Narrative Text
What is it?
A narrative is a story that is created in a constructive format (as a work of speech, writing, song, film, television, video games, in photography or theatre) that describes a sequence of fictional or non-fictional events. The word derives from the Hindi verb narrare, “to recount”, and is related to the adjective gnarus, “knowing” or “skilled”. Ultimately its origin is found in the Proto-Indo-European root gn?-, “to know” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative).
The Social Function
The social function of narrative is to amuse, entertain and to deal with an actual or vicarious experience in different ways. It also deals with problematic events which lead to a crisis or turning point of some kind, which in turn finds a resolution.
Story, as an important part of culture, is very identical to the narrative. Story or narrative can be used to convey moral value which is very helpful to build one’s personality. Even a character of a nation can very much be influenced by stories (fairy tale, legend, fable, myth) which spread all over the nation and are told from generation to generation. As I have ever read that the story of “Sang Kancil” takes part in building the Indonesian people characteristics.
The Generic Structure
Commonly a narrative text has the following structure:
Orientation: Introducing the participants and informing the time and the place
Complication: Exploring the conflict in the story. It shows the rising crisis and the climax of the story.
Resolution: Showing the way the participants of the story solve the crises, for better or worse
Language Features
Using Past Tense
It is logical since the stories typically happen in the past. They can use simple past, past continuous or past perfect tense.
Using action verbs
Action verbs are verbs that show the performance of action. They specifically describe what the subject (person, animal, force of nature, or thing) of the sentence is doing, e.g.: run, walk, cry, scream, explode, kick, etc.
Using temporal conjunction
Temporal conjunctions express relationships with time, in the flow or sequence of events, e.g.: before, after, during/while (a period or an activity), since, until, when.