What they never told you about stories!

When you analyse a text for coursework or exam, it's the subtlety of your analysis that gains most marks. To state the obvious or focus on routine points is to take the the road to a low grade; a high grade demands more - a subtle awareness of how language and images are operating on their reader, the effects these create and the purposes intended.

In texts of all kinds, an important and subtle way in which meaning is frequently be constructed is through the use of narrative devices. Narrative is such an important device because it is capable of acting powerfully to support and reinforce ways of thinking about the world and its peoples (i.e. dominant ideologies) - and yet it hides itself; it is almost invisible.

Narrative is the technical term for no more than story - yes... those things you hear, tell or read every day of your life; but what you're going to use stories for to gain you high marks in your essays and exams is rather different...

We all carry around with us a fund of stories, some of which are very ancient and enduring. We pick such stories up during childhood when they on our subconscious in surprising ways to inform us of what life should be like - often at its best and worst. They provide a kind of framework against which we can measure and judge people and events in the world.

An example: if you were reading a poem about a powerful leader, you wouldn't need to have many of the qualities of the kind of person involved described to you - you already have in your head a pre-existing narrative that 'tells' you what it means to be such a person. Similarly a romantic story or even a magazine advertisement for, say, perfume might employ the 'femininity narrative' as this is well known and easily invoked. You wouldn't need to be told what it means to be feminine... or masculine, for that matter. There are so many aspects of life that narratives help us interpret and judge in particular ways, and importantly, these are ways that we share with most others within our culture or society.

You might be beginning to see now that the kind of narratives we are involved with here are those that can be  easily invoked and very quickly brought to mind, even by a few words or, perhaps, a single image. This kind of narrative is sometimes referred to as a snapshot narrative or mini-narrative. You might also have made the connection that many narratives - because they are shared ways of thinking - also act at a powerful ideological level.

These narratives exist in literature, non-fiction and media texts rarely as whole stories but as 'bits of narratives' that are called narrative codes. These work by prompting or bringing to mind a memory of a deeply embedded, widely known story. This process is technically referred to as cueing.

This image will help you recognise how narrative codes work. The image and the text are simple. Yet, as they say... every picture tells a story; and - in the case of narrative - a picture is worth a thousand words. What 'story' is cued by this image? It certainly acts as a surprisingly powerful narrative - one that we should all recognise. It should bring to mind - cue - the story of loneliness and all of the emotional power that story brings in its wake. This is narrative at its most obvious. Can you think of other narratives? There are very many - and the most enduring are called myths. The narratives or myths of masculinity, or of femininity, or of the hero are three that come immediately to mind. Narratives are not stories you could necessarily write down or tell as such - or even that you can even remember being told; but they are stories, nonetheless; and they act very powerfully to reinforce ways of thinking about life. In this sense narratives are all ideological. They also usually tend to operate at the level of binary opposition. > Can you fill in the rest of the loneliness narrative? It really is a kind of story. It's a sad story and it's something we want to avoid happening to us. In part, this narrative guides our decision process concerning entering into relationships and marriage, or having children and even becoming old. It even guides our actions when we choose our clothes, cosmetics and so on... all ways of helping to avoid loneliness.

It's can be difficult to believe that something as everyday as a story can act so powerfully to shape the ways in which we interpret texts, but make no mistake, narratives act powerfully to define and shape our very lives.

The following pages will show you how narrative codes can be created and how they work. The analysis you will see could easily be applied to any number of texts in both English and Media Studies.