Exposition is a literary device used to introduce background information about events, settings, characters etc. to the audience or readers. The word comes from the Latin language and its literal meaning is “a showing forth.” Exposition is crucial to any story, for without it nothing makes sense.
There are many ways to present an exposition and they include monologues, dialogues, in-universe media (newspaper, letters, reports, journal etc.), a protagonist’s thoughts or a narrator’s explanation of past events. It is one of the four rhetorical modes of communication – the other three being narration, description and argumentation.