Narratology

Definitions

Anima and Animus

— within every man is a feminine part (Anima), within every woman is a masculine part (Animus). They are inner mediators with the collective unconscious, sources of creativity and wisdom, but also of projections and illusions in relationships.

Shadow

— everything the personality denies and suppresses — the “dark side.” The shadow is not necessarily evil; it is simply everything excluded from conscious self-identity. The unacknowledged shadow is projected onto others (“they are bad”). Working wit...

Persona

— the social mask a person wears in different roles. When the persona is identified with the “I” (one thinks that the mask is oneself) — psychological emptiness arises.

Self

— the wholeness of the psyche, uniting consciousness and the unconscious. The symbol of the Self is the mandala, the circle, wholeness. The path to the Self is individuation: the process of integrating all parts of the psyche.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) expanded the theory of the unconscious beyond personal experience. Freud saw the unconscious as a repository of repressed memories of the individual. Jung added a deeper layer — the collective unconscious: a heritage common to all humanity, containing archetypes — uni...

Archetypes are not transmitted culturally (like stories passed from generation to generation) — they are biologically embedded in the psyche, like instincts. This explains why the same motifs — mother, hero, wise old man, trickster, shadow — appear in myths, dreams, religions, and art of all cult...

Anima and Animus: within every man is a feminine part (Anima), within every woman is a masculine part (Animus). They are inner mediators with the collective unconscious, sources of creativity and wisdom, but also of projections and illusions in relationships.

Shadow: everything the personality denies and suppresses — the “dark side.” The shadow is not necessarily evil; it is simply everything excluded from conscious self-identity. The unacknowledged shadow is projected onto others (“they are bad”). Working with the shadow is a key Jungian process.

The "Epic of Gilgamesh" (Sumerian, about 2100 BCE) is the oldest surviving literary narrative. Its central theme is strikingly modern: the fear of death and the quest for immortality.

Gilgamesh, king of Uruk—"two-thirds god, one-third human"—experiences the death of his friend Enkidu and for the first time realizes his own mortality. He embarks on a quest for immortality—and in the end finds not immortality, but wisdom: the gods left death for humans, life for humans. The only...

This is a narrative of maturation through loss. The friendship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu (the wild man sent by the gods to tame the king) is one of the earliest stories of transformative friendship. They become better versions of themselves through their relationship—not through solitary heroism.

Prometheus (Greek) is the archetype of the "culture hero": he steals fire (technology, knowledge, culture) from the gods and gives it to mankind. Punishment: chained to a rock, with an eagle devouring his liver every day, which regenerates every night—eternal torment.

Dan McAdams, one of the founders of narrative psychology, proposed: personal identity is not a set of traits, but a story that a person tells about themselves. The "life narrative" is a reconstruction of the past, interpretation of the present, and anticipation of the future in the form of a cohe...

This is not just a metaphor. People literally form their identity through narrative: memories are restructured around current identity; events are interpreted in light of the "main theme" of life; future goals are encoded as a continuation of the story.

Change the story — change the identity. This explains why therapy works through narrative: when a person can tell their story differently (not "I am a victim of events," but "I am someone who survived them and became stronger"), it changes their mental state.

Research shows: people with more coherent (connected, causal) life narratives demonstrate higher levels of psychological well-being, better ability to cope with difficulties, and a higher level of wisdom.

Plutarch (46–120 AD) invented the biographical genre as an instrument of moral education. “Parallel Lives” — 46 biographies of great Greeks and Romans, written in pairs and with parallel comparison. Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. Demosthenes and Cicero. Theseus and Romulus.

Plutarch honestly formulates his objective: he writes biography, not history. Biography is about character and morality; history is about events. An anecdote, a small gesture can reveal character better than a great battle. “The smallest act, a brief saying, a joke” — are truer features of a pers...

This principle had a huge influence on Western culture. Plutarch inspired Shakespeare (“Julius Caesar”, “Antony and Cleopatra”, “Coriolanus”), Montaigne, Emerson. Napoleon read “Parallel Lives” and called Plutarch his favorite author.

James Boswell’s “The Life of Samuel Johnson” (1791) is possibly the best biography in Western literature. Boswell spent years recording Johnson’s conversations, observations, utterances. His method: to imitate the reader’s presence next to the subject.

