Wikipedia - Narrative

Wikipedias text on narrative

A narrative is a story that is created in a constructive format (as a work of speech, literature, pictures,song, motion pictures, television, video games, theatre, musical theatre, or dance) that describes a sequence of fictional or non-fictional events.

The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled".^[1] Ultimately its origin is found in the Proto-Indo-European root gnō-, "to know".^[2]

The word "story" may be used as a synonym of "narrative", but can also be used to refer to the sequenceof events described in a narrative. A narrative can also be told by a character within a larger narrative. An important part of narration is the narrative mode, the set of methods used to communicate the narrative through a process called narration.

Along with exposition, argumentation and description, narration, broadly defined, is one of four rhetorical modes of discourse. More narrowly defined, it is the fiction-writing mode whereby the narrator communicates directly to the reader.

Stories are an important aspect of culture. Many works of art and most works of literature tell stories; indeed, most of the humanities involve stories. Owen Flanagan of Duke University, a leading consciousness researcher, writes that “Evidence strongly suggests that humans in all cultures come to cast their own identity in some sort of narrative form. We are inveterate storytellers” (Consciousness Reconsidered 198).

Narrative has also been used in Knowledge Management as a way to elicit and disseminate knowledge,^[3]encourage collaboration, generate new ideas,^[4] and "ignite change".^[5]

Stories are of ancient origin, existing in ancient Egyptian, ancient Greek, Chinese and Indian culture. Stories are also a ubiquitous component of human communication, used as parables and examples to illustrate points. Storytelling was probably one of the earliest forms of entertainment. Narrative may also refer to psychological processes in self-identity, memory and meaning-making.