Narrative

Narrative
Narrative is the structure and organisation of media texts in short it is the way the parts of the story are put together and presented to the audience.
in order to analyse the narrative, there are series of codes and conventions that need to be considered because of this when looking at the narrative we examine the conventions of:

• Genre
• Character
• Form
• Time

Roland Barthes describes a text as

"a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signified; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can read, they are indeterminable...the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language..."  

what he is stating is that a text is like a tangled ball of thread that needs to be unravelled and that once we do this we encounter a variety of potential meanings.

Narrative Enigmas
These are codes that limit the information given to the audience and forces them to work out what's going on in the story. Because the audience have to figure out the puzzle of the plot it keeps their attention on what their watching.

Technical code sound camera angles editing
verbal code  way language is used to convey the story
symbolic codes clues in the story
structure beginning middle end three part structure
character protagonist antagonist heroin sidekick mentor

Narrative conflict
All narrative is caused by narrative conflict and the battles between characters moves the story along

An example of how the narrative(structure) helps create the story and make it flow

• crime planned
• crime conceived
• crime committed
• detective investigates
• crime discovered
• detective identifies the criminals

Iconography
Iconography is the genre changes over time e.g westerns & musicals
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconography