Narrative Theories:


The term narration describes how stories are told, how their material is selected and arranged in order to achieve particular effects with their audiences. 


Narrative theory suggests that stories in whatever media and whatever culture share certain features. But particular media are able to "tell" stories in different ways.(books and films)


A good definition of narrative is given by Branigan who argues that it is " a way of organizing spatial and temporal data into a cause-effect chain of events with a beginning, a middle and end that embodies a judgement about of events"


Individual structuralist approaches to narrative.
Propp argues that it was possible to group characters and actions into:
 eight character roles or spheres of action.
1. the villian
2. the hero
3. the donor
4. the helper
5. the princess
6. the princess' father
7.the dispatcher
8. the false hero


Propp's original study worked on fairy tales. Yet fairy tales, or versions of them are still familiar to us e.g. Harry Potter books and films with their stories of male initiation, good verses evil.


Todorov argued that all stories begin with an "equilibrium" where any potentially opposing forces are "in balance". This is disrupted  by some event, setting a train of series of other events to finish with a different "equilibrium"


Bathes suggests that narrative works with five different codes which actives the reader to make sense of it. Enigma codes work to keep setting puzzles  to be solved to delay the stories ending. Action codes will be read by accumulated details (looks, certain words) which invoke our knowledge of what are often highly conventional "scripts" of such actions