A narrative or story is a construct created in a suitable format (written, spoken, poetry, prose, images, song, theater, or dance) that describes a sequence of fictional or non-fictional events. It derives from the Latin verb narrare, which means "to recount" and is related to the adjective gnarus, meaning "knowing" or "skilled". (Ultimately derived from the Proto-Indo-European root gnō-, "to know".) The word "story" may be used as a synonym of "narrative", but can also be used to refer to the sequence of events described in a narrative. A narrative can also be told by a character within a larger narrative. An important part of narration is the narrative mode.

Along with exposition, argumentation, and description, narration (broadly defined) is one of four rhetorical modes of discourse. More narrowly defined, narration is the fiction-writing mode whereby the narrator is communicating directly to the reader.

Stories are an important aspect of culture. Many works of art and most works of literature tell stories. Most of the humanities involve stories. Stories are of ancient origin, existing in ancient Egypt, ancient Greek, Chinese, and Indian culture. Stories are also a ubiquitous component of human communication, used as parables and examples used to illustrate points. Storytelling was probably one of the earliest forms of entertainment. Narrative may also refer to psychological processes in self-identity, memory and meaning-making.

Conceptual issues

In postmodern theory, semiotics begins with the individual building blocks of meaning called signs — and semantics, the way in which signs are combined into codes to transmit messages. This is part of a general communication system using both verbal and nonverbal elements, creating a discourse with different modalities and forms. In On Realism in Art, Roman Jakobson argues that literature does not exist as a separate entity. He and many other semioticians prefer the view that all texts, whether spoken or written, are the same except that some authors encode their texts with distinctive literary qualities that distinguish them from other forms of discourse. Nevertheless, there is a clear trend to address literary narrative forms as separable from other forms. This is first seen in Russian Formalism through Victor Shklovsky's analysis of the relationship between composition and style, and in the work of Vladimir Propp who analyzed the plots used in traditional folktales and identified distinct functional components. This trend continues in the work of the Prague School and of French scholars such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. It leads to a structural analysis of narrative and an increasingly influential body of modern work that raises important epistemological questions: What is text? What is its role in the contextual culture? How is it manifested as art, cinema, theater, or literature? How are poetry, short stories and novels of different genres?