Narrative, Literary Theory, and the Self in Contemporary Society

Traditional narrative is dead. My purpose is to explain its demise. I will take narrative to mean an account of an agent whose character or destiny unfolds through events in time. Thus, The king the queen died, is no narrative; but, The king then the queen died of grief, is a narrative because the latter events are linked to the earlier ones, revealing character through actions and forming a plot. This gives integrity to the actions as a whole as well as to the characters represented. Plot is the means by which essential features of human existence are expressed through specific events. By organizing actions into a logically unfolding development, the author can show in a palpable fashion the tension between what the character takes or wishes himself to be, and what the world tells him that he is. Plot conveys a moral meaning by encoding in actions some item of wisdom that auditors can decode into their own lived experience.1