Narrative Texts

Narrative texts are a form of discourse that has been fixed by writing. Some postmodern scholars have defined text to include anything that can be interpreted, from a photograph to a film score. For this entry, Paul Ricoeur's definition of a text as a discourse fixed by writing is used; however, it is important to recognize that some scholars recognize forms other than the written word as having textuality.

Scholars of rhetoric divide texts into different types depending on the author's intent. Narratives are characterized by temporal organization: beginning to [Page 546]middle to end. Events unfolding over time constitute the plot. Other central features of narratives include characters, a setting for the plot, and a theme or message that is conveyed both by the words of the story and by the selection and ordering of events that are included within it. Narratives, as compared to expository texts, use voice to convey a particular point of view—all narratives take a point of view, although the point of view may be that of an omniscient observer. Point of view is used to support the narrative's theme by supporting the credibility or worthiness of the narrator. The purpose of a narrative text is to tell a story, usually the story of a resolution to a problem.

In contrast, the purpose of expository texts is to explain, inform, or teach. The voice of expository texts is therefore neutral and objective. Recipes, laundry lists, and textbooks are examples of expository texts. Research reports are often structured as expository texts, using language that minimizes the author's voice and obscures the role of selection and exclusion of events or information in the development of a theme or message. Many qualitative researchers have decried this approach and developed alternative forms of research representation, some of which include narrative elements such as the story of the research or the researcher.

Both narrative and expository texts can be used as qualitative data. For example, historians often rely on expository texts such as lists of supplies ordered by a military unit during a particular period of World War I or by cataloguing the equipment advertised for use by nurses in the 1940s. Similarly, interviewers may request expositions from informants, perhaps as journal entries or logs, or may elicit expositions in interviews and then fix those expositions as texts via transcription. Interviewers may also elicit narratives from informants, either in writing or as discourse.

The boundary between expository and narrative texts is itself controversial. Some scholars contend that all texts are narrative because of the meanings they convey and because of the deliberate selection or omission of events or information. This liminality is nowhere more apparent than in qualitative research reports in which the exposition of findings, the voice of the author, the context of the study, and the narratives of informants come together.