Narration Rhetorical Mode

If you wanted to tell the story of your first day at school, how would you go about it? Chances are, you’d begin with the first moment you can recall, which might be waking up or getting ready at home. You would probably move on to the next significant event you can remember. You may also frequently use the word “I,” and write about everything from your perspective—rather than, say, your mother’s. To tell that story of your first day of school, you would likely rely on many important principles of narration.

Narration is a method of telling stories and sharing events, recognized all over the world.

Meaning of Narration as a Rhetorical Mode

Narration is a rhetorical mode used to tell a story, communicate a series of events, or describe a scene.

When you thought about how you might narrate your first day of school, did you have to spend a lot of time deciding how to tell the story? Likely not, because narration follows a particular pattern of organization—which is another term for rhetorical mode—that most of us are very familiar with.

Narration can describe both fictional and true events. Most, if not all of us, have seen a movie, read a book, or heard someone tell a story in our lifetimes. Each of these examples follow the narrative pattern. Often, when someone tells a story or explains something in chronological order, they are using narration as a rhetorical mode. One of the hallmarks of narrative writing is chronological order.

Importance of Narration

Narrative writing connects ideas, events, or concepts. There are three important aspects of narration to keep in mind.

1. Narration Connects Events and Aspects of a Story

Narration through storytelling makes sense of specific themes, ideas, or concepts and relates them to each other. By connecting one event to another through narration, an author can reveal a pattern.

2. Narration Shapes Events Around an Overarching Effect

Whether consciously or unconsciously, narration can shape events around a particular goal or effect. For example, the goal of a comedic narrative is to make the audience laugh. This means a comedic narrative can be shaped in order to serve that purpose.

3. Narration is the Art of Storytelling

By narrating an event, a person is practicing the art of storytelling. It is the ability to connect one event to another, revealing something important about the event or the narrator.

Purpose of Narration as a Rhetorical Mode

One major purpose of narration is to keep the action moving in a forward direction. Fictional writing especially often relies on narration to move the story along. The designated timeline helps the reader not only understand the series of events, but also to put themselves in the story and experience it personally.

Audiences of all kinds understand the format of narration and enjoy the entertainment of a good story.

Types of Narration

There are five common types of narration that serve different purposes. These are descriptive narrative, viewpoint narrative, historical narrative, linear narrative, and non-linear narrative.

Descriptive Narrative

The purpose of descriptive narration can be boiled down to two basic ideas:

1. It creates a sense of time, place, and setting

2. It conveys the mood and tone of said time, place, and setting

Descriptive narratives use sensory details to explain something. In other words, a descriptive narrative will use language that appeals to the reader's taste, touch, smell, feel, or sound.

Take, for example, the protagonist’s description of a room from Jane Eyre (1847) written by Charlotte Brontë. The narrative uses details of sight, feel, and sound to describe the scene to the reader.

Viewpoint Narrative

Much of the time, the purpose of narration is to show how a particular individual perceives an event or their surroundings. Viewpoint narrative filters everything through an individual’s point of view.

The power of viewpoint narrative is that it informs the audience’s perceptions, getting them to see things the way the narrator does. When readers read something narrated, they typically identify with whoever is speaking, whatever their perspective.

It is possible for the viewpoint to change between characters within a single piece of writing, or even on a single page. The narrator is simply the person telling the audience what is happening or what someone is thinking, and it is all coming from their perspective.

For example, two people may be explaining how their group presentation went and one may have seen it as a smashing success, while the other would describe it as a train wreck. The audience will only know about the presentation from the narrator's perspective, or whoever is describing it.

Historical Narrative

This type of narration recounts events from the past. Because historical narrative writes about events that have already happened—again, either fictional or true events—it is able to establish causation between events. In other words, historical narrative can show how or why one thing caused another to happen.

Linear Narrative

Linear narrative is telling a story in the order the events happened. This is also known as sequential, or chronological, order. Linear narrative can be found in realist fiction, or any time an author presents a series of events realistically.

Chronological order assembles information based on timing and according to what happened from first to last.

As you recalled the details from your first day at school, they may have come to your mind out of order, but chances are your mind went about arranging them from first to last as you assembled your narrative.

Non-Linear Narrative

An author doesn’t have to provide narrative events in sequential order. Non-linear narrative shares events out of order, at least from a chronological perspective. This narrative approach can actually provide more information about the narrator’s mental or emotional state.

Flashbacks are a form of non-linear narrative and are one way to show the emotional impact of an event on a person. Readers see many flashbacks in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), which give the reader insight into the psyche of the anti-hero, Holden.

This quote is from a formative memory for Holden; in it, he recalls the aftermath of an interaction between Jane, his crush, and her stepfather. He begins to suspect the stepfather is abusing Jane, but Holden doesn’t know how to comfort her. This flashback gives us helpful context about Holden's character and how he perceives the world.

Examples of Narration as a Rhetorical Mode

Narration requires a perspective, meaning there must be someone doing the narrating. There are six types of narrators, as seen below, each with an example highlighting how narration functions as a rhetorical mode.

Omniscient (Sees all, knows all)

Omniscient means to have infinite knowledge and insight. An omniscient narrator is above the action and events of the story and has intimate knowledge about what other characters perceive and think.

In this example, the narrator shared what the main character was experiencing, as well as the other students at the school. This is the only narrative perspective that can offer insight into multiple characters’ minds and motivations.

First-person (I, we)

This narrator tells events from their point of view. That means first-person uses “I” (or “we” for plural) to explain events and how they experienced them.

Notice how everything is from the narrator’s perspective; words like “my,” and “I” tell you that this is first-person narration.

Second-person (You)

In second-person, the reader is the one driving the action. Think of “Choose your own adventure” stories, in which the reader decides what happens in the story. Second-person narration is often instruction-oriented.

Second-person narration is describing or talking about someone else. The words “you” and “your” indicate second-person perspective.

Third-person (He/ she/ they)

Third-person narration explains events from a more distant perspective. The narrator only shares what they see or know with the reader. This is known as limited third-person narration.

The narrator only knows what Theo is thinking and how he is feeling. The narrator can’t speak to how Scott or anyone else in this story feels.

Unreliable

An unreliable narrator is one who may share untrue or misleading information. Sometimes an unreliable narrator shares incorrect information on purpose, and other times it is by mistake. There are several types of unreliable narrators; they might be offering false information because they are naive, an outsider, insane, a picaro (i.e., one who exaggerates), or a liar. Unreliable narrators may also avoid the truth out of self-preservation.

This example is written from the first-person point of view, but the terrifying description of the school is exaggerated, perhaps to mirror the fear the narrator feels in a new school.

Fly-on-wall

A fly-on-the-wall narrator is purely objective and doesn’t have an opinion. This type of narrator simply records and relates events, like a camera. This narrative perspective is very straightforward and doesn’t offer much insight into the characters.

Although there are plenty of details about Naomi’s first day of school, everything is explained without reflecting how the events affected Naomi or anyone else. The fly-on-the-wall narrator simply relays information without any emotional context.