IM: Reading Reflection Week 4

“Narrative…is the textual actualization of story, while story is narrative in a virtual form.” – H. Porter Abbott.

I love this. Right here ^.

This is a great quote to define story and narrative. As I started this weeks reading, I zoned about for a bit and tried to define narrative in my head. This quote is the actualization of my thoughts. I didn’t have a worded definition, but this quote represented my thought process.

Jannidas proposes 8 conditions among 5 dimensions to which a narrative should abide by. I find it difficult to agree with this because in my opinion, a story is a story. Write what you want to be in your story, their shouldn’t be governing rules that restricts your story. I know that these conditions are very broad, and not conditions like “you must have an antagonist”, but I always like to reference The Tree of Life whenever the argument of story comes up. It’s a well made film, well shot, well acted. I hated it. It’s a complete existential and metaphorical road trip that made little sense to me and didn’t interest me enough to dig deeper. That film literally has a scene with dinosaurs in it. DINOSAURS! Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that it’s structure and narrative were offputting to me but that is because I like traditional narrative. Why I use this film as an example is that it was nominated for Best Picture. It’s a well regarded film, yet follows little tradition in its creation. I admire Terrence Malick for that, and the fact that he makes films like that, because it’s not what is expected from film narrative, and he defies it.