Some definition

I thought it was probably time I put a definition up here. I've come across a lot of definitions of narratives but this one seemed the most appropriate.

A narrative can be defined as a sequence of events deliberately arranged to reveal their dramatic, thematic, and emotional significance*. Academic Marie-Laure Ryan has proposed that there are three main elements that qualify a text as a narrative:

'A narrative text must create a world and populate it with characters and objects.... The world referred to by the text must undergo changes of state that are caused by non-habitual physical events ...The text must allow the reconstruction of an interpretative network of goals, plans, casual relations, and psychological motivations around the narrated events."