“Confessiones” (“Confessions”) by Augustine of Hippo (354–430) is the first great autobiographical text of Western literature. But it is not memoirs in the modern sense. It is a conversation with God—a public prayer, a confession of one’s spiritual history.

Augustine describes his youthful sins (sexual promiscuity, stealing pears—in which he saw the triumph of the will towards evil for its own sake), intellectual wanderings through Manichaeism and Neoplatonism, and finally—conversion in Milan in the garden under a fig tree, under the influence of th...

His famous prayer: “You have made us for Yourself, Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.” This is the first systematic introspection in the Western tradition—a search for God through the exploration of one’s own inner world.

Augustine invented self-reflection as a genre. Before him, authors wrote about events; he began to write about inner experience—anxiety, desire, the search for meaning. This anticipates modern psychology.

Words not only reflect history—they make it. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (1863, 272 words) reframed the Civil War: it was no longer a dispute over the Constitution, but a fight for “a new birth of freedom.” Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” (1963) was not just a speech, but a performative ac...

Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” (1946, Fulton): Churchill was the first to publicly name the phenomenon—Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe—with a term that became a symbol of the Cold War. A rhetorical act—creating reality through naming.

“The Communist Manifesto” (Marx and Engels, 1848): “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism.” This is the opening of one of the most influential political documents in history. Its power—beyond its ideas—lies in its narrative energy.

All great speeches have common elements: (1) A beginning that commands attention: King begins with a historical frame (“Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation”), which sets the scale. (2) Rising structure: emotional in...

The Kuleshov Effect (1922): the same shot of an actor's face, edited with different images (a bowl of soup / a coffin / a child), is perceived as conveying different emotions. Editing creates meaning that is absent in the individual shots. This is pure narratology: significance arises not in the ...

Three fundamental editing principles of Eisenstein: metric (rhythm), tonal (atmosphere), intellectual (idea through collision). "Battleship Potemkin" — a manifesto of intellectual montage.

Genre is a narrative contract between the creator and the audience. A thriller promises: the tension will escalate, the protagonist is in danger. A melodrama promises: emotional catharsis through separation and reunion. Violation of genre conventions — an artistic device or a deception?

Noir destroys the optimistic narrative "the criminal is punished": the detective is often morally compromised, victory is conditional, the world remains dark. This is narrative pessimism as an aesthetic stance.

Journalism is a narrative activity. Facts do not speak for themselves: they need to be selected, organized, titled, placed in context. These are narrative decisions. The same set of facts can be presented as a story of success, tragedy, or scandal.

"New Journalism" of the 1960s-70s (Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion): journalists deliberately applied narrative techniques of the novel—scenes, dialogues, point of view—to reporting. The goal was to convey experience, not just facts. The risk was blurring the boundaries between reportage ...

How do narrative decisions shape the perception of societal issues? If mass shootings are covered through the story of a single victim instead of statistics—is that more humane or more manipulative? Research shows: individualized narratives are more persuasive than statistics ("identifiable victi...

In digital media, narrative choice is governed by algorithms: what to show first, what to suggest next, which content to amplify. The algorithm optimizes engagement—and engagement is maximized by emotional intensity, conflict, and novelty.

This creates a narrative environment where moderate, nuanced stories lose to extreme ones. Not because people want extremity—but because that’s how the algorithm is designed. The media ecology determines which stories survive.

Henry Jenkins (2006): transmedia storytelling—a story unfolds across multiple media platforms, each adding a unique element. "Star Wars": films + books + games + series + comics—a unified narrative world, each fragment of which stands alone, yet enriches the whole.

Brands use transmedia: Nike—it’s not just sneakers, but a narrative of overcoming, realized through advertising, apps, events, athlete-ambassadors.

Dan McAdams (1993): personal identity is not a set of traits, but a narrative construction. We organize the experience of life into a story with a protagonist (myself), a plot (life path), a theme (what matters), a genre (tragedy, comedy, quest, confession). This is a “personal myth”—and it is re...

Therapy often works through restructuring the narrative: not “I have an anxiety disorder” (diagnosis-label), but “I am a person who, in certain situations, feels intense anxiety, and I am learning to regulate it” (a narrative with agency).

