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losophy of language. For once the “Cognitive Revolution” in the human sci-
ences brought to the fore the issue of how “reality” is represented in the act of
knowing, it became apparent that it did not suffice to equate representations
with images, with propositions, with lexical networks, or even with such more
temporally extended vehicles as sentences. It was perhaps a decade ago that
psychologists became alive to the possibility of narrative as a form not only of
representing but of constituting reality, a matter of which I shall have more to
say presently. It was at that point that cognitively inclined psychologists and an-
thropologists began to discover that their colleagues in literary theory and his-
toriography were deeply immersed in asking comparable questions about tex-
tually situated narrative. I think one can even date the “paradigm shift” to the
appearance of a collection of essays narrative inquires in 1981 -
On Narrative
(Mitchell 1981).
If some of what I have to say about the features of narrative, then, seem
“old hat” to the literary theorist, let him or her bear in mind that the object is
different. The central concern is not how narrative as text is constructed, but
rather how it operates as an instrument of mind in the construction of reality.
And now to the ten features of narrative.
3.
1. Narrative diachronicity.
A narrative is an account of events occurring over
time. It is irreducibly durative. It may be characterizable in seemingly non-
temporal terms (as a “tragedy” or a “farce”) but such terms only summarize
what are quintessentially patterns of events occurring over time. The time in-
volved, moreover, as Ricoeur has noted, is “human time” rather than abstract
or “clock” time (Ricoeur 1984). It is time whose significance is given by the
meaning assigned to events within its compass. William Labov, one the great-
est students of narrative, also regards temporal sequence as essential to nar-
rative but he locates this temporality in the meaning-preserving sequence of
clauses in narrative
discourse
itself (Labov 1967, 1981). While this is a useful
aid to linguistic analysis, it nonetheless obscures an important aspect of nar-
rative representation. For there are many conventionalized ways of express-
ing the sequenced durativity of narrative even in discourse, like flashbacks
and flashforwards, temporal synechdoche, and so on. As Nelson Goodman
warns, narrative comprises an ensemble of ways of constructing and represent-
ing the sequential, diachronic order of human events, of which the sequencing
of clauses in spoken or written “stories” is only one device (Goodman 1981).
Even non-verbal media have conventions of narrative diachronicity, as in the
