Applied narratology. Theory, Methods, and Analysis of Social and Political Narratives: How Stories Shape Power, Identity, and Reality

CHAPTER 3. CLASSICAL NARRATOLOGY

How the Discipline Emerged, What It Studies, and Why Its Language Still Defines the Work With Meaning

Narrative is not a sequence of events, but a way of presenting them.

Stories seem like magic only to those who have never seen their blueprints.

Classical narratology arose from the desire to understand why stories work. It was born in the realm of text, form, and structure, where meaning was first considered not as inspiration, but as the result of precise architecture.

This chapter returns us to the origins of the discipline that provided the language for all subsequent approaches. Without it, neither the cognitive explanation of narrative nor the applied work of changing a story is possible, because one cannot change what has not been recognised in its form.

To understand how modern narratology arrived at its ideas, we must return to where it was born. And it emerged not in psychology or sociology, but in the literary theory of the twentieth century. This is important: the discipline grew out of a focus on text, on form, on how a person creates meaning through structured narration.

Classical narratology is the discipline that first asserted: a story is not inspiration, not a flow of emotion, not ‘talent’, it is architecture. A story has constructive elements, and if we study them, we can understand why some texts work and remain in memory, while others fall apart by the second paragraph. Classical narratology was born from a simple but revolutionary idea: a story is constructed according to rules, and these rules can be dismantled like a mechanism.

At first glance, this seems extremely rational and cold. As if narratologists want to strip the text of its magic. But in reality, it is the opposite. When you understand the structure of a story, respect for creativity only grows. As in music: the more you understand the theory, the more vividly you hear the nuances. Classical narratology turns story from magic into craft.

This discovery became possible thanks to an almost century-long intellectual movement that led to the idea of structure. Classical narratology was formed at the intersection of two powerful intellectual traditions – structuralism and textual analysis. Its task was clear: to learn to describe the workings of narrative as precisely as physics describes motion, and linguistics describes grammar. And although its interests, seemingly, lay far from practical work with people, it was this school that created the language without which neither cognitive nor applied narratology can be understood.

Classical narratology did not appear suddenly. It was not the discovery of a single person or a single school. It is the result of a long process involving philologists, philosophers, folklorists, critics, and linguists. To understand its power and its limitations, it is important to trace its development step by step, from the first insights to its modern institutional form.

Origins: Structuralism and the Search for a Universal Language of Story

Thinking about how a narrative is constructed began long before the twentieth century. Aristotle, in his Poetics, described beginning, middle, end, catharsis, turning points, and connections between events. This was not yet narratology, but it was the first step towards the idea that a story is a structure.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, comparativists, novelists, and folklore researchers began to look for recurring patterns, motifs, typical plots, and archetypes. The French were already setting the direction then: Rousseau, Diderot, the Enlightenment era – all pushed towards the idea that art could be explained rationally. But a systematic theory did not yet exist.

The early twentieth century. The first wave of formalising plot came from Russia and later moved to France. The Russian Formalists, such as Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynyanov, Boris Eikhenbaum, and Vladimir Propp, made two breakthroughs: they separated ‘plot’ (syuzhet) from ‘story’ (fabula) and showed that a literary text is built on methods, not just on ‘content’ and reflection of reality. These ideas would influence the French structuralists, who would later say: ‘Propp was the first architect of plot.’

Propp, analysing Russian folktales, demonstrated that despite their diversity, all stories operate according to fixed patterns, and in effect invented the first ‘grammatical’ approach to plot. This was not yet narratology, but it was the foundation of the future discipline. Although the French school became the heart of classical narratology, it was Vladimir Propp’s work that provided the initial powerful impetus. Propp was not interested in the psychology of characters; his attention was focused on the structure of action. He was the first to say that a narrative can be broken down into elementary steps. This became the foundation for all subsequent research.

In the mid-twentieth century, European humanities sought order where previously they had seen chaos. Literature was viewed as a system, language as a structure, culture as a set of sign codes. Narrative began to be seen as a construction subject to specific rules. The idea emerged: if a story has an internal logic, it can be described precisely. This faith in structure defined the approach of the entire classical school.

The French School – Formation of the Discipline

Before the structuralists, stories were analysed differently: one discussed authorial inspiration, sought morality, admired writing style; compared eras and movements. But no one tried to understand why some plots survive for centuries while others disappear. Why some stories seem monumental while others are clearly weak?

In the mid-twentieth century, French intellectuals proposed a radical idea: a story lives not because it is beautiful, but because it is structurally stable. That is, plots have an internal organisation, akin to architecture or anatomy. Structuralism became the ideological soil, preparing the general turn of the humanities towards the idea that behind any cultural phenomena lie structures. If previously researchers studied authors, eras, and influences, the structuralists said: what matters is not who and when, but how it is constructed. For narratology, this was a decisive shift: the story ceased to be a ‘work of genius’ and became an analysable system.