Psychological well-being correlates with narrative flexibility: the ability to tell the story of a difficult experience not only as victimization, but also as overcoming, learning, transformation. This is not denial—it is active reinterpretation.

Benedict Anderson (1983): nations are "imagined communities." We will never meet most of our "compatriots," but we imagine ourselves as part of a single community through a shared narrative—history, symbols, rituals. This is a narrative construction supported by institutions: schools, media, holi...

National narratives are selective. They emphasize certain events and silence others. Whoever controls the narrative of the past controls the legitimacy of the present.

"Memory wars" are political conflicts surrounding the historical narrative: who was the victim, who the aggressor, what counts as tragedy and what as just retribution. Monuments, textbooks, and holiday dates are narrative battlegrounds.

Corporate narratives about the past work in a similar way: "we are an innovative company" vs "we are a company with strong traditions"—different stories about the same facts.

Paul Zak and neuroscience: a compelling story stimulates the production of oxytocin—the hormone of trust and empathy. Narrative transportation—a state of immersion in the story—reduces critical thinking and increases susceptibility to persuasion. This works in advertising, politics, therapy, and ...

The date has changed, but the power of stories remains. Aristotelian division: logos (argument), ethos (authority), pathos (emotion)—narrative engages all three. A story can carry a factual argument, demonstrate the character of the narrator, and evoke strong emotion.

Precisely because narratives are so persuasive, they are instruments of manipulation. Propaganda, disinformation, fraud—all these are narrative practices. "It sounds true" ≠ "it is true."

Critical thinking requires us to notice when we are "transported" into a narrative and to ask questions about the factual basis of the story.

The novel is a comparatively young genre. Epic, tragedy, and comedy have existed for millennia. The novel in the modern sense is a product of the 17th–18th centuries. What changed? The invention of printing created a mass readership. Urbanization and rising literacy—especially among middle-class ...

The novel is a genre of the bourgeois world: not kings and gods, but private individuals with private problems. Mikhail Bakhtin: the novel is the only genre that is “not yet ready,” unfinished, open—because its subject is modernity in its unfinishedness.

Cervantes (1605) created something unprecedented: a book about a man who read too many books. Don Quixote sees windmills—and sees giants. He is not insane in the usual sense: he applies the narrative schemes of the chivalric romance to the real world. The world does not coincide with these scheme...

The novel is self-referential: in the second part (1615), the characters know that the first part exists and react to their own narrative existence. This is metafiction 400 years before Borges. Nabokov considered “Don Quixote” a cruel book: the crowd mocks the madman. But it is also a book about ...

Nineteenth-century realism is not merely a style. It is a program: literature must show life “as it truly is,” without romantic idealization. This meant paying attention to the details of everyday life, to class contradictions, to the psychology of ordinary people, to the social mechanisms that d...

Balzac (“The Human Comedy” — 90 novels) created a systematic map of French society. His project — the “secretary of history”: the novel must document society more precisely than historians. Stendhal, Flaubert, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky — each in his own way implements this program.

Gustave Flaubert (“Madame Bovary”, 1857) created one of the first novels deconstructing the romantic narrative from within. Emma Bovary is raised on novels — she expects narrative schemes of romance from life. Real life — provincial, banal, boring — does not coincide. Emma searches for romance in...

Flaubert sympathizes with Emma and criticizes her at the same time. “Madame Bovary is me,” Flaubert allegedly said. The novel about novels — a metanarrative: a critique of narrative thinking applied to life. This is a precursor to Nabokov and Borges.

Jürgen Habermas in "The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere" (1962) describes a phenomenon that arose in Western Europe in the 17th–18th centuries: the public sphere — a space between the private and the state, where citizens discuss public affairs through reason and argumentation. Cof...

This is narratively important: the public sphere exists through narratives. A newspaper is a narrative about "events". A pamphlet is a narrative about the political situation. A novel is a narrative about private life, which becomes a public conversation. All three together create "public reason"...

John Adams: "The revolution occurred in the minds of the people before the first musket fired." Thomas Paine's pamphlets ("Common Sense", 1776) — a narrative instrument that mobilized the American colonists. The newspaper revolution of the 19th century: the cheap "penny press" created a mass audi...

