Narratology
Based on Wikipedia: Narratology
The Science of Why Stories Work
Consider this six-word story, often attributed to Ernest Hemingway: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."
Something happens when you read those words. Your mind races to fill in the gaps. Who bought the shoes? What happened to the baby? The tiny advertisement becomes a tragedy, complete with characters you've never met and events you've never witnessed. You've constructed an entire narrative from almost nothing.
This is the mystery at the heart of narratology—the study of how stories work and why humans are so deeply wired to create and consume them. It's not simply about analyzing plot structures or character arcs. It's about understanding something fundamental to human cognition: our compulsive need to make sense of the world through narrative.
From Ancient Greece to the Russian Formalists
The formal study of storytelling traces back to Aristotle's Poetics, written around 335 BCE. Aristotle dissected Greek tragedy with the precision of a surgeon, identifying elements like plot, character, and spectacle that still form the backbone of screenwriting courses today. He understood that stories weren't random collections of events but carefully structured experiences designed to produce specific emotional effects in audiences.
But narratology as a distinct academic field didn't crystallize until the twentieth century, and it emerged from an unlikely place: revolutionary Russia.
In the 1920s, a group of scholars known as the Russian Formalists began taking stories apart like mechanics disassembling engines. They wanted to understand the machinery beneath the hood. Vladimir Propp, working with Russian folk tales, made a startling discovery. Despite their surface differences, these tales followed remarkably similar patterns. He identified thirty-one narrative functions—basic building blocks like "the hero leaves home" or "the villain is defeated"—that appeared across hundreds of stories in predictable sequences.
Propp published his findings in 1928 as Morphology of the Folktale. The title was intentional. Just as biologists study the morphology—the form and structure—of organisms, Propp was studying the morphology of stories. He was suggesting that narratives, like living things, have an underlying anatomy that can be scientifically examined.
Around the same time, another Russian scholar named Mikhail Bakhtin was approaching narrative from a different angle. Bakhtin was fascinated by what he called heteroglossia—the way novels contain multiple voices and perspectives jostling against each other. In a novel by Dostoevsky, for instance, each character speaks with their own distinct worldview, their own way of understanding reality. The author doesn't impose a single authoritative perspective but lets these different voices interact and conflict. Bakhtin called this dialogism, and he saw it as the defining characteristic of the novel as a form.
The French Connection
The Russian Formalists' work remained largely unknown in the West until the 1960s, when French structuralists discovered and translated their ideas. In 1966, a special issue of the French journal Communications became something of a manifesto for the new field. It featured articles by Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, Tzvetan Todorov, and others—a murderer's row of literary theorists who would shape how stories are analyzed for decades to come.
Todorov, a Bulgarian-French scholar, coined the term "narratology" itself in 1969, adapting it from the French narratologie. The word signaled an ambition: to create a science of narrative as rigorous as linguistics or biology.
The structuralists introduced one of narratology's most influential distinctions: the difference between story and discourse. The story—what the Russian Formalists called fabula—is the sequence of events as they would occur chronologically in the fictional world. The discourse—or syuzhet—is how those events are actually presented to the reader or viewer.
Consider a detective novel. The story might be: "A wealthy businessman embezzles money, his accountant discovers it, the businessman murders the accountant, a detective investigates, the businessman is caught." But the discourse rearranges everything. It might begin with the discovery of the accountant's body, then follow the detective's investigation, revealing the embezzlement only near the end. Same story, entirely different discourse.
This distinction opened up two branches of narratology. Thematic narratology, following Propp's lead, focused on the story itself—the underlying patterns of events and character types. Modal narratology, associated with scholars like Genette, examined the discourse—how the story is told, including questions of voice (who's narrating?), perspective (whose eyes are we seeing through?), and time (how is the chronology manipulated?).
The Mind in the Story
Traditional narratology treated stories as objects to be dissected—texts with measurable structures and identifiable components. But in recent decades, a new approach called cognitive narratology has shifted the focus from the text to the reader.
Rather than asking "What is the structure of this story?", cognitive narratologists ask "How do humans make sense of stories?" and "How do we use stories to make sense of our lives?"
Return to those baby shoes. A strict structuralist might argue that six words don't constitute a proper narrative. There's no clear beginning, middle, and end. No named characters. No explicit conflict or resolution. By the traditional definition—"the narration of a succession of fictional events"—it barely qualifies as a story at all.
But cognitive narratology recognizes that something unmistakably narrative-like is happening when we read those words. We experience it as a story because our minds are narrative-generating machines. Given even the slightest prompt, we construct characters, invent backstories, imagine consequences. The "story" isn't really in the text at all—it's in the mental work the reader performs.
This insight led theorist Marie-Laure Ryan to distinguish between "a narrative" as a clearly definable object and "narrativity" as a quality—the ability to inspire a narrative response. Something doesn't have to be a conventional story to possess narrativity. A photograph can have it. A piece of music can have it. A video game can have it.
When Stories Become Games
The emergence of video games posed a fascinating challenge to narratology. Were games stories? They certainly had characters, settings, and conflicts. But they also had something stories typically didn't: interactivity. The player made choices that affected outcomes. The sequence of events wasn't fixed but emerged from gameplay.
In 1998, digital media theorist Janet Murray published Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, arguing that computers were transforming storytelling itself. She observed that digital media enabled what she called "cyberdramas"—narratives that invited the audience inside, allowing them to explore branching paths and influence outcomes.
Murray made a controversial claim: video games, including role-playing games and life simulators like The Sims, contained narrative structures. Or if they didn't contain them exactly, they invited players to create them. She noted that stories and games share fundamental structures: contests and puzzles. When you're trying to rescue the princess or solve the mystery of what happened to the colony on Mars, you're engaged in both gameplay and narrative simultaneously.
Scholar Espen Aarseth took a different approach. He coined the term "cybertext" to describe texts that required what he called "nontrivial effort" to traverse. Reading a traditional novel is ergodic—you start at page one and proceed linearly. But reading a hypertext fiction, where you click links to navigate between scenes, requires constant decision-making. You're not just reading; you're playing.
Aarseth compared these interactive narratives to labyrinths. Some were unicursal—having a single winding path that eventually led to the center. Others were multicursal—true mazes with branching paths where different choices led to genuinely different destinations. In a multicursal narrative, you might never see large portions of the content. Every path taken means other paths forever unexplored.
When you read from a cybertext, you are constantly reminded of inaccessible strategies and paths not taken, voices not heard. Each decision will make some parts of the text more, and others less, accessible, and you may never know the exact results of your choices; that is, exactly what you missed.
This is a strange experience for anyone raised on traditional books. When you finish a novel, you've read the whole thing. When you finish a hypertext fiction like Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden—which contains over a thousand text segments connected by nearly three thousand links—you've experienced only one possible journey through a vast narrative space.
The Structure Beneath the Surface
One of narratology's enduring debates concerns how deep structural analysis should go. Roland Barthes argued that all narratives share similar underlying structures, and that every sentence contains multiple possible meanings. He saw literature as "writerly text"—work that doesn't require the conventional machinery of beginning, middle, and end, but instead offers "multiple entrances and exits."
The Lithuanian-French scholar Algirdas Julien Greimas went further. He sought what he called the "deep structure of narrativity"—universal patterns underlying not just written stories but all human meaning-making. Greimas developed complex diagrams mapping the fundamental relationships between characters and their roles: the hero and the villain, the helper and the opponent, the sender and the receiver of the quest object.
But Greimas also made a startling claim. These narrative structures, he argued, existed not just in stories but in how humans understood reality itself. We don't just tell stories; we perceive the world through narrative structures. The connection between a physical object and the language we use to describe it, between experience and meaning, is fundamentally narrative in nature.
American psychologist Robert Sternberg offered a skeptical view, calling narratology "structuralism at variance with the idea of structure"—a discipline that sought universal patterns while constantly finding exceptions and complications that undermined those very patterns. Perhaps stories were too various, too protean, to be reduced to any single grammar or formula.
Beyond the Written Word
Narratology has never been limited to literature. Film theorist David Bordwell applied narratological concepts to cinema, examining how movies construct and withhold information, how they manipulate time, how they position viewers as detectives piecing together stories from carefully controlled clues.
Sociolinguist William Labov studied oral storytelling in natural conversation—the casual narratives people tell each other at dinner parties or in workplace breakrooms. These spontaneous stories, he found, had their own structure and grammar, their own techniques for building suspense and delivering payoffs.
Today, narratology extends to graphic novels, where the interaction between words and images creates meaning neither could produce alone. It encompasses what theorists call the "infinite canvas"—the potentially unlimited space of digital comics that scroll in any direction. It even includes narrative sculptures, three-dimensional works that tell stories through the arrangement of physical forms in space.
Some theorists have proposed the concept of the "narreme"—the basic unit of narrative, analogous to the phoneme in linguistics or the gene in biology. If such fundamental units exist, they might operate across all media, underlying the stories we tell whether we're writing novels, making films, designing games, or simply explaining to a friend what happened to us last weekend.
Why Any of This Matters
You might wonder why it matters whether six words constitute a narrative or whether video games possess narrativity. These can seem like academic debates, the kind of distinctions that occupy scholars but have little bearing on how regular people experience stories.
But narratology addresses something genuine about the human condition. We are, as some theorists have put it, homo narrans—the storytelling animal. We don't just enjoy stories as entertainment. We use stories to make sense of our lives, to understand cause and effect, to assign meaning to the random chaos of experience.
When you explain to someone why your relationship ended or how you ended up in your current career, you're constructing a narrative. When you lie awake at night worrying about the future, you're often generating narratives about what might happen. When nations justify their histories or religions explain the cosmos, they do so through stories.
Understanding how narratives work—how they manipulate time, construct perspective, create sympathy and suspense, invite or foreclose possibilities—gives us tools for understanding how we understand ourselves. The structuralists may have dreamed of a complete grammar of narrative, a formula that could explain every story. That dream has proven elusive. But the attempt revealed something profound: that stories aren't merely things we consume. They're the architecture of human thought.
The baby shoes remain for sale. They've never been worn. And in those six words, an entire discipline finds its mystery and its purpose—the enduring question of how such sparse symbols can contain such abundant meaning.