An Introduction to Understanding Narration

Narrating mythical stories was perhaps the earliest method man used to understand and express the truth about life and the world. The story of Ardaviraf’s trip to heaven and hell in Avesta and Saint Augustin's autobiography written in the fourth century AD are narrations that made use of the preferred principles of their time, organizing the story of their "text" in a way that can still be read again and again. Today narration means a precise attempt to compile these disseminated and disharmonious elements into a meaningful whole. Each and every event holds an appropriate position when in a narrative form. The concept of narration and narrative functions have been taken into account by many scholars particularly over the recent decades in various intellectual fields including cinema and drama, philosophy, mythology, the theory of history, the theory of literature and etc. After all understanding people’s lives is only possible through reading the narrations that picture the possible and potential aspects of life.