4 Narrative

The Narrative Throughline

No discussion of mass media or popular culture would be complete without exploring the topic of narrative. From the earliest human communities to the most algorithmically curated social media feed, one thing has remained constant: people tell stories. We tell them to explain what happened, to justify what we believe, and to make sense of who we are. Narrative is not simply a literary device or a feature of entertainment—it is one of the primary ways human beings organize experience and share meaning with one another. It is also the connective tissue between mass media and popular culture texts.

Mass media and popular culture texts are deeply intertwined. Mass media describes the system—the infrastructure, the industries, and the economic relationships that determine how messages are produced and distributed. Popular culture texts are what that system carries and what audiences make of what it carries. A streaming platform is mass media. Stranger Things is a popular culture text. A social media platform is mass media. A viral video or a meme are popular culture texts. When we study mass media, we ask: Who owns it? Who controls the gate? Whose voices get amplified and whose get filtered out? When we study popular culture texts, we ask: What does this mean? How does it work on an audience? What assumptions does it carry, and whose interests do those assumptions serve?

Narrative is where these questions meet. Every popular culture text tells a story, or draws on one, or deliberately disrupts one. And every mass media system makes choices—about which stories get told, how they are framed, which characters are centered, and which are left at the margins. As you learned in Chapter 2, ideology does not announce itself; it operates through the stories that feel so natural and so familiar that we stop noticing them as stories at all. Hegemony works the same way—not through force, but through the slow accumulation of narratives that make certain arrangements of power look like common sense.

Understanding how narrative works, then, is not just an academic exercise. It is a media literacy skill. When you can identify the structure of a story, recognize the choices embedded in how it is told, and ask whose worldview it reflects, you are doing exactly what Chapter 3 called for: moving beyond “Do I like this?” toward the deeper questions of where a message comes from, whose values it encodes, and how your response to it might shape what gets produced next. This chapter offers you the tools to do that work systematically.

Narrative Paradigm: Humans as Storytelling Animals

Before we can analyze the stories that mass media tell and that popular culture texts carry, we need a theoretical foundation for understanding why narrative works on human beings the way it does. Many communication theories we have examined so far—agenda-setting, framing, gatekeeping—describe what mass media do to audiences, or how institutions shape the flow of information. Walter Fisher’s (1984) narrative paradigm asks a more fundamental question: What kind of creatures are we, such that stories move us the way they do?

Most communication theories assume that human beings are rational decision-makers; that we carefully weigh facts, logic, and evidence before forming beliefs or taking action. Fisher didn’t agree. He argued that human beings are, first and foremost, storytelling creatures, and that because of this, the most influential messages are not logical proofs but stories that give us good reasons to believe or act.

When Fisher talks about narratives, he is not referring only to novels or films. A narrative is much broader than that. It includes the symbolic words and actions people use to assign meaning to their experiences, drawing on plot, tone, imagery, and language. We rely on narratives constantly to make sense of the world around us, often without realizing we are doing it.

As we analyze popular culture texts, narrative paradigm reframes persuasion. In a traditional rational worldview, persuasion is about facts, data, and formal argument. In a narrative worldview, persuasion happens when a story feels meaningful, believable, and relevant to our lives.

Think about how this plays out in the mass media environment. News organizations, advertisers, political campaigns, and entertainment producers are all, at some level, competing for the same thing: a story that sticks. The most effective mass media messages rarely overwhelm audiences with data. They build worlds, populate them with characters, and invite audiences to see themselves somewhere in the plot.

Narrative Rationality: How We Judge the Stories We Encounter

If humans do rely on stories rather than formal logic to make sense of the world, the next question becomes, How do we judge which stories to believe? Fisher called this process narrative rationality. Instead of asking whether a message is logically valid, narrative rationality asks whether it provides good reasons—reasons grounded in values, experience, and human understanding. Narrative rationality operates through two main pillars: narrative fidelity and narrative coherence.

Narrative fidelity is whether a story rings true. Are its facts credible? Does it align with our values, our cultural experience, and what we know of life? Importantly, what feels true to one person may not feel true to another. Our judgments are always shaped by history, identity, and social context—what Fisher called the logic of good reasons. This is why the same news story, film, or social media post can land so differently with different audiences. A narrative that carries high fidelity for one group may feel hollow or even offensive to another, because fidelity is not a fixed property of the text itself. It is a relationship between the story and the person encountering it.

