1.6 Elements of a Story

While stories differ in many ways, almost all stories have some general elements in common. Mastering these elements and their functions will help us better understand how stories work.

Narrative

The driving force behind any story is the narrative, the sequence of events that unfolds over the course of the story. Most of the time, these events are closely connected to each other, but the connections aren’t always obvious.

In our course, we can also refer to this sequence of events by the term plot. This word appears in certain phrases that help us analyze a narrative—a plotline is one branch of the unfolding events, a plot hole is a logical gap between events, and so on.

As an example, let’s consider a simple narrative—the sequence of events in Dr. Seuss’s book The Cat in the Hat.1 We’ll model the main events on individual lines in Figure 1.11 and connect them with arrows to represent their development over the course of the story.

In this diagram, each line represents an event or group of events. The narrative unfolds as each event causes or contributes in some way to the event after it. We divide up the events in whatever way best preserves the structure of the narrative—here, the line “Cat causes a lot of mischief” actually represents a big portion of the book, while “Fish: ‘Mom on her way home!’” happens in just a couple lines. But the fish’s warning marks a turning point in the narrative, so we make sure to point that out.

Characters

A second primary element of a story is a character or characters, which are the entities in a narrative that make events happen or that events happen to. We use the general term “entities” to refer to these characters because characters are usually people but can also be animals, robots, aliens, or anything else we want.

Through characters, we connect with the events in the narrative. Characters may be like us or completely different, but as we see the world through their eyes, we come to experience some of the same things they do.

Characters in The Cat and the Hat

The Cat in the Hat contains a number of characters: Sally and her brother, the fish, the Cat in the Hat, Thing One and Thing Two, and at the end, the children’s mother. The characters have different functions in the story, and their actions as they perform those functions tell us something about them. The Cat seems to be up to no good but really just wants to have fun; the children are bystanders for almost the entire book; the fish has some stern words for anyone who looks like they’re having a good time, and so on.

In this book, the narrative allows the characters to act or experience events on their own, so we learn about the characters by seeing what they do and how they react. We learn that the fish is stern by watching his prudish behavior; we learn that the Cat likes having fun because he’s starting a new party every few pages. The narrative and the characters work together to create a zany atmosphere that keeps children coming back for more.

Characters don’t have to be living things, at least not in the way we’ve been describing them here. Settings can be characters too, for example. In Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Old Man and the Sea,2 the sea itself is a character because it interacts with the old man, Santiago. We learn of Santiago’s character and life as he struggles with the sea, and the fish he tries to catch becomes another character as well.

Message

Not all stories have messages that go beyond the events recounted in the story. Of course, we can always interpret a story as having a message, even when there doesn’t really seem to be one. We could say, for example, that The Cat in the Hat is really a commentary on Elvis Presley’s third and final appearance in The Ed Sullivan Show.3 No one would take that interpretation seriously outside of a literary theory class, but we could still try to make the case.

Even though not all stories have underlying messages, we will treat messages here as important elements of a story. We do this because, in many professional and organizational settings, stories are created in order to share a message—the message is integral to the story and may be the reason for its existence in the first place. As we saw before, a story can be the frame through which we convey some other piece of information. That information is the message, whose content drives some or all of the narrative, characters, and other elements of the story.