Narrative Theory

Narrative theory sets out to show that what we experience when we ‘read’ a story is to understand a particular set of constructions, or conventions, and that it is important to be aware of how these constructions are put together.

The narrative of something is the structure of the story and Tim O’Sullivan (1998) argues that all media texts tell us some kind of story. Such media texts as a music video through careful mediation, offer a way of telling stories about ourselves – not usually our own personal stories, but the story of us as a culture or set of cultures. 

Andrew Goodwin (1992) argues that in music video, 

“narrative relations are highly complex” and meaning can 

be created from the individual audio-viewer’s musical 

personal musical taste to sophisticated intertextuality that 

uses multidiscursive phenomena of Western culture. 

Many are dominated by advertising references, film 

pastiche and reinforce the postmodern ‘re-use’ tradition. 

According to these theories of narrative my music video, which I create, will portray my own ideology of what the song and its lyrics represent. Whatever I choose to create and include in my video will also determine to audience which it will appeal to i.e. people who hold similar ideas and beliefs of my own.


Another theorist Sven Carlsson (1999) suggests that music videos in general, videos fall into two rough groups: performance clips and conceptual clips. When a music video mostly shows an artist (or artists) singing or dancing, it is a performance clip. When the clip shows something else during its duration, often with artistic ambitions, it is a conceptual clip. My music video falls into the category of performance because it contains mostly filmed performance. A performance clip is a video that shows the vocalist(s) in one or more settings. Such as common places to perform i.e. the recording studio. But the performance can take place anywhere, my other locations include a bedroom, park, a garden and a pier.


According to this theory the performance can be of three types:

• song performance
• dance performance
• instrumental performance

Almost every music video includes song performance and some videos combine song and dance performances. My music video will contain elements of both song and instrumental performance.


Kate Domaille (2001) suggests that every story ever told can be fitted into one of eight narrative types. Each of these narrative types has a source, an original story upon which the others are based. My music video fits with the narrative story of Romeo & Juliet, which is a love story like Titanic. Through a reflection of the lyrics my music video tells the story of someone who falls deeply in love with someone, but they are now with someone else. They start to question what was wrong with loving someone that much and they took advantage of that love and attention, but then denied their affections which obviously confused them and sent them to the brink as they couldn't deal with it.


The Russian theorist Vladimir Propp (1928) concluded that all characters can be resolved into just 7 broad character types in the many Russian folk tales, which he analysed.  My lead singer will play the part of the hero/victim/seeker hero who stereotypically weds the princess.

The narrative within my music video must contain versimilitude. This is the quality of something appearing to be real or true to the viewer. For a story to engage an audience it must follow the rules of continuity, temporal and spacial coherence in order for it to appear real as we watch it. The fictional space and time implied by the narrative i.e. the world in which the story takes place is known as the diegesis.