If a story passes the fidelity test, we then evaluate its coherence—whether the story holds together. Fisher (1987) identified three distinct types of coherence.

1. Structural coherence asks whether the story is internally consistent. Does it flow logically, or does it contradict itself along the way?
2. Material coherence asks whether the story fits with other stories we already accept as true—whether it belongs to the same world we recognize.
3. Characterological coherence asks whether the people in the story behave in believable ways. Are they trustworthy, consistent, and recognizably human?

If a story fails the fidelity test entirely, coherence becomes largely irrelevant. We do not typically scrutinize the internal logic of a story we have already rejected as false or alien to our experience. But when fidelity is present, coherence is what helps us decide whether to fully commit to the story being told.

Cooperative and Competing Narratives

Fisher’s (1987) narrative paradigm carries one further insight that is especially useful for studying mass media and popular culture: We do not live inside a single story. We live in a world made up of cooperative and competing narratives. Cooperative narratives reinforce shared understanding—they feel familiar and validating, confirming what we already believe about how the world works and what it values. Competing narratives challenge or undermine other stories, often forcing audiences to choose which version of reality they accept.

You’ll recall that ideology operates most effectively when it stops feeling like a perspective and starts feeling like common sense. The narratives that achieve that status are, by Fisher’s definition, the ones with the highest fidelity for the largest number of people. They are the cooperative narratives at the center of a common culture, the stories so widely shared that questioning them can feel disorienting or even threatening. Competing narratives—the stories told from the margins, by groups whose experiences do not match the dominant account—are what hegemony works to contain, discredit, or absorb.

This is why the stories we find in popular culture texts are worth taking seriously as objects of analysis. According to Fisher, the stories we accept are not merely persuasive—they are formative. They shape how we understand the world, how we relate to others, and how we decide to act. We do not reason our way through life like mathematicians. We live, decide, and believe through stories. And in a media environment where mass communication channels are constantly producing, circulating, and competing over narratives, understanding how those stories work—and on whom, and why—is one of the most important analytical skills a media literate person can develop.

Narrative Elements

Fisher’s narrative paradigm tells us why stories work on human beings the way they do. But to analyze how any specific story works, we need a more granular set of tools. Let’s explore the core elements of narrative; the building blocks that creators use to construct stories, and that we can learn to identify and interrogate as we build our media literacy.

The first element to consider is genre. Genre is the categorical frame through which audiences approach a text before they have encountered a single scene or sentence. Knowing that something is a horror film, a romantic comedy beach read, or a true-crime podcast activates a set of expectations about plot structure, character types, tone, and outcome. Those expectations shape how the entire narrative is received.

There are two aspects of genre that we must consider as we analyze popular culture texts: convention and invention. Convention is how genre validates existing cultural beliefs. At its most basic, genre refers to a set of recurring conventions—formal features, narrative patterns, character types, settings, and audience expectations—that cluster around recognizable categories of texts. Think of a horror film’s darkness and isolation, a romance novel’s emotional arc toward partnership, or a true crime podcast’s investigative structure. These conventions develop over time through repeated transactions between creators and audiences.

Invention is how genres conform and respond to ideological shifts, providing new insight. This is the capacity of texts, creators, and audiences to work against, across, or beyond existing conventions in ways that generate new meaning. Often invention happens through recombination, parody, pastiche, or genre mixing—and it is interdependent with genre conventions. A movie like Get Out follows the conventions of the horror genre, but it mobilizes those conventions to articulate a politically specific critique of race and liberal complacency. The horror is doing new cultural work precisely because audiences recognize what the genre normally does, and they feel the deviation.

While genre is classification, it is more than simply a filing system. As Mittell (2017) argues, genre categories carry cultural assumptions about value, legitimacy, and audience identity that are themselves worth examining critically. When Euphoria blends teen drama, coming-of-age narrative, and psychological thriller, it is doing something deliberate with genre conventions—using audience expectations as raw material, satisfying some while deliberately frustrating others. That friction is part of how the show produces meaning.

