Narrative

What is Narrative ?

The word narrative comes from the Latin word gnarus and the Indo-European root gnu, meaning 'to know'. Narrative is a message that tells or presents a story. A story is an account of an event or a series of events, natural or non-natural, true or fictitious; an anecdote; a report or an allegation of facts.

Narrative begins in the mind, as each individual conceptualizes their perception of experience. The individual's inner voice formulates a description of life experience as a story. It is an essential human function to externalize experience by sharing anecdotes - brief tales narrating interesting or amusing biographical incidents - with other individuals. Although stories can depict history, human imagination can also create artificial stories, or fiction.

People seem to prefer organising information as stories rather than categorizing data as facts in logical relationships. They retain everyday information as anecdotal narratives with characters, plots, motivations, and actions. Some argue that all communication is storytelling. As such, stories become a prime instrument for education. Parents tell stories to their children to pass on what they have learned through experience. Communities share information through narrative.

As humans developed speech in prehistoric times, they must have quickly developed the habit of sharing anecdotal narrations. Through the development of memory, a community accumulated a body of verbal expression including tales, oral history, jokes and proverbs that comprised an oral tradition and the beginning of culture. Folklore developed as a stratum of communal consciousness.