Story Narration

Narrative
A narrative is a concept, composed and delivered in any medium, which describes a sequence of real or unreal events. It derives from the Latin verb narrare, which means "to recount" and is related to the adjective gnarus, meaning "knowing" or "skilled”. 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.
Conceptual issues
Semiotics begins with the individual building blocks of meaning called signs and studies 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 analysed 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, theatre, or literature? How are poetry, short stories and novels of different genres?
Literary theory
General purposes in Semiotics and Literary Theory, a 'narrative' is a story or part of a story. It may be spoken, written or imagined, and it will have one or more points of view representing some or all of the participants or observers. In stories told verbally, there is a person telling the story, a narrator whom the audience can see and hear, and who adds layers of meaning to the text nonverbally. The narrator also has the opportunity to monitor the audience's response to the story and to modify the manner of the telling to clarify content or enhance listener interest. This is distinguishable from the written form in which the author must gauge the readers likely reactions when they are decoding the text and make a final choice of words in the hope of achieving the desired response.
Whatever the form, the content may concern real-world people and events. This is termed personal experience narrative. When the content is fictional, different conventions apply. The text is projecting a narrative voice, but the narrator is ontologically distant, i.e. belongs to an invented or imaginary world, and not the real world. The narrator may be one of the characters in the story. Roland Barthes describes such characters as 'paper beings' and fiction comprises their narratives of personal experience as created by the author. When their thoughts are included, this is termed internal focalisation, i.e. when each character's mind focuses on a particular event, the text reflects his or her reactions.
In written forms, the reader hears the narrator's voice both through the choice of content and style and through clues that reveal the narrator's beliefs, values, and ideological stance, as well as the author's attitude towards people, events, and things. It is customary to distinguish a first-person from a third-person narrative. A homodiegetic narrator describes his or her personal and subjective experiences as a character in the story. Such a narrator cannot know anything more about what goes on in the minds of any of the other characters than is revealed through their actions, whereas a heterodiegetic narrator describes the experiences of the characters who do appear in the story and, if the story's events are seen through the eyes of a third-person internal focaliser, this is termed a figural narrative. In some stories, the author may be overtly omniscient, and both employ multiple points of view and comment directly on events as they occur.
Tzvetan Todorov (1969) coined the term narratology for the structuralist analysis of any given narrative into its constituent parts to determine their function(s) and relationships. For these purposes, the story is what is narrated as usually a chronological sequence of themes, motives and plot lines. Hence, the plot represents the logical and causal structure of a story, explaining why the events occur. The term discourse is used to describe the stylistic choices that determine how the narrative text or performance finally appears to the audience. One of the stylistic decisions may be to present events in a non-chronological order, say using flashbacks to reveal motivations at a dramatic moment.
Narrative Paradigm
Outside the mainstream of semiotics, Walter Fisher has offered a comprehensive theory known as the Narrative paradigm. This involves the claims that rather than organising data as facts in logical relationships, most people retain their everyday information as anecdotal narratives with characters, plots, motivations, and actions, and that, at its broadest level, all communication is a form of storytelling.
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Protagonist and Antagonist

Protagonist
A protagonist is a term used to refer to a figure or figures in literature whose intentions are the primary focus of a story. Classically protagonists are derived from good will, however, this does not always have to be true. Protagonists cannot exist in a story without opposition from a figure or figures called antagonist(s). Classically in literature, characters with good will are unusually the protagonists, however, not all characters who assist the protagonist are required to be simple protagonistic.
In some nineteenth century novels, for example, Wilkie Collins' "No Name," the protagonist, Magdalen Vanstone, is introduced with an extended description, and thereafter simply expresses the qualities given in the description. Similarly, in much "formula fiction", the protagonist will remain essentially unaltered for the duration of the story; no value judgement need be implied by an author's use of either type of protagonist. A refinement can be introduced by an author using the first, evolving, type of protagonist as in Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener"; though a novel may center on the actions of another character, it is the dynamic character who typically allows the plot to progress in a manner that is conducive to the thesis of the work, and thereby focuses the attention of the audience. The original Greek phrase refers to the central character within a drama, deriving from a conflation of πρωτο-, proto- and agōnistes.
It should be pointed out that the protagonist is not always the hero of the story. Many authors have chosen to unfold a story from the point of view of a character who, while not central to the action of the story, is in a position to comment upon it. However, it is most common for the story to be "about" the protagonist; even if the Main Character's actions are not heroic, they are nonetheless usually vital to the progress of the story. Neither should the protagonist be confused with the narrator; they may be the same, but even a first-person narrator need not be the protagonist, as they may be recalling the event while not living through it as the audience is.
The main character is often faced with a "foil", a character known as the antagonist who most often represents obstacles that the protagonist must overcome. As with protagonists, there may be more than one antagonist in a story. Sometimes, a work will initially highlight a particular character, as though they were the protagonist, and then unexpectedly dispose of that character as a dramatic device. Such a character is called a false protagonist.
When the work contains subplots, these may have different Main Characters from the main plot. In some novels, the book's main character may be impossible to pick out, because the plots do not permit clear identification of one as the main plot, as in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, depicting a variety of characters imprisoned in and living about a gulag camp.
Main Character or Characters
In an ancient Greek drama, the Main Character was the leading actor and as such there could only be one main protagonists, or the chief persons of the drama". This plural use and the use outside of drama attract the disapproval of Fowler in his "Modern English Usage", insisting on the derivation from PROTOS=first. When there is more than one protagonist the story becomes more complex.
Main Character as proponent
The use of 'Main character' in place of 'proponent' has become common in the 20th century and may have been influenced by a misconception that the first syllable of the word represents the prefix pro- rather than proto-, meaning first. For example, usage such as "He was an early protagonist of nuclear power" can be replaced by 'advocate' or 'proponent'.
Main Character in psychodrama
In psychodrama, the "Main Character" is a person who decides to enact some significant aspect of his life, experiences or relationships on stage with the help of the psychodrama director and other group members, taking supplementary roles as auxiliary egos.
Antagonist
An antagonist is a character or group of characters, or, sometimes an institution of a happening who represents the opposition against which the protagonist(s) must contend. In the classic style of story wherein the action consists of a hero fighting a villain, the two can be regarded as protagonist and antagonist, respectively.Contrary to what some people commonly believe, the antagonist is not always the villain, but simply those who oppose the main character.
Writers have also created more complex situations. In some instances, the story is told from the villain's point of view, and any hero trying to stop said villain can be regarded as an antagonist. Such antagonists are usually police officers or other law enforcement officials. In the film K-19: The Widowmaker, an American film about a Soviet Cold War submarine crew, the crew, enemies of the United States, are depicted as protagonists, creating something of a paradox -as very often the American film industry tends to depict the forces of the United States as the people that fight for "good" and "justice", in opposition to them being the antagonists.
More often, stories simply do not have characters that are readily identifiable as most heroic or villainous. Instead, the antagonist becomes that character, group, or metaphysical force which provides the chief obstruction to the protagonist(s) of the story. Note that the antagonist is not necessarily human; often, the forces of nature or psychological elements provide this element of opposition. For example, Final Destination features a metaphysical, though possibly sentient, personification of death which tries to kill people in gruesome "accidents" as part of some large plan.
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