Once genre has set the frame, we can look more closely at what a narrative is actually doing. The subject is the most straightforward starting point. Subject is what a text is about at its most basic, literal level. It is the topic which the creator chooses to address. For example, the subject of Olivia Rodrigo’s song “drivers license” is heartbreak. Other examples of subjects include war, politics, love, racism, friendship, and aging.

However, some of the most interesting analytical work happens at the level of theme—the deeper idea or argument that a text makes about its subject. Theme is what a story says, not merely what it is about. A story whose subject is friendship may carry the theme that loyalty requires sacrifice, or alternatively that loyalty can become a form of control. More clearly than any other narrative element, theme reveals the creator’s thoughts on the subject. Themes matter enormously for analysis. The Hunger Games is, on the surface, about a teenager forced to compete in a televised death match. Its themes—the brutality of unchecked power, the politics of spectacle, the moral cost of survival—are what give the story its cultural resonance and what make it worth studying as a popular culture text.

It is often at the level of theme that narrative fidelity operates most powerfully. We are often drawn to stories that include themes that confirm or productively challenge what we already believe about how the world works.

Conflict is the struggle or tension between two forces that drives a narrative forward and gives audiences a reason to keep paying attention. Conflict can be external, between characters or between a character and social forces, or internal, within a character’s own conscience or identity. In the movie Spider-Man: No Way Home, Peter Parker’s conflict is not simply physical—it is ethical and personal, rooted in the tension between individual desire and collective responsibility. That kind of conflict, where the stakes are moral rather than merely dramatic, can produce strong narrative fidelity because it mirrors the kinds of dilemmas real people recognize from their own lives.

The emotional texture of a narrative is established through tone and mood, two related but distinct concepts. Tone is the attitude a creator takes toward the subject. For example, tone can be serious, satirical, elegiac, or ironic. The tone of The Daily Show with Trevor Noah was consistently satirical, which allowed the program to discuss genuinely consequential news topics while maintaining distance that signaled to its audience that critical thinking, rather than passive absorption, was the expected response.

Mood, by contrast, is what a text makes the audience feel—the emotional atmosphere it generates. The dread that accumulates across Hereditary is not incidental to the film’s meaning; it is the primary vehicle through which the film’s themes about grief, family, and inherited trauma are delivered.

Finally, point of view is perhaps the most politically significant narrative element of all, because it determines whose experience of events the audience is invited to share. Point of view answers the question of who is telling this story and from where. Stephen Chbosky’s novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower is narrated in the first person by Charlie, drawing the audience into direct intimacy with his inner life in a way that a third-person narration could never achieve. A news broadcast’s choice of whose testimony to feature, a documentary’s decision about whose face appears on screen, a social media platform’s algorithmic determination of whose posts get amplified—all of these are point-of-view decisions, with real consequences for whose stories get told and whose get marginalized.

This last point connects narrative elements back to the broader concerns of this textbook. Audiences are not uniform, and the same narrative will be received differently depending on who is watching, reading, or listening, and what their own social position and cultural experience bring to the encounter. Genre frames expectations. Subject establishes the terrain. Theme stakes a claim about what the subject means. Conflict generates stakes. Tone signals attitude. Mood creates feeling. Point of view determines whose reality we inhabit. Together, these elements constitute the architecture of every story circulating in the mass media and popular culture landscape. Learning to identify them is the foundation of the kind of critical media literacy this textbook has been building toward.

Heroes and Journeys: Character and Plot

If narrative elements are the building blocks of storytelling, then character and plot are the two load-bearing walls of the structure. Every story is, at its core, about someone doing something. The relationship between who that someone is and what happens to them is where narrative comes to life.

Character is the who of a story. It’s the people, figures, or entities whose experiences a story follows and whose choices drive its action. But character in popular culture texts is more than a collection of personality traits. Characters are cultural constructions, shaped by the social contexts in which they are created and received. They embody values, carry ideological assumptions, and represent—or fail to represent—the full range of human experience.

When we ask why so many action heroes have historically been white men, or why certain character types are consistently coded as villains or comic relief, we are asking questions about character that are really questions about power. As you learned in Chapter 2, media representations are a primary site of hegemonic work, and nowhere is that more visible than in the recurring character types that genres produce and audiences come to expect. A character who feels three-dimensional and fully realized—whose motivations are complex, whose choices carry genuine moral weight—is doing something quite different culturally than a character who exists only to fill a narrative function or confirm an existing stereotype.

