ABSTRACT

The nature of narratives Narratives are generally conceived as accounts of events, which involve some temporal and/or causal coherence (Hoshmand 2005). Narrative is not the only possible form of human communication. Communicative manifestations are characterized by a boundless diversity of speech acts, and even if we consider the discourse genres of monologues alone, we have, in addition to narrative, argumentation, description and explanation, just as we have a wide range of mental

constructs for analysing the organization of observation and experience besides episodic or story schemas. Nonetheless, as Barthes (1977) writes:

narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting, … stained-glass windows, cinema, comics, news item, conversation. Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative. … Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself.