Narrative: Who Tells It, and When

Two friends tell you about the same night. One starts with the car breaking down. The other starts with the moment they were laughing on the roadside, then goes back to explain why. Same night, same events, and yet you feel different things, and you trust one friend more than the other. Nothing in the events changed. The telling did.

That gap between what happened and how it is told is the first thing a literature student learns to see, and it never stops being useful. It explains why a mystery can hide a fact for 300 pages, why a book narrated by a murderer reads differently from one narrated by a detective, and why a story told by a woman to save her life became one of the most influential books ever made.

Story and telling: the same events in two orders

The Russian Formalist critics of the 1910s and 20s gave this split two names: fabula, the events in the order they happened, and syuzhet, the events in the order the text gives them. The French critic Gérard Genette later refined it into three layers: the story (events), the narrative (the text on the page) and the narrating (the act of telling, with a someone doing it). Aristotle, in his Poetics (4th century BCE), had already said that the arrangement of events is the heart of a story, more important than the characters.

Below are six events from an invented story. Pick a telling order and watch what changes. The readout counts how many pairs of events are told in a different order from the one in which they happened: zero means a plain chronological telling.

The same events, told in the third order, become a mystery: we learn the mother is dead and a letter has been found before we learn why the sisters stopped speaking. Told in the fourth, the story begins at its end and the whole telling becomes an answer to "how did she get here?" A beginning in medias res, "in the middle of things," is how Homer opens the Iliad and Odyssey. Nobody has told it any other way since.

Plot and time: speed is a choice

Everyone knows the English novelist E. M. Forster's example from Aspects of the Novel (1927). "The king died and then the queen died" is a bare story. "The king died, and then the queen died of grief" is a plot, because now one event causes another. Plot is story plus why. It is what makes a reader keep turning pages: not "and then" but "because".

The second dial is time itself. A narrative can summarise years in a sentence ("She waited thirty winters") or stretch five seconds across a page. Genette called the ratio of text to time the duration or speed. Slow means the reader is meant to pay attention. Fast means something is background. Count the words per story-minute for the same walk to a door.

Notice that the fastest version holds almost no feeling and the slowest holds almost no plot. Most of what a story says about what matters is carried by where it slows down.

Who tells it: person, point of view and the unreliable narrator

Someone is always telling. Sometimes the teller is a character in the story (first person, "I"), sometimes a voice outside it (third person, "she"), and rarely a voice that addresses the reader as a character (second person, "you"). But the person is only half of it. The other half is the point of view, or in Genette's word the focalisation: whose eyes and mind does the reader see through? A third-person narrator can be locked inside one head (limited), can move among all of them (omniscient), or can see only what a camera would (objective).

The same moment, five ways. For each, the table says what the narrator is able to tell us.

A first-person narrator can lie, or be wrong, or simply not know. That is an unreliable narrator, and it works by making the reader see more than the teller does. In the first version above, Ana says Ben does not care. A reader who notices that he is speaking to the floor will suspect she is wrong. Famous cases worldwide: Lu Xun's "Diary of a Madman" (1918), a Chinese story told by a man who believes his neighbours are cannibals and whose madness may be the sanest part; and Machado de Assis's Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881), a Brazilian novel narrated by a man who is already dead and does not mind admitting he was a bit of a fool. Both are in the public domain.

Character: made of choices, not adjectives

Aristotle again: character is revealed by choice under pressure. A narrator who says "Dora was greedy" has told you a fact. A narrator who shows her sliding the last three pieces of cake onto her own plate and covering them with her hand has made you conclude it, and conclusions feel truer than claims. This is the rule behind the writers' advice "show, don't tell". Try it.

The advice is a tendency, not a law. Telling is fast and honest, and a story that only showed would take forever. Forster, in the same book, called characters flat if they are built around one idea or quality and round if they can surprise us convincingly. A flat character is not a bad one; Dickens built a world of them. What matters is that the reader gets what the story needs.

Frame tales: stories inside stories

One of the oldest tricks is the frame: an outer story whose only job is to hold other stories. The Sanskrit Panchatantra (a collection of animal fables, composed in Sanskrit in India, with roots two thousand years old or more) uses it. So does Boccaccio's Decameron, written about 1348 to 1353: ten young people, seven women and three men, leave plague-struck Florence for a villa and tell one another one hundred tales. So do Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (c. 1387 to 1400), told by pilgrims on the road.

