Narrative Genre in Literature: A Comprehensive Guide
The genre of the novel
The narrative understood as the writer pays attention to what happens outside of it trying to convey as objectively as possible, with more or less fair, is one of the literary genres, together with the lyric <http://personal .Telefonica.Terra.Es / web / apuntesasr / JoseCarlosCarrillo / GenJCCLaLirica.Htm>, the dramatic and testing, which make up each of the different groups can be classified as literary works on the basis of certain common characteristics.
Usually occurs in prose.
Prose narrative genres
The most important are:
1.The story:
a story is usually brief, with few characters, a single plot and a complexity lower than in the novel. We can not establish the exact limits of the story.
When we speak of brevity, we mean that its length is less than a novel.
Traditionally, stories have been passed down orally from generation to generation. These folk tales often have a didactic or moralizing end (for example, The Count, Don Juan Manuel, XIV century). Starting basically from the nineteenth century, some authors began to write short stories artistic purposes, but not moralistic claims. Most of these literary tales (no popular tradition) are aimed at an adult audience and have a high concentration of the action and characters (for example, the tales of Edgar Allan Poe or the Legends of Gustavo Adolfo Becquer).
2.La novel usually has a greater length and complexity to the story. It is characterized by freedom: it has no boundaries and can contain from dialogues with clear intention to fragments dramatic or theatrical lyrical or descriptive. The novelistic subgenres are numerous: a historical novel, adventure, pink, detective, action, black, psychological, of chivalry, love, theses, social … The only condition is that is written in prose and characters involved in it on which tell us something. Currently, the novel is the main literary subgenre.
Action
By action we mean the story that unfolds before our eyes as we read the novel. In a narrative usually happen several actions at once, elementary and secondary schools, which, woven together, form the body of the novel or argument. It is important that successive actions are plausible or credible, that is to be developed within the internal logic of the novel. Also, the author must be careful not to fall into contradictions argument for the action forward without problems. The order of action, from a classical viewpoint, usually responds to the following internal structure: 
Approach:
the introduction of the characters and the setting of the action to be developed. It discusses the temporal and spatial framework within which the story.
Nudo and development:
the situation described in the approach begins to evolve, ie the conflict is developed in which the characters will be immersed. In the novel there is usually a main conflict and other secondary dependent to a greater or lesser extent than that.
Outcome:
the resolution of the conflict and the end of the events that have been raised. It can be positive and happy, neutral, negative and unhappy. Other types of structure:
In medias res or principle steep: the action is to start as this is fully developed, without having previously submitted to the characters.
Structure reverse:
the author advances the denouement of the novel in the first pages of it, and then focuses on how events have evolved to reach the final.
Open Final:
history not resolved, either positive or negative, so that the reader perceives the sense that the action extends beyond the limits of the novel. Time
The development of a narrative story usually evolves over time. This time of the novel need not be presented in a linear or ordered, but can be altered freely by the author with stylistic purpose, plot or structure.
In relation to time in the novel can not forget the long term. One event can last so in a narrative that in real life, but it can be summed up so that, for instance, several years elapse in few pages, or dilated in time, and thus a minimum can indeed be described and analyzed carefully covering a large number of pages.
Space
A novel can develop in one place or several, indoor or outdoor, rural or urban, for the following purposes: give credibility to the story, contextualize the characters, environmental effects and are worth simbólicos.Los novelists art of description to present the spaces. In the current literature shows the space through the eyes of the characters or narrator.
Characters
The characters are people, real or fictitious, who develop the action narrated by the novelist. The main or central characters are called actors, while others are secondary. It is essential that the narrator offers the reader a description of the characters, which can be:
Physics:
describes the look and style of dress.
Psychology:
How people think, what they think to the surrounding reality, how it behaves.
Mixed:
a mixture of the two. This technique is called retrato.Los characters in a novel may be filed with the reader in several ways: Themselves. This resource is usually near the autobiographical novels. Through another character. Through the narrator. A mixed form