clouds and an azure sky, the waves of the fjord were green, blue and white, in stark contrast to the rusty old steam engine in its siding.
2. 12.00 Ostersund
20.00 Stockholm
04.00 Oslo
06.00 Volda
3. By the time the train pulled into Volda Central Station, Montmorency was exhausted. The journey had been a long one and as he dragged himself up onto his feet, stretched and shook himself, he felt as if he had been trodden on and kicked all night. Had it just been a dream, he asked himself, as the recollection of the sinister-looking man with the flashing red eyes playing cards in the restaurant car shot through him like a lightning bolt from the heavens. All had gone well until that fateful stop somewhere between Stockholm and Oslo …
The answer, as we saw, was that the first of these passages is a description, the second a schedule, the third a narrative.
We noted, though, that there are narratologists (experts in the study of narrative) who would claim that passage 2 has as much right to be considered a narrative as passage 3. This is because it too represents an event (a train journey) and it too conveys a sense of the passage of time (in as far as we can work out when the train is due to arrive at each stop and how long it takes to get from one stop to another). For most people, though, it feels wrong to call a schedule like this a narrative. Something seems to be missing from passage 2 that is present in passage 3 and that makes that second passage a narrative in a way that its predecessor is not. This ‘something’ is important: unlike passage 3, passage 2 does not tell a story; it merely conveys information.
Yet what is this ‘something’ that distinguishes narrative from the mere conveying of information? Scholars disagree about precisely what it is that gives us this sense of storytelling and that thus determines whether something is a narrative or not. Here, though, are two suggestions we feel are worth thinking about:
- A narrative must have a human element. It cannot consist solely of a bare transmission of facts (such as we find in railway schedules or recipes), but it should convey the experience of what it feels like to follow that schedule, make that recipe, and so on.
- Related to this claim that narratives must convey a sense of what it feels like to experience the event(s) described is the contention that narratives must therefore be particular rather than general: they must convey a sense of what it feels like to be person (or people) x experiencing event y at z moment in time.
Passage 3 does convey this sense of a particular rather than a general occurrence; it presents us with Montmorency’s experience of travelling on that particular train. Passage 2, by contrast, does not – it merely provides information about a sequence of events and about the time in which they take place that is intended to be just as true for one person as another and just as true on one day as on the next. It is abstract and general rather than concrete and specific.
If we now proceed to compare passage 3 (the narrative) with passage 1 (the description) we can see an illustration of the second of the two additional points about narrative highlighted above: that just as a narrative may well include other forms of discourse (such as argumentation, information, description and so on) as a part of its narrative technique, so too may other forms of discourse include narrative elements in order to accomplish what they set out to achieve.
After all, if we read it entirely on its own, passage 1 has little claim to be a narrative: it represents a scene rather than an event, and it captures that scene as it was at one particular moment of time; there is no immediate sense of the passing of time. This is why we classified it as a description. Nonetheless, descriptions such as this do frequently occur in novels, films and other forms of narrative and can constitute an important part of their storytelling. It is not hard to imagine, for instance, that passage 1 and passage 3 could have appeared in the same story. Perhaps it was because he found the scene depicted in the photograph described in passage 1 so attractive, for instance, that Montmorency decided to undertake the journey recounted in passage 3 in the first place. In this way, it would have created a set of expectations in Montmorency of what he might find at the end of his journey that will either be fulfilled or thwarted when he gets there. This, indeed, could be one of the things the story is about – one of the events it represents as that event unfolds for Montmorency over time.
For a list of additional criteria narratologists have suggested for a complete definition of narrative, along with our responses to them, click here.
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