As described in "Ways of Reading", narrative content is “a collection of represented events, along with the participants in those events and the circumstances of those events.” (Ways of Reading 260) and narrative form is “the way in which those events are represented through a particular narrative medium” (Ways of Reading 260). In other words narrative content is the events that happen throughout a story and narrative form is the way we are shown these events throughout the story. There is often a tension between narrative content and narrative form. The difference between the narrative content and narrative form includes differences in narrative order, narrative pace and narrative coherence. In this essay I will explain what is meant by narrative order, narrative pace and narrative coherence with examples from Kate Chopins “The Awakening”. …show more content…
Content order and form order. Content order is “the chronological order of events” (Ways of Reading 260), which is the order in which the events really happened. Form order is “the order in which the narrative presents these events to us” (Ways of Reading 260). In simple narratives the form order and the content order are usually the same, so the event that we read about first, we assume that this event was what happened first. Unlike in more complex narratives where there can be a “manipulation” or “mismatch” in the order of events, which means that the first event we read about might not be the event that actually occurred first in the story. An example of narrative order in "The Awakening" is “The two women went one morning to the beach together, arm in arm, under the huge white sunshade” (Chopin 15,28). This examples shows a simple narrative order as it simply tells us that the two women went to the beach, so we assume that that is what happened in the order the narrative tells us it has