Narrative Theories

Narrative Theories

definition: is the study of story and studies the convention governing the organisation of a story into a sequence.

VLADIMIR PROPP, in his book 'Morphology of the Folk Tale' he studied 100 folk tales and through this exploration he came up with his theory. He claimed that in tales there are 8 types of characters.
-the villain
-the hero
-the donor- who provides an object with some magic property.
-the helper who aims the hero
- The dispatcher - who sends the hero on his way
-the false hero
He argues that all fairy tales were constructed of certain plot elements, which he called functions. He also devised 31 narrative functions, and proposed that they encompassed all of the plot components from which fairy tales were constructed.

Tzvetan Todoroz, argues that stories begin with an equilibrium (a stable situation in which forces cancel one another). The stable situation is disrupted by some even that preludes to a series of events. Problems are solves for the mere purpose of restoring the world of the fiction back to its original position.

Claude Levi-Strauss’s, after studying hundreds of myths and legends from around the world, Levi-Strauss observed that we make sense of the world, people and events by seeing and using binary opposites everywhere. He notes that all narratives are organised around the conflict between such binary opposites.
Examples of binary opposites
Good vs evil
Black vs white
Boy vs girl
Peace vs war
Democracy vs dictatorship