The basic principle: ‘function is more important than content’. This is the main law of classical narratology. It doesn’t matter who the character is; what matters is what they do within the structure. For example: a father could be a tyrant or a mentor; a hero could be weak or strong, but their function is to move the plot forward; an antagonist could be a person, nature, the state, an idea. What makes a story a story is not its ornamentation, but the role of each element. In this approach, the hero is not a person, but a function of movement; analysis is not about psychology, but about mechanics.

‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ as Mechanical Perfection

Although the novel was written not by a French structuralist but by Alexandre Dumas, it fits perfectly into the logic of classical narratology. Why? Because it works like a perfect machine: exposition: Edmond Dantès, honest, talented; disruption of equilibrium: betrayal; exile: prison; new identity: Monte Cristo; goal: restoration of justice; resolution: balance restored. The functions are arranged with clockwork precision. Each character is not just a person but a part of the mechanism: Fernand: the initiator of the disruption; Abbé Faria: catalyst for the hero’s development; Mercédès: the emotional axis; Villefort: symbol of institutional injustice.

The story reads like a legend because its structure is perfect.

In the 1950s—1970s, French structuralism became the centre of classical narratology, and narratology itself received its definitive formulation. It was here that scholars emerged who created the language still spoken by any school working with stories.

This is a key period. It was here, at the intersection of literary criticism and semiotics (Barthes, Genette, Greimas, Todorov), linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure), and anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss), that classical narratology in its modern sense was born.

Roland Barthes: Narrative as a Play of Codes

Barthes viewed the text as a system of signs that affects the reader through codes: cultural, symbolic, semantic. He spoke of the multi-layered nature of narrative, of how a story is simultaneously simple (as a chain of events) and complex (as a network of interpretations).

By analysing the myths of society as texts and calling for an interdisciplinary study of narrative, Barthes made two conclusions especially important for cognitive narratology.

– ‘Narrative is everywhere’: the story is seen as a universal form of organising experience, not just a property of literature. This is a direct bridge to the idea that the brain structures the world through narrative.

– The confusion of sequence and causality: Barthes describes the ‘main mechanism of narrative’ as the mixing of succession and cause (later reinterpreted as the cognitive bias towards ‘post hoc ergo propter hoc’).

From Barthes, applied narratology inherited the idea: a story is not only what is said, but also how it allows the reader to think.

Gérard Genette: The Architect of Narratology

Genette effectively created the ‘anatomy of story’. The text is autonomous and can be analysed independently of the author and reader. This is the classical structuralist view. Genette’s approach structured narrative so that it could be viewed as a coordinate system. This is why he became the central figure of the entire discipline.

Gérard Genette gave narratology a fundamental tool: the analysis of time. He showed that in a story there is:

– order (the sequence in which events are told);

– duration (how much text is devoted to a scene);

– frequency (how many times an event is repeated);

– levels of narration (who is telling the story: the hero, a main voice, or a second-level character).

Genette proved that narrative is not just a chain of events, but a play with the perception of time.

The nineteenth-century French novel was a laboratory for these techniques. Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, each manipulated time, creating a particular sense of the density of the world. For Balzac, for example, time contracts and expands as he reveals a social mechanism.

For Flaubert, time stretches when Emma Bovary experiences an emotional crisis.

For Zola, time becomes the rhythm of the milieu. Classical narratology helps us see these movements as an engineer would: precise, functional, perfectly calculated.

Genette introduces the concept of ‘focalisation’ – who exactly sees and knows the events. This is a key tool. Telling a story is always a choice of point of view. French novels are proof of this.

In Madame Bovary: if the story were told from Emma’s perspective, it would be a novel about a dream. If from the doctor’s perspective, a novel about bewilderment. If from society’s perspective, a novel about a scandal.

But Flaubert chose the position of an outside observer, who coldly and precisely records her destruction. And it is this position that makes the novel so powerful.

Genette’s ‘Narrative Discourse’ became the benchmark of structural narratology, without which cognitive analysis would be blurred.

A. J. Greimas: The Actantial Model

Greimas introduced the idea that any character is not a person but an ‘actant’ – a function of the plot. Such actants can be: Subject (hero), Object (the hero’s goal), Sender (who gives the goal), Receiver (who needs the result), Helper, Opponent.

Any story can be reassembled through these roles.

For example, Little Red Riding Hood: Subject: Riding Hood. Object: to get to grandmother’s. Sender: mother. Receiver: grandmother. Helpers: woodcutters. Opponent: wolf.

And the same can be done with any novel: For example, Les Misérables: Subject: Jean Valjean. Object: to atone for the past. Sender: Bishop Myriel. Receiver: society, Cosette. Helper: inner morality. Opponent: Javert, the system.

This transforms even a vast novel into a simple schema, where each part works as an element of a motive system.

And finally, Tzvetan Todorov introduced the term ‘narratology’ itself and worked with types of narratives, genres, and the grammar of storytelling.