Plot is the sequence in which characters’ choices and conflicts unfold. It is the ordered arrangement of events that moves a story from its opening situation through rising tension to a climax and eventual resolution. Plot is the scaffolding of storytelling, and while its basic architecture is remarkably consistent across cultures and media, the choices creators make within that structure are anything but neutral.

What makes the relationship between character and plot so analytically rich is that neither exists independently of the other. Plot is not simply a series of events that happen to characters, it is the pressure that reveals who characters are. And characters are not simply vehicles for advancing plot, they are the lens through which audiences are invited to care about what happens next.

Together, narrative elements are the choices made by creators and mass media to produce a desired effect. Which events are shown, which are skipped, where the story begins, and whose perspective anchors each scene are just a few of the editorial decisions that shape meaning as surely as the events themselves. The story of Squid Game, for example, could have been told from the perspective of the game’s organizers, its corporate sponsors, or its television audience within the fictional world. Each narrative choice would produce a fundamentally different story, with different ideological implications.

The Hero’s Journey

Certain patterns of character development and plot structure have proven remarkably durable across cultures and centuries. One of the most influential patterns was identified by comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell in his 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell argued that the world’s mythologies, despite their vast cultural differences, share a common narrative structure he called the monomyth. His central claim was that across cultures and centuries, from ancient Greek mythology to Native American folklore to Hindu epic poetry, the same basic story keeps getting told, because it maps onto something fundamental about human experience: the experience of leaving the familiar, facing the unknown, and returning transformed.

Campbell identified seventeen steps (later simplified by Christopher Vogler into twelve steps for Hollywood screenwriters) organized into three broad phases, mapping what he called the Hero’s Journey. The first phase is the Departure. The hero begins in the ordinary world, comfortable and familiar, until a call to adventure disrupts the status quo and demands a response. The hero is initially reluctant or refuses the call, before a mentor figure provides the guidance and encouragement needed to move forward. With that support, the hero crosses the first threshold, leaving the ordinary world behind and entering the special world, where different rules apply and nothing is guaranteed.

The second phase is the Initiation. In the special world, the hero encounters tests, allies, and enemies—a gauntlet of experiences that begin to reveal who they truly are. They then cross a second threshold into the most dangerous territory of the journey, where they must endure the central ordeal—a crisis that brings them to their lowest point and demands everything they have. Having survived, they take possession of their reward: sometimes an object of power, but more commonly the knowledge or inner transformation the ordeal has produced.

The third phase is the Return. The hero cannot remain in the special world. Pursued on the road back toward the ordinary world, they cross a third threshold and experience a resurrection—a final test that confirms their transformation and separates who they were from who they have become. They then return with what Campbell calls “the elixir” (a boon or treasure), whether literal or symbolic, that benefits the ordinary world they left behind.

The persistence of this structure in popular culture is striking. George Lucas drew directly from the Hero’s Journey when developing Star Wars (watch this 5-minute video to see how Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope maps to the Hero’s Journey). The pattern appears in the Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter series, The Lion King, The Matrix, Black Panther, and countless other texts across film, television, literature, and digital media. Once you learn to recognize it, you see it almost everywhere, which is precisely what makes it worth examining critically rather than simply appreciatively.

Consider first what kinds of heroes this structure was built around. Campbell derived the monomyth primarily from myths produced by patriarchal cultures, and the resulting framework centers a particular kind of protagonist: typically male, solitary, defined by action and individual conquest. When popular culture defaults to this structure without interrogating it, it tends to reproduce those assumptions about who gets to be the subject of the defining human story. When texts subvert or complicate the structure—as films like Moana, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Mad Max: Fury Road do in different ways—the deviation itself becomes analytically meaningful. The question to ask is not only whether a text follows the Hero’s Journey, but whose journey it centers, and what that choice says about the creator and culture that produced it.

Alternative Narrative Structures

Campbell’s Hero’s Journey is a powerful analytical tool, but it is not the only story structure available to creators. Treating it as the default risks obscuring the enormous variety of ways narratives can be developed and stories can be organized. As popular culture has grown more sophisticated, and as digital platforms have expanded the kinds of stories that can find audiences, alternative narrative structures have become increasingly common and worth understanding on their own terms.

