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Narrative The recounting of a series of facts or events and the establishing of some connection between them. The word is commonly restricted to fiction, ancient epics and romances or modern novels and short stories. In imaginative literature the nature of the link between the reader and the text is crucial, and here the narrator becomes important. This may be the author speaking in the author’s ‘own voice’; the author adopting some role towards the reader, such as an honest friend, a joking companion or a contemptuous enemy; or a ‘character’ or ‘characters’ introduced to ‘tell the story’. Narrative thus has two overlapping aspects. One is a question of content, the assemblage of material, the nature of the connections implied. The other is rhetorical, how the narrative is presented to the audience. Such questions are in literary criticism apt to be considered exclusively in terms of ‘imaginative’ literature, but an examination of some non-fictional narratives illuminate the profound and farreaching power of narrative. The word is used in Scots law for the recital of facts at the beginning of a deed or agreement. The connection between them is their relevance to some declaration of intent. There are no complex rhetorical considerations apart from the legal solemnity of the document which claims demonstrable truth for some state of affairs. Similar kinds of narrative, in which convention suppresses the power of the narrator, are found in accounts of scientific experiments or in do-it-yourself books. When we come to ‘scientific’ eyewitness reports of journeys or travels, the narrator becomes of great importance, a fact recognized by early

travel writers like Captain Dampier who commonly establish their credentials in an Introduction. This key role of the travel narrator has been exploited by satirists and expert rhetorical writers like Lucian, or Swift in Gulliver’s Travels. Narrative is also of crucial importance in the writing of history: the selection of incidents for recording, the treatment of time and its effects, and the kind of connection which the historian establishes between events. The latter is a mark of the cultural context of the writer and is to a degree outside of conscious control.