Narrative

Literature was synonymous with poetry at one point in time. Over time, novel which was just an upstart amongst the genres gained traction and emerged as a full-fledged genre in its own right. In the 20th century, the novel superseded poetry as the genre which held sway in academic climate in Britain.

Narrative structures pervade the human society through they acts of telling and retelling stories inter-generationally. Children are born with a bare minimum narrative competence regaling each other stories they concoct as a combination of fact and fancy.

According to Aristotle, the plot is the skeletal structure of a narrative with a beginning, middle and end in the traditional sense in which the narratives are understood. Obviously, a mere sequence of events is not a narrative and the latter is usually suffused with complications and their resolutions with the story, a word often replaced with narrative. The complications could mean change in relationship between the characters, the realization of fear or prediction to its inversion.

There is a distance between the narrator and the narrated story depending upon the particular instance at hand. Focalisation is giving an emphasis through the consciousness of a character. It is a perspective through which a story is narrated.

The purpose of a narrative is to impart pleasure to the readers which in turn is linked to the desire.