The "yellow press" at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries (Hearst, Pulitzer) — narrativization of the news as sensation. "You supply the pictures, I’ll supply the war" — an apocryphal quote from Hearst about the war with Spain in 1898. Media influence not just opinions — but what events "exist" f...

“Stream of consciousness” is a literary technique that imitates the continuous flow of a character’s thoughts, sensations, and memories without editorial processing. The term was introduced by the psychologist William James in 1890 to describe how the mind operates: thought is not discrete and lo...

Modernist writers made this their narrative tool. Why? Nineteenth-century realism precisely described the external world—but the inner world remained schematic: “he thought”, “she felt”. Modernism wanted to show the very fabric of subjective experience: not what the character thinks, but how exac...

“Ulysses” (1922) is one of the most complex and most important novels in history. Action: one day in Dublin, June 16, 1904. Three characters: Leopold Bloom (a Jewish advertisement agent—a modern Odysseus), Stephen Dedalus (a young artist—Telemachus), Molly Bloom (Leopold’s wife—Penelope).

The final chapter is Molly’s monologue, 40+ pages almost without punctuation. This is stream of consciousness in its purest form: thoughts about her husband, lovers, past, and future intertwine without logical transitions. “Yes I said yes I will Yes”—the final “yes” to life, an affirmation of vit...

Classical narrative presupposes a “reliable narrator”—a narrative voice the reader trusts. The narrator may make mistakes, but does not intentionally conceal the truth. Twentieth-century literature systematically undermines this trust.

Wayne Booth (“The Rhetoric of Fiction”, 1961) introduced the concept of the “unreliable narrator”: a character whose story diverges from “real” events—due to limited knowledge, self-deception, psychological instability, or intentional deception of the reader. This is one of the most productive na...

Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky (1864) features one of the first unreliable narrators in world literature. The “Underground Man” himself admits that he contradicts himself, that he lies, that he does not understand his own motives. Yet it is precisely this unreliability that creates the illu...

Nabokov’s Lolita (1955)—Humbert Humbert narrates a story of “great love”, using sophisticated language to conceal the reality of child rape. The reader must read “against” the narrator—notice what he hides, what he downplays. This is one of the most radical experiments with unreliability in liter...

Psychological trauma is not just a painful experience. It is a rupture in narrative coherence: something has happened that “does not fit” into the story about oneself and the world. The normal process of “processing” experience — incorporating it into narrative memory — is disrupted. Instead, the...

Laurel Silverman and Shoshana Felman (“Testimony,” 1992): testimony is the central narrative act after catastrophe. Holocaust survivors often described the impossibility of telling — and the irresistible need to tell. “If This Is a Man” by Primo Levi is one of the most important texts about narra...

Primo Levi (1919–1987) survived Auschwitz and wrote several books of testimony. “If This Is a Man” (1947) is a strict, almost dispassionate narrative about life in the camp. Levi deliberately avoids sentimentality: his goal is to testify precisely, so that the world understands, and not just feels.

The “gray zone” is one of Levi’s key concepts: the camp system created a moral gray zone, where victims were forced to participate in the system of their own oppression (kapos, Sonderkommandos). The simple division into “victims” and “perpetrators” is a moral simplification that does not reflect ...

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) is one of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century, although he wrote stories rather than treatises. His "Ficciones" (1944) and "The Aleph" (1949) are philosophical literature that explores time, infinity, identity, reality, and narrative through the forms...

"The Library of Babel": an infinite library containing all possible books of all possible alphabetical combinations. Among them are all great books, all their refutations, all meaningless strings of letters. This is a narrative illustration of the mathematical concept of infinity—and a metaphor f...

"The Garden of Forking Paths": a novel within a story, in which a labyrinth of time—not space—is described. Instead of a single future, all possible futures exist simultaneously. This is quantum mechanics as a narrative principle: every choice realizes one of the infinite universes.

Borges systematically destroys the boundary between narrative and reality. "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote": a twenty-first-century writer creates a text identical to "Don Quixote" word for word—but it is a different work, because the context is different. This illustrates Barthes's idea of...

Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" (1902) is a classic of European literature about the Congo, about the brutality of colonialism. But Chinua Achebe, in the essay "An Image of Africa" (1977), challenged this canon: "Heart of Darkness" uses Africa and Africans as "background," as "darkness," against whi...

