What’s the difference between a narrative and a story?

Starting in the 1960s and continuing well into the 1980s (and beyond) we see a renewed interest in stories and narrative across a variety of disciplines, literary criticism (including narratology), folklore, cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale was revived by the structuralists, George Lakoff recast it in the terms of formal linguistics in an essay, “Structural Complexity in Fairy Tales” (The Study of Man, 1, 1972), and everyone was reading Lévi-Strauss on myth. One of the questions that came out of this research is simple: What’s the difference between a mere narrative and a story? By the time I stopped following that research in the mid-1980 the question was still open.

According to an informal review by Mark Riedl that’s where things stood as of August 2021, “An Introduction to AI Story Generation” (The Gradient). He defines three key concepts:

• Narrative: The recounting of a sequence of events that have a continuant subject and constitute a whole (Prince, 1987). An event describes some change in the state of the world. A “continuant subject” means there is some relationship between the events—it is about something and not a random list of unrelated events. What “relates” events is not entirely clear but I’ll get to that later.

Story: A narrative that tells a story has certain properties that one comes to expect. All stories are narratives, but not all narratives are stories. Unfortunately I cannot point to a specific set of criteria that makes people regard a narrative as a story. One strong contender, however, is a structuring of events in order to have a particular effect on an audience.

Plot: A plot is the outline of main incidents in a narrative.

Let’s consider a very simple kind of narrative: someone leaves home, travels to the grocery story, purchases some items, and returns home. An actual narrative would mention a specific individual, specific places, events along the way, items purchase, and so forth. By Prince’s definition that’s a narrative because there has been a change of state in the world, several in fact depending on how you count them. Items have been taken from the store and transported home (involving two state changes per item) and money has been transferred from our “protagonist” to the owner of the store (two state changes).

I doubt, however, that anyone would consider such a narrative to be a story. Now consider a Japanese reality show that has been shown on Netflix, Old Enough! Young children, three to six years old, are given simple errands to perform. Going to the store, purchasing something, and returning with it is a typical errand. I have watched a number of these and would consider them stories. Why? Because the errands are challenging for the children. They’ve never done it before, there is no line of sight between home and the story, they have to remember the items, remember to ask for change, and so forth. It’s a challenge for them. We see them confronting and overcoming obstacles, including simply fear. That makes it a story proper.

Note, however, that I watched a video of the journey, one edited to amplify the challenges the children face.  That is to say, the events were edited “in order to have a particular effect on an audience.” It would be easy to write these stories in such simple and reduced form that the “storyness” is completely eliminated, leaving only the bare narrative husk. But someone with only modest story-telling skills could also write these stories in a from that includes accounts of the challenges faced by the children, thus making a story out of a bare narrative.

Now consider a six-word statement that’s been mistakenly attributed to Ernest Hemingway: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” However, versions of that statement have appeared as early as 1883. Those six words don’t even give us an event, and yet we seem willing to treat them as telling a story. Why? Because those words lead us to infer something like: the baby shoes were purchased in anticipation of the birth of a child; the child was either still born or died soon after birth; the shoes are no longer needed. Question: At what age is a person sophisticated enough to make such an inference from those words? I doubt that a six-year old would do it.

What, then, is the difference between a narrative and a story? It depends, doesn’t it? How are the events narrated and what can we expect the audience to infer from what is said? It’s not an easy question to answer.