Narrative

Narrative is the media term for story telling. It is the way in which different elements of a story are presented to an audience to create a meaningful text. Narratives across different texts often share similar features, which links to genre. Narrative structure is the way in which the story unfolds. Bordwell and Thompson suggested that a chain of events within a media text do not necessarily have to occur in the plot in the same order as they occur in the story. The story is the parts of the narrative the narrative that the audience have to infer. It is the events that happen in chronological order. The plot is everything that is presented to the audience; everything that is visible and audible. Beyonce's Partition supports this idea to a certain extent because it is about her daydreaming a situation at the dinner table. The opening and closing of the video show her sat at the dinner table, but the events in the middle of the video are not in chronological order. However, this gives the effect that her imagination is overloading with lots of different thoughts, so the constant switching of scenes and returning to different shots shows she thinking about lots of different things.

Sven Carlson recognised that all music videos consist of three elements; performance, narrative and conceptual/abstract elements. The narrative is usually the part that dominates the music video, usually to tell the story of the song. In Partition, the performance element dominates the music video, and the narrative has very little importance in the overall video.

Tim O'Sullivan argues that all media text tells a story. Through careful mediation, media tets offer a way of telling stories about ourselves - not usually or own personal stories, but the stories of us as a culture or set of cultures. For example, the TV soap Hollyoaks reflects British culture and often adapts to tell stories about events and issues that are happening in the real world. Beyonce's video could relate to this theory because she is portraying a married woman with sexual fantasies, which shows a story of some people in our culture, as there are probably many women in our culture that are housewives and can relate to this video.

Many media texts follow very similar narratives. For example, Todorov suggests that conventional narratives follow a similar structure of five stages;
1. A state of equilibrium, or stability, at the start
2. A disruption in the story
3. A recognition that there has been a disruption
4. An attempt to repair the disruption
5. A reinstatement of the equilibrium

This can be seen in many forms of media texts. Some texts are anti-narrative, which don't follow a linear, conventional narrative. Beyonce's video is overall anti-narrative because it doesn't follow this conventional narrative.

Pam Cook recognised that standard Hollywood structure should have; linearity of cause and effect within an overall trajectory of enigma resolution, a high degree of narrative closure, a fictional world that contains verisimilitude, especially governed by special and temporal coherence and narratives start with an establishment of plot of theme.