Classical Narratology Today: What Remains, What Has Changed

Today, this school is no longer limited to the analysis of literary texts. Its tools are applied in the analysis of political speeches, in journalism, in cinema, in brand communications, and in strategic consulting.

But the main thing is that classical narratology gave us a language without which it is impossible to describe a story in any field. When an applied narratologist says, ‘Your story has a shifted focalisation,’ or ‘The plot is built around the same rhythm of obstacles,’ or ‘You are using a linear structure, although the situation calls for a branching one’ – this is all the legacy of the classical school.

Why Must an Applied Narratologist Know the Classical School?

Because it allows one to see form. Form is what remains stable even when content changes. For example, a person retells the same story but changes the facts – the form remains the same. An employee explains the complexity of their work to themselves using the same structure of conflict. An organisation builds its corporate narrative based on a recurring dramaturgy: hero, enemy, victory. A family lives within a story with rigidly distributed roles: the strong one, the weak one, and the rescuer. Form is what a specialist must see before moving on to changes. You cannot transform what has not been recognised.

Classical narratology provides the ability to hear structure as clearly as a musician hears rhythm. Without it, a person swims in emotions and images, not understanding that a story can be taken apart. It teaches us to see structure, functions, roles, turning points, and the logic of events. And once you master this language, you will be able to analyse your own life as clearly as narratologists analysed the texts of Balzac.

Limitations of the Classical School

Classical narratology taught us to see what usually remains invisible: the form of a story, its rhythm, functions, and points of tension. It provided a language through which narrative ceased to be a vague concept and became a construction that can be disassembled.

But this precision has its limits. The classical school answers the question of how a story is constructed, but it does not explain why this particular story takes hold in the mind, why a person gets stuck in certain plots and ignores others, or how form translates into choice and action.

To answer these questions, one must go beyond the text and look at how a story is created, maintained, and distorted within the mind. This is where cognitive narratology begins – the next step in understanding how meaning becomes reality.

CHAPTER 4. NARRATIVE, LOGIC, AND PERSUASIVENESS

A person acts not on the basis of what is proven, but on the basis of what may be.

Logic says what is true. Narrative says what is possible. Truth obliges the mind. Plausibility guides action.

From Truth to Plausibility

The majority of human decisions are made outside the conditions of strict proof – in situations of incomplete information, an open future, and conflicting grounds. In these conditions, logic in the classical sense proves insufficient. Its place is taken by another form of rationality: narrative.

Logic answers the question: ‘What is true?’ The narrative answers the question: ‘What does it make sense to do?’

This distinction is fundamental. Narrative represents an independent mode of rationality, oriented not towards proof, but towards the possibility of choice and action. Narrative is the rationality of action, not the rationality of truth.

Truth, Belief, and Choice: Different Modes of Rationality

Classical logic operates with necessary connections: if the premises are true and the form of reasoning is correct, the conclusion is obligatory. But human life almost never conforms to this scheme. Most decisions are made where there is no complete information, the future is open and undefined, consequences are probabilistic, and values conflict.

In these conditions, the question shifts from ‘what is proven’ to ‘what allows one to act meaningfully.’

Narrative structures precisely this space. It does not prove, it makes choice psychologically and culturally possible. Therefore, the persuasiveness of a narrative cannot be measured by the categories of formal truth. It is measured by plausibility, internal logic, and correspondence with the subject’s expectations.

Plato’s Distrust of Myth: Story as a Threat to Truth

Philosophical suspicion of narrative has deep roots. In Plato, myth and poetry occupy an ambiguous position. On one hand, they affect the soul. On the other, they do so bypassing rational control.

For the Platonic tradition, the danger of a story lies in its ability to form beliefs without proof, substituting plausibility for truth.

Hence the fundamental opposition: logos as the path to truth, mythos as seduction and distortion.

This opposition long entrenched the view of narrative as something secondary, artistic, or manipulative. However, this line does not exhaust ancient thought.

Aristotle: Narrative as the Logic of the Possible

A turning point comes with the position of Aristotle, who for the first time clearly distinguishes different types of rationality.

For Aristotle, logic deals with the necessary, mathematics with the unchanging, rhetoric with the probable, and poetics with the possible.

History and narrative, for Aristotle, belong to the realm of the possible, and therefore are not opposed to truth as falsehood. They do not work with what must always be true, but with what may be as told, and thus deserve credence.

Aristotle introduces the key concept of plausibility. A story is persuasive not because it is factually accurate, but because it is internally consistent, psychologically recognisable, causally coherent, and proportionate to human experience.

Thus, narrative acquires its own rationality, not secondary to logic, but differently structured. Narrative is the logic of the possible, not the logic of proof.

Enthymeme: The Hidden Logic of Any Story

The central mechanism of a narrative’s persuasiveness is the enthymeme. In Aristotle’s rhetoric, the enthymeme is a truncated syllogism in which one or more premises are not articulated and remain implicit. This is precisely how stories are structured.