ABSTRACT
Narrative and language are two of the main cultural processes shared by all societies: they are “simply there, like life itself.” Like language, narrative is a basic way of making sense of our experience of the real, and structuralists have argued that it shares many of language’s properties, that it is structured along the twin axes of the paradigmatic and syntagmatic, that there may be a universal narrative structure, the equivalent of langue, of which specific narratives are the paroles, and that its signification necessarily works at denotative and connotative levels. Furthermore it is like language in that its denotative relationship with the real is illusory and its signifying ability derives from its
systemic nature and its internarrative (intertextual) relations: that is, its categorizing and structuring processes signify not because of their operation upon reality, but because of their relationship to these processes in other narratives and other signifying forms.