The greatest frame tale is the Thousand and One Nights. Its frame: King Shahryar, betrayed once, marries a new wife each day and has her killed at dawn. The vizier's daughter Shahrazad (also spelled Scheherazade) volunteers, tells a story that breaks off at its most exciting point, and is spared another night. This repeats for 1,001 nights. The earliest known fragment of the book, a few pages from Syria, dates from the early 9th century; the oldest substantial Syrian manuscript was copied some time between about 1450 and 1593. The frame itself probably descends from a lost Persian book, the Hezar Afsan ("A Thousand Tales"), mentioned by the 10th-century writer Ibn al-Nadim. The collection grew over centuries with stories from India, Persia, Baghdad and Cairo.

Two details are worth knowing. The European versions began with Antoine Galland's French translation (12 volumes, 1704 to 1717), which added "Aladdin" and "Ali Baba," tales that appear in no Arabic manuscript of the time. Galland said he heard them from a Syrian storyteller, Hanna Diyab, during Diyab's visit to Paris in 1709. And the stories nest. "The Fisherman and the Jinni" is told by Shahrazad, and contains a story the fisherman tells the jinni, which contains tales told by a king and a vizier. Tap through the layers.

The nesting does what a frame is for. Every tale is told to do something: to save a life, to change a mind, to delay a death. Telling is shown as an action with stakes, which is what makes "narrative" a thing people do, not only a thing on the page.

The short story: a whole world in one sitting

The short story as a form grew up in the 19th century, with magazines that wanted something finished in one sitting. In 1842 Edgar Allan Poe, reviewing Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, argued that a short tale should aim at a single "unity of effect," every sentence working toward one impression. Around the world, short fiction took its own shapes: Gogol and Chekhov in Russia, Maupassant in France, Tagore in Bengal, Lu Xun in China, Quiroga in Uruguay, Akutagawa in Japan.

Akutagawa's "In a Grove" (1922) is a good test of this whole piece, because it turns the narrator dial into the plot. A samurai is found dead. Seven people give testimony in turn: a woodcutter, a priest, a policeman's informant, an old woman, a bandit who confesses, the wife who says she did it, and the dead man himself, speaking through a medium. They do not agree. The story never says who is right, and the reader learns that the way people tell a thing is part of what happened. (Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon of 1950 takes its structure from it.) In the next century, Borges, Mahfouz, Alice Munro and many others made the short story a place for thinking about how any story gets told.

What a graduate just sees

• There are always two timelines: the order things happened and the order they are told. Ask why they differ.
• Plot is not "and then" but "because". Cause is what makes a story feel like a story.
• Where a narrative slows down is where it is saying "this matters".
• Someone is always telling, and the teller is a choice: who sees, who speaks, what they do not know.
• Whenever a narrator tells you what to feel, check whether the events agree.
• A character is a pattern of choices, and showing is often (not always) stronger than telling.
• A frame is a story about why stories get told, and what they are for.
• The same facts told by three witnesses are three stories.

Where it shows up next

• Epic, Myth & the Ancient Literatures (35/30): the epics begin in the middle, nest tales, and are told by bards who change them each time.
• The Novel (35/32): the novel is the form where voice, time and point of view get their fullest play, from Murasaki to Cervantes to Austen.
• Literary Theory & Criticism (35/34): narratology is one of the schools, and structuralism asks whether all stories share a grammar.
• In the world: films and TV (flashbacks, voiceovers), news reporting, podcasts, game design, advertising and the way your friend tells a story at dinner.

If you want to go deeper

• 📘 Textbook. H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge University Press; 3rd edition, 2021). A standard university text that covers everything above in plain prose.
• 📘 Textbook. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Cornell University Press, English translation 1980). The source of the time, speed and focalisation vocabulary. Harder, and worth it.
• 📘 Gentler. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927), short, chatty and still the best place to meet flat and round characters; and James Wood, How Fiction Works (2008).
• 🌐 Free course. Open Yale Courses, ENGL 300 Introduction to Theory of Literature (Paul Fry), which includes lectures on Russian Formalism and on Semiotics and Structuralism, where the story/telling split comes from.