what is narrative text

Narrative text is a type of text that tells a story or describes a sequence of events, whether nonfictional or fictional. The purpose of a narrative text is to entertain or inform the reader by presenting a series of events in a coherent and engaging way. Narrative texts often contain past tense because they typically recount events or stories that have already occurred. The formal and literary process of constructing a narrative is called narration, which is one of the four traditional rhetorical modes of discourse, along with argumentation, description, and exposition. The characteristics of narrative text include using past tenses, having a plot, characters, setting, and conflict. The generic structures of narrative text include orientation, complication, resolution, and re-orientation/coda. Understanding the elements of narrative text can help readers follow the story line and make successful predictions about what is to occur, and it also develops higher-level thinking skills.