The paper offers a mildly deflationary account of narrative, drawing attention to the minimal, thus easily satisfied, conditions of narrativity and showing that many of the more striking claims about narrative are either poorly supported or refer to distinct classes of narrative—usually literary or fictional—which provide a misleading paradigm for narration in general. An enquiry into structural, referential, pragmatic, and valuebased features of narrative helps circumscribe the limits of narration and the test case of the narrative definition of the self (...) is examined and shown to yield rather less that is often claimed. (shrink)

In sum, flashbacks and foreflashes are commonplace in narrative, and such rearrangements in the telling of a story seem to leave us not only with a story but with very much the same story.1 . . . Will no disparity between the order of telling and the order of occurrence destroy either the basic identity or the narrative status of any story? An exception seems ready at hand: suppose we simply run our film...backwards. The result, though indeed a story, seems (...) hardly to be the same story in any usual sense . . . Does cinematic narrative actually differ this sharply from narrative in a series of snapshots or in words? I think not. Our first impulse with any tale when the order of telling is clear is to take the order of occurrence to be the same as the order of telling; we then make any needed corrections in accord with temporal indications given in the narrative and with our antecedent knowledge both of what happened and of causal processes in general. But discrepancy between order of telling and order of occurrence cannot always be discovered instantaneously—or at all. If our series of snapshots is shown in reverse order at normal speed, we readily detect the reversal; for we know that a race begins at the starting gate, ends at the finish line, and so on. Even if the pictures do not show the starting gate or finish line or other identifiable parts of the track, we are not deceived, for we know that horses do not run backward. But when the film is run backward, such clues and considerations usually cannot be brought to bear soon enough, and we momentarily mistake the direction of the actions filmed. A little time is needed to make the correction. What seemed like a drastic difference between film and other forms of narrative amounts to nothing more than this lag. · 1. In an obvious and important sense. Of course, whether two version are properly said to be of the same story—or of the same world—depends upon which of many permissible interpretations of sameness is understood; but that need not trouble us here. Nelson Goodman is emeritus professor of philosophy at Harvard and the founder of both Project Zero and the Harvard Dance Center. His works include The Structure of Appearance; Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, and Ways of Worldmaking. His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "The Status of Style" , "Metaphor as Moonlighting" , and "The Telling and the Told". (shrink)

A story does more than recount events; it recounts events in a way that renders them intelligible, thus conveying not just information but also understanding. We might therefore be tempted to describe narrative as a genre of explanation. When the police invite a suspect to “tell his story,” they are asking him to explain the blood on his shirt or his absence from home on the night of the murder; and whether he is judged to have a “good story” will (...) depend on its adequacy as an explanation. Can we account for the explanatory force of narrative with the models of explanation available in the philosophy of science? Or does narrative convey a different kind of understanding, which requires a different model and perhaps even a term other than ‘explanation’? (shrink)