Narrative and Narratology

Narratology is the study and theory of narratives, or complex stories—what they are made of, how they are structured, and what we gain from using them as a vehicle for communication. Narratology had its beginnings in the study of literary texts. From literary analysis, the term text has expanded to mean anything that is equivocal and thus legitimately open to interpretation. Thus, for example, the Bible is a text; so too is Mother Nature. How are these different sources of meaning reconciled personally and theologically? For the Bible, a dark cloud might mean one thing; for Mother Nature, another. Narratology empowers us to look at such a comparison to estimate what texts mean in relation to each other.

The range of interpretative choices that a text allows means that prominent communication narratologists such as Arthur Bochner, David Boje, Larry Browning, Eric Eisenberg, Leonard Hawes, Dennis Mumby, Dave Snowden, Mary Boone, James Taylor, and Jennifer Ziegler all operate from perspectives that may not overlap very much. There is no coalition that decides what qualifies as a narrative. Since narrative, like text, has become an umbrella term, anything from a Shakespearean play to a bumper sticker can count as a narrative if it has the capacity to produce meaning through a series of events and characters in a story. There is not much omitted from what is coded as a narrative because anything counts as a story that has (a) a sequence—that is, a beginning, middle, and end; (b) some causal development between sequences and the conclusion (our assessment of the difference between the state of things at the beginning and the end of a story produces its point or intended significance); and (c) memorable phrasing to represent what happened. Forms of communication that meet these three criteria qualify as stories to be analyzed because they make the most sense when analyzed in their space and time context. There is no better statement of the causal development in narrative than Roland Barthes's interpretation of the row of telephones from an early scene of the James Bond movie Goldfinger. That there are four phones in that scene only makes a difference if at some future point in the narrative their presence becomes causal by driving the story in a particular direction. Any force that causes the story to pivot (to turn dramatically), whether it be a telephone or a hero, carries what Barthes labels a cardinal function.

In recent decades, narratology has emerged as a well-credentialed field of study. We are now seeing the publication of whole books devoted to reviewing its major insights, and dictionaries now include scores of its most popular specialized terms, such as motivation, sequence, actor, and ending. The very term narratology has reinforced this credentialing. As an intellectual marker, it elevates the seriousness of the narrative project and the uses that we readers can make of it. So, too, with the word narrative. Compare it to the more street term story, which can connote anything from a religious affirmation (“I love to tell the story”) to wholesale dishonesty (“Now, Robert, did you tell a story [Page 674]about your brother?”). Story lacks gravitas. It implies no particular artistic skill or rhetorical purpose. Narrative implies both.

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