Narrative Theories

Narrative

In Media, Narrative is the continuity given to a series of facts. The human mind needs narrative in order for things to make sense. The brain connects events and makes explanations based on those connections. In everything, we seek a start, a middle and an end. We understand and construct meaning using our experiences and of previous texts. Each text becomes part of the previous and the next through its relationship with the audience.

Narrative and Story

Story: "a narrative, either true or fictitious, in prose or verse, designed to interest, amuse or instruct the hearer or reader; tale."

Narrative: "a story or account of events, experiences, or the like, whether true or fictitious.

Media 

Reality is difficult to understand, and we struggle to construct meaning our of our everyday experiences. This is very different to media texts. Media texts are better organised, as this makes it easier for the audience to engage with them without too much effort. Normally, also, the audience expects the text to be constructed in a certain way. Media texts can also be used to create a story which isn't present in reality, so people can experience the feelings behind it. Here are the basic elements of a narrative, according to Aristotle:

"...the most important is the plot, the ordering of the incidents; for tragedy is a representation, not of men, but of action and life, of happiness and unhappiness - and happiness and unhappiness are bound up with action. ...it is their characters indeed, that make men what they are, but it is by reason of their actions that they are happy or the reverse." (Poetics - Aristotle(Penguin Edition) p39-40 4th century BC )

Successful stories need actions which drastically change the lives of the characters within the stories. They must also contain some sort of resolution, where the change is registered, and this then creates a new story for the characters to be involved in. We must also remember that narratives are not just what we encounter in films. They are in news stories, advertisements and documentaries, and we must interpret them.

Narrative Conventions

When creating a narrative, there are conventions that need to be followed. When we look at a narrative, we examine the conventions of:

• Genre
• Character
• Form
• Time

We then use knowledge of these conventions to help us interpret the text. Something that is quite easy to understand as a convention is time; narratives do not take place in real time, but may slow down or speed up depending on the film. 

It is because we are used to reading narratives from a very early age, and are able to compare texts with others that we understand these conventions. A narrative in its most basic sense is a series of events, but in order to build the meaning from the narrative,  it is vital that the events are linked.

Barthes' Codes

Roland Barthes describes a text as:

"a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilises extend as far as the eye can read, they are indeterminable...the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language..." (S/Z - 1974 translation)

A basic summary of this is that a text is all tangled up, but it needs unravelling so we can separate out the different parts. Once we start to unravel it, we discover a huge variety of potential meanings. We can then start by looking at a meaning from one viewpoint, using one previous experience and therefore create one meaning for that text. You can then continue to unravel different parts to create different meanings through and throughout. This can happen an infinite number of times, if you wanted it to.

In summary, Barthes believed that a text could be open, where lots of different meanings come from it, or closed, where there is only one obvious meaning for it. Barthes also decided that the texts you try to unravel are called narrative codes, and that they could be categorised in the following ways:

• Action/proiarectic code and enigma code (I.E. Answers and Questions)
• Symbols and Signs
• Points of Cultural Reference
• Simple description/reproduction

Narrative Structures

There are many ways of breaking down narrative structure. You may hear a movie described as a "classic Hollywood narrative", meaning it has three acts.

Our Opening Scene

We decided from the beginning that we wanted a voice over in our film opening, so that the story would make sense to the audience. However, we decided that we didn't want a normal voice over, we wanted a news report, as this is quite a simple thing, and the majority of humans can understand what is happening when they hear a news report, hence why we decided to go for this approach. We also wanted the story to be quite complicated so that 1. The audience could try and work out the storyline for themselves, and 2. They can come up with various theories for the film. There is also a series of events that link together in ours, the events being the murders, and the link being the murderer. This links in various ways to different ideas of Narrative Theories.