The Elements

A prototypical narrative can be characterized as:

(i)A representation that is situated in – must be interpreted in light of – a specific discourse context or occasion for telling.

(ii)The representation, furthermore, cues interpreters to draw inferences about a structured time-course of particularized events.

(iii)In turn, these events are such that they introduce some sort of disruption or disequilibrium into a storyworld involving human or human-like agents, whether that world is presented as actual or fictional, realistic or fantastic, remembered or dreamed, etc.

(iv)The representation also conveys the experience of living through this storyworld-influx, highlighting the pressure of events on real or imagined consciousnesses affected by the occurrences at issue. Thus – with one important proviso – it can be argued that narrative is centrally concerned with qualia, a term used by philosophers of mind to refer to the sense of “what it is like” for someone or something to have a particular experience. The proviso is that recent research on narrative bears importantly on debates concerning the nature of consciousness itself.

For convenience of exposition, I abbreviate these elements as (i) situatedness, (ii) event sequencing, (iii) worldmaking/world disruption, and (iv)what it’s like.