Complex narratives

Stories are representations and a representation is something that stands for something else, for example a word on a page standing for an object in the world or a portrait standing for a person living or dead. Stories are instantiated in so many genres, by so many modes of representation, and across so many media channels in the 21st century that it is easier to begin by identifying representations that are not stories. These include lists and diaries (with which all readers will be familiar), annals and chronicles (old-fashioned histories), most contemporary poems (such as lyric poetry), and most conversations (where one may set out to tell a story, but usually fails courtesy of interruption, digression, or both). Stories are made rather than found, intentionally produced by a creator, and the identity of the creator is partly determined by the story's mode of representation, media channel or both, for example: author (novel), director (feature film), or studio (television series). ‘Story’ is sometimes used to denote something distinct from ‘narrative’, but I shall employ the two terms as synonyms. A story or narrative consists of two basic and essential components: a sequence of events, which may be real or imagined, and the representation of those events (McGregor 2021a). Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) is an autobiography of the first twenty years of Frederick Douglass’ life, but it does not include everything that happened to him from 1818 to 1838. Indeed, it would be impossible to include every event in one's life in a representation of that life and narratives are, in consequence, selective (White 1987). A narrative representation thus represents only a selection of the entire sequence of events it takes as its subject.

The proliferation of internet technology has not only increased the number of narrative representations in existence exponentially, but increased the proportion of those representations that are short in length and simple in structure (Presser 2018). These are called, variously, basic narratives, notional narratives, or micronarratives. Strictly speaking, diaries, annals, chronicles, and conversations are narrative representations because they are basic narratives, but they are not narratives in the sense in which I am interested in narrative representation, that is complex narratives.