Narrative vs. Chronology

Narrative is made of successive events.

Narrative is the order in which the author presents the story’s events to the recipient, i.e. the audience or reader. Chronology is the order of these events consecutively in time. Some people use terms from Russian Formalism, Syuzhet and Fabula, to make the distinction.

While the convention is linear, i.e. to relate the story’s events consecutively in time, that is chronologically, we are also very used to narratives which move certain events around. An event may be moved forward, meaning towards the beginning of the narrative, perhaps even to be used as a kick-off. Or possibly events may be withheld from the audience or reader and pushed towards the end, perhaps to create a revelation late in the narrative for a surprise effect – though this technique often feels cheap. Also, an author may use flashbacks to insert backstory events from the past, the past being all relevant events that are prior to the events in the narrative.

As authors, when we begin composing a story, we may sense the event-order of narrative before we are clear about the actual chronology of events. Irrespective of the chronology of events, we may order and reshuffle the story’s events until we feel the narrative structure creates the desired emotional effect. The process of ordering and shuffling helps us to see where there are gaps in the plot, i.e. where the recipient requires knowledge of events in order to understand what is going on. And in the rewrite, we may decide to remove some events because they provide too much knowledge too soon, or because they are superfluous since they do not provide new knowledge.

The beginning and end of a story can be a narrative frame within which the bulk of the story is embedded, as in Stand By Me, the movie version of The English Patient, or the German Realism classic Der Schimmelreiter by Theodor Storm.

Sometimes an author plays with chronology to surprise the recipient, as in Pulp Fiction. Sometimes chronology can be the premise of the story, as in Irreversible or Memento.

Written fiction is in some ways more free than movie structure, but whatever the medium: one of the many decisions the author must make concerns the congruence between narrative (Syuzhet) and chronology (Fabula). We delve deeper into the meaning of narrative in our next post on Story vs. Narrative.