Narrative Theory

Narrative Theory

Narrative is created to appeal to an audience, and so narrative elements are created to entice an audience and keep them interested. Narrative is the coherence or organisation given to a series of facts. The human mind needs narrative to make sense of things, because we connect events and make interpretations based on these connections, and so in everything we seek a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Propp's Fairy Tale Characters

Vladimir Propp was a Russian critic who examined folk tales to see if they shared any common structures. He suggested that characters in stories all have a narrative function. He identified 8 character roles and 31 narrative functions. 

The 8 character roles are:

1. The Villian
2. The Hero 
3. The Donor - who provides an object with some magic property
4. The Helper - who aids the hero
5. The Princess (sought for person) - reward for the hero and object of the villian's schemes
6. Her Father - who rewards the hero
7. The Dispatcher - who sends the hero on their way
8. The False Hero - the person who is perceived as a good character in the beginning but emerges as evil

Tvzetan Todorov

Tveztan Todorov suggests that narrative is simply equilibrium, disequilibrium and new equilibrium. The Bulgarian structuralist linguist suggested that stories begin with an equilibrium where any potentially opposing forces are in balance. This is disrupted by some event, setting in chain a series of events. Problems are solved so that order can be restored to the world of fiction. The storyline flows as follows:

• A state of equilibrium
• A disruption of the equilibrium
• A recognition of the disruption 
• An attempt to repair the disruption
• A reinstatement of the equilibrium

Claude Levi-Strauss

Levi-Strauss looked at narrative structure in terms of binary oppositions. Binary oppositions are sets of opposite values which reveal the structure of media texts. An example would be good and evil - we understand the concept of good as being the opposite of evil. He suggested that all narratives are driven by a constant creation of conflict and that narrative can only end on resolution of this conflict. Opposition can be visual (light/darkness, movement/stillness) or conceptual (love/hate, control/panic), and to do with soundtrack.

He was not so interested in looking at the order in which events were arranged in a plot, but rather he looked for deeper arrangement of themes. For example, if we look at Science Fiction films, we can identify a series of binary oppositions which are created by the narrative;

• Earth & Space
• Good & Evil
• Humans & Aliens
• Past & Present
• Normal & Strange
• Known & Unknown