Principally, to tell a story means to make other people “enjoy, listen to, and think” the things we tell about. According to Derewianka (1990), the main goal of telling a story is to entertain, to get and to pay the attention of the readers or the listeners for what we tell them. However, telling a story can also have a function to educate or to inform, to express the author’s reflection about his experiences, and the last but not at least is to arouse the readers imagination.In our daily activities, we often tell something to our friends or our family, don’t we? We tell good news at our school or in our neighborhood, we also read or listen to news or story from others, we tell everything to friends, family and our relatives.
There are some kinds of narrative text. Narrative text is usually imaginative, but sometimes can be factual (really happened). Those belong to narrative text among others are fairy stories, mysteries, science fictions, romaines, horrors etc.
How is narrative text composed? Or what is the generic structure of Narrative text? Generally, a Narrative starts with Orientation, where the writer describes “the world” of his story. In this phase, the readers are acquainted to the characters or the participants of the story, and sometimes they are informed where and when the story took place. An atmosphere is created to make the readers curious to follow the story. Orientation can be shortly written, or can also be some pages of length.
In the middle of a narrative there will be a complication or a problem. Complication will make the story more interesting to enjoy, because on this phase the characters will face some handicaps to achieve their goals. Complication reflects reality life, and it makes the readers sure that there are always resolutions for any problems.
A good narrative gives a resolution for the complication. The resolution will finish the complication, even though there are also stories which let the readers think about the end of the stories or how the stories are resolved.
So we can conclude that
the generic structure of a narrative text is :
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Orientation (the beginning or introduction) introduces main characters, setting and time.
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Complication ( middle ): the problem happens among the characters.
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Resolution (ending) : the problem is resolved.
A narrative text usually has moral value.
Based on the significant lexical grammatical, here are the characteristics of Narrative text :
• A specific participant, sometimes can be individual
• Uses many action verb (material processes) and also verbal and mental processes
• Often uses past tense
• Uses many linking words related to time
• Uses dialogues so the tense can be possibly changed
• Descriptive language is used to create imagination in the mind of the readers
• Can be written as the first person (I), or the third person (He, She, They). The use of the singular second person (you) is often used in the story of “choose-your-own-adventure”.
