Narrative is realised in many different media. In this book we look at narratives
in film, in television, in radio and in various media of popular print culture. These
could be called 'mass media' in that all are assumed to be shown or broadcast to
a scattered and diverse audience.
I want to begin here, however, with a narrative in a very different medium: a
handwritten letter from one person to another person. This is a much simpler
textual situation than that of many of the media texts we will later consider,
yet, in an introductory way, we can identify certain features of this letter and its
relation to its social context as exemplifying more general 'concepts of narrative'.
In the comments following the letter, the concepts, when first mentioned, are in
bold. In the latter part of this chapter and in the next, chapter 3, many of these
concepts are more generally described (see also the glossary, at the end of the
book).