“The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms offers a long definition of which I reference key elements:

“narrative[na-ra-tiv], a telling of some true or fictitious event or connected sequence of events, recounted by a narrator … consist[s of] a set of events (the story) recounted in a process of narration (or discourse), in which the events are selected and arranged in a particular order (the plot).”

“I also perused several other authoritative references. For personal use while engaging in conversations around narrative and its relatives, I define it simply as a story. Outside of those engaged in the complex and evolving semantics, nuances, and details of deep scholarly interchange, it seems to me that this offers a simple basis for discussing the vast amount of stories and the incredible ways in which these stories are told — a shared language provides the basis for richer dialog.”

The above Concise Oxford Dictionary definition of “narrative’ captures more than simply “telling a story.” It implies, through the terms “sequence,” “selection,” and “connections” that the narrator, from and through the Kantian Catagories into which his brain is constructed as well as through her psychological dispositons continually molded by experiences, is making judgements regarding causality, ethics, etc. Some believe that though the indvidual ‘atoms’ of events may be non-fiction (i.e., correlate to something, noumena, outside the individual) the story linking events is always “constructd” by the narrator (e.g., by the very linking and selection of what events are to be included).

Witnesses in a courtroom who render very different accounts, or narratives, are not necessarily committing perjury. To quote Kierkegaard, “all history is approximation.”