Narrative-and-life.

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Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa

1º Grado en Estudios Ingleses

Facultad de Filosofía y Letras

Universidad de Zaragoza

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 Comentario de texto
First semester 2023/2024

-Narrative and life-

-The universality of narrative-

Usually, as humans when we think about narrative the first feature that comes to mind is art, novels,
anecdotes, etc. Narrative it’s something that we use in our everyday lives, since we start to put words
together, the subject with the verb, and when we start to remember memories.

For Fredric Jameson, it’s the distinctive human trait, and he also said about narrative “Is the central
function or instance of the human mind”. For Jean-François Lyotard narrative is “The quintessential form
of customary knowledge”. But even though we don’t have a perfect meaning or description about the
narrative, but only Roland Bathers’s could make the fullest and better explanation:

“The narratives of the world are numberless. Narrative has a prodigious variety of genres, with different
substances, any material were fits the man’s stories, we can create narrative by articulated language,
spoken, written, moving images, and gestures. We have narrative everywhere in myth, legend, fable, tale,
novelle, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting, stained-glass windows, cinema, comics,
new items, conversation, every place, moment, day, age, society. Thanks to narrative we can know about
other cultures, and other histories, it’s something that all classes use, all human groups, and even if
humans are opponents we can find similar narratives. We can also find narrative in the best literature and
in the bad ones, likewise, we understand that narrative is something international, transhistorical,
transcultural, it’s something that exists with us”

Bathers also explains that there are narrative genres: a novel, epic poem, short story, saga, tragedy,
comedy, farce, ballad, and western. He also explains that the narrative it’s the structure, when we say or
think of the word “Narrative” we expect it to tell a story, but also there are non-narrative genres like the
lyrical poem, but even that, we can find some “micro-narrative” some lines that are narrative.

[For example: In a lyrical poem we can see “Drink to me onely, with thine eyes” There are two
micro-narrative. The first one is “Drink to me” which acts like a metaphor and the second one is “Look at
me”]

As we said before narrative it’s something that grows up with us, when we start to create memories, to
speak better by putting verbs together with nouns (three or four years) we start to reading narrative text
(children’s fable) and we start to get the “deep structure” of narrative.

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 For Paul Auster “ A child's need for stories is as fundamental as his need for food” He wants to explain
with that, children need to read, need to understand those stories because that will help them when they
grow up.

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To finish this point we need to remember that Narrative is something we learn rather than something you
build into us through our genes.

-Narrative and time-

To continue we need to understand what does narrative do for us. As we said before narrative it’s the
most important feature in us and that makes us organize and understand the time. We’re the only species
on earth with language and awareness about the passage of time.

As humans, we use different ways to organize time:

Mechanical timepiece: Clocks, watch. (But they started to exist since The Middle Ages, and
before them, people approximated the time)

Non-narrative ones: Passage of the sun, phases of the moon, succession of seasons, season
cycles that we call years.

But in narrative, we understand the passage of time by the events themselves.

[For example: “I fell down” cries the child. At this moment we understand that this event happened in a
few seconds, but we can keep adding things: “I fell down” cries the child after falling to the ground, he
looked to his knees and saw the blood, he looked to his mother and run to her crying loudly.

In those lines we still see the same timelapse, just we add more details to make it more interesting or
more descriptive]

The only difference between the mechanical timepieces, non-narrative ones, and the narrative it’s that we
can add as many actions or events and we will define the time, something that with the others we cannot
do.

-Narrative perception-

Narrative it’s at some point the way we see and understand the world, we don’t only read, we also can
see a static image and identify the connect and/or sometimes create the context by ourselves.

For Filmmaker Brian De Palma “People don’t see the world before their eyes until it’s put in a narrative
mode”

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 That means, when we see a picture we tend to look for the context, we try to analyze the image, to look
for a background, and when we find it we’re able to have an opinion about it. But when we can’t
understand the context we cannot understand the image also.

Reservados todos los derechos. No se permite la explotación económica ni la transformación de esta obra. Queda permitida la impresión en su totalidad.
[For example: We see a boat in the sea and people jumping out of it. When we see those features we
understand that something bad is happening, and when we get the context by ourselves we can
understand the picture, image, painting, etc]

To sum up; Anything we look at in this world we get, or we try to get a context from it, and we can create
or see it thanks to the narrative that gives us this feature.

For Hayden White in his book “The Content of the Form” explains that the word “Narrative” comes from
the ancient Sanskrit “Gna” which means “Knoe”, and in Latin for the word “Knowing” it’s “Gnarus” and for
“Telling” “Narro”. This etymology has two sides of narrative, it’s about knowledge, the narrative gives us
knowledge, and at the same time, it’s a constant telling of actions and events.

Narrative it’s the most important and useful thing in the world, but we should take care of it because it
could be dangerous, some people can use it with bad intentions.

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