One alternative is the nonlinear narrative, which is a story told out of chronological order. In a nonlinear story, the sequence of events as presented to the audience differs deliberately from the sequence in which those events occurred. Nonlinear narratives ask audiences to do interpretive work, assembling meaning from fragments rather than following a clear throughline from beginning to end. Films like Pulp Fiction and Memento, television series like Westworld and The Affair, and video games like Disco Elysium all use nonlinear structure not merely as a stylistic flourish but as a thematic statement.

A second alternative narrative structure is the ensemble narrative, which is a story that distributes its focus across multiple characters of roughly equal importance rather than centering a single hero. Where the Hero’s Journey privileges individual transformation, ensemble narratives suggest that experience is collective, that meaning is made between people rather than within them, and that no single perspective is sufficient to account for the complexity of events. Television has proven especially hospitable to ensemble storytelling. Series like The Wire, Orange Is the New Black, Severance, and Abbott Elementary use the extended runtime of serialized drama or comedy to develop multiple characters with the depth that film typically reserves for one or two. The ensemble structure also creates space for more diverse representation, since the story is not organized around a single protagonist whose demographic identity inevitably shapes whose experience is centered.

A third alternative worth understanding is the tragic narrative, which is a structure in which the protagonist does not successfully complete the journey, does not return with the elixir, and may not be transformed in any redemptive sense. Tragedy is one of the oldest narrative forms in Western culture, rooted in Greek drama, but it remains vital in contemporary popular culture. The tragic protagonist is typically undone by a fundamental flaw—in character, in circumstance, or in the collision between the two—and the audience’s experience is one of recognition and catharsis rather than triumph. Breaking Bad is perhaps the defining tragic narrative of recent television: Walter White’s journey is structurally a Hero’s Journey in reverse, a man who crosses thresholds not toward wisdom and community but toward moral dissolution and isolation. Requiem for a Dream, Bojack Horseman, and Succession operate in similar territory.

What these alternative structures share is a willingness to challenge the assumptions embedded in the Hero’s Journey: that human experience has a coherent shape, that individual agency drives outcomes, and that suffering produces growth. Being able to identify which narrative structure a text is using—and asking why—is one of the most revealing questions a media-literate student can bring to any popular culture text.

Narrative and You

The tools introduced in this chapter are not meant to stay on the page. Like the communication theories introduced in Chapter 3, they are most valuable when taken out into the world and tested against the media you already consume every day.

Every time you watch a series, scroll through a feed, play a game, read a book, or listen to a podcast, you are encountering narratives—stories making arguments about how the world works, who matters, and what is possible. Most of the time, those arguments are invisible precisely because narrative is so natural to us. We follow the story. We root for the hero. We feel the mood without stopping to ask how it was constructed or whose values it reflects.

That is exactly what Fisher, the father of the narrative paradigm, would predict. Narrative rationality operates below the level of conscious deliberation. Stories do not ask us to evaluate them the way we evaluate an argument in a debate. They ask us to live inside them, which is why they are such an effective vehicle for ideology and such an important object of critical analysis.

The analytical vocabulary introduced in this chapter gives you language for what you are already noticing intuitively, and a framework for asking harder questions. As you work through the remaining chapters of this textbook, you will find narrative operating in every medium, sometimes following familiar structures and sometimes deliberately breaking them. The question is whether you are noticing it happen.

References

• Campbell, J. (1949). The hero with a thousand faces. Pantheon Books.
• Fisher, W. R. (1984). Narration as a human communication paradigm: The case of public moral argument. Communication Monographs, 51(1), 1–22.
• Fisher, W. R. (1985). The narrative paradigm: An elaboration. Communication Monographs, 52, 347–367.
• Fisher, W. R. (1987). Human communication as narration: Toward a philosophy of reason, value, and action. University of South Carolina Press.
• Hills, M. (2017). Audience. In L. Ouellette & J. Gray (Eds.), Keywords for media studies (pp. 17–20). NYU Press.
• Hwang, D. (Creator). (2021). Squid game [TV series]. Siren Pictures; Netflix.
• Mittell, J. (2017). Genre. In L. Ouellette & J. Gray (Eds.), Keywords for media studies (pp. 81–83). NYU Press.