Narrative Essay



Narrative Essay

All of us tell stories about things that have happened to us. Have you ever been "almost" hit by another car and then you rushed home to relate this story to your husband or wife? Have you ever had a bizarre experience, such as being mistaken for someone else? Or perhaps you were wrongfully accused of shoplifting one time. Did you ever help someone in a time of need or vice-a-versa? You probably told these stories to someone, didn't you? Many events happen in our lives that we brush off as insignificant. However, if we really analyzed some of those incidents, we might find that they actually have some significance and are worth putting down on paper. Thus, you could write a narrative, which gives an account of something or tells a story.

A narrative essay tells a story-usually of a personal experience-that makes a point or supports a thesis. To actively engage the reader's attention, you need to re-create the experience in vivid detail, using descriptive language and following a clear, chronological order. The reader should be able to visualize the occurrence.

A narrative uses tools such as flashbacks, flash-forwards, and transitions that often build to a climax. The focus of a narrative is the plot. When creating a narrative an author must determine their purpose, consider their audience, establish a point of view, use dialogue, and organize the narrative. A narrative is usually arranged chronologically.

An essay is usually a short piece of writing. It is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can be literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition of an essay is vague, overlapping with those of an article and a short story. Almost all modern essays are written in prose, but works in verse have been dubbed essays (e.g. Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism and An Essay on Man). While brevity usually defines an essay, voluminous works like John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population provide counterexamples.

It is very difficult to define the genre into which essays fall. Aldous Huxley, a leading essayist, gives guidance on the subject:

Like the novel, the essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything. By tradition, almost by definition, the essay is a short piece, and it is therefore impossible to give all things full play within the limits of a single essay. But a collection of essays can cover almost as much ground, and cover it almost as thoroughly, as can a long novel. Montaigne's Third Book is the equivalent, very nearly, of a good slice of the Comédie Humaine. Essays belong to a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively within a three-poled frame of reference. There is the pole of the personal and the autobiographical; there is the pole of the objective, the factual, the concrete-particular; and there is the pole of the ...