This is not simply literary criticism—it is narrative political analysis. Who tells the story? Whose perspective is "normal," and whose is "other"? In colonial literature, "I" is the European, "they" are the natives. This is narrative power.

Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart" (1958) is a response to "Heart of Darkness": the story of an Ibo village on the eve and during colonization from the viewpoint of Nigerians themselves. The main character Okonkwo is not a "savage," not the "other"—he is a complex person with his own inner life,...

Ngugi wa Thiong'o (Kenya) took a radical step: in 1978, he decided to write only in Kikuyu, not in English. The use of the colonizer's language is already acceptance of his narrative frames. The decolonization of literature is the decolonization of language.

In the 1960s, a revolution occurred in American journalism, known as "new journalism." Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion applied techniques of fiction writing to reportage: vivid scenes, inner monologue, dialogue, character point of view. The result: nonfiction that reads like a novel.

Truman Capote’s "In Cold Blood" (1966) is a "nonfiction novel": a documentary investigation of a murder in Kansas, written with the psychological depth and narrative mastery of Dostoevsky. It is simultaneously journalism and literature. And simultaneously — a problem: Capote reconstructed dialogu...

The "true crime" genre is one of the most popular in the 21st century. Podcasts (Serial, My Favorite Murder), Netflix documentaries (Making a Murderer, The Jinx). Why? Psychologists suggest several explanations: fear of death in a safe narrative container, the desire to understand the "incomprehe...

But true crime has ethical issues: victims and their families become material for entertainment. Sometimes, coverage influences court proceedings. Sometimes, it creates "stars" out of murderers. The narrative rendering of real crimes is power that the media wield over real people.

Video games are the newest narrative medium and the fastest-growing. By 2022, the video game industry exceeded $200 billion—more than film and music combined. But what interests us is not the economy, but the narrative: games have created a fundamentally new type of storytelling—the interactive n...

In traditional narrative (book, film), the reader/viewer is a passive recipient. The narrative unfolds independently of them. In a game, the player is a co-author: their decisions influence the course of the story. “Mass Effect,” “The Witcher,” “Detroit: Become Human”—role-playing games where cho...

This radically changes the narrative structure. Instead of a linear plot—there is a “decision tree” or “rhizome” (per Deleuze): a structure without a center or hierarchy. This corresponds to the postmodernist idea of a multiplicity of narratives.

“The Last of Us” (Naughty Dog, 2013) is a game with narrative depth comparable to quality cinema. The relationship between Joel and Ellie is explored through gameplay: you not only see their interactions—you live through them. The ending confronts the player with a moral dilemma and provides no “...

ChatGPT, GPT-4, Claude — large language models (LLMs) — are, essentially, machines for generating text, trained on vast arrays of human narrative. They can write a novel, a screenplay, a poem, a narrative report. But is this truly “narrative” in the full sense?

Peter Brooks defined narrative through “narrative desire”: a text driven by the desire to reach an end, to find resolution. This assumes intention, purpose, meaning. An LLM has no desires — it predicts the next token based on statistics. Does this create meaning — that is an open philosophical qu...

From a pragmatic point of view: AI creates texts that function as narratives — eliciting emotions, holding attention, providing a sense of meaning. Readers respond to them as to narratives. Whether this constitutes narrative is a question about the minimal conditions for narrativity.

YouTube, Netflix, TikTok — algorithms recommend the next video, the next episode, the next post. This creates a personalized narrative: each user experiences a unique “story” of content assembled by the algorithm.

A corporate narrative is not a PR tool and not a marketing trick. It is the way in which an organization understands itself, coordinates the actions of its members, and interacts with the outside world. Organizations without a narrative are disoriented: members do not understand where and why the...

The narrative solves three tasks. Identity: who we are, where we came from, how we are different. Direction: where we are going and why it is important. Mobilization: why people should join us or stay.

Leadership is in many ways a narrative act. The research of Howard Gardner (“Leading Minds”, 1995): great leaders are, above all, great storytellers. Roosevelt, Churchill, Gandhi — created narratives that mobilized millions.

A strategic narrative is a concept developed by Lawrence Freedman (“Strategy”, 2013): a narrative that explains why an organization or state does what it does, and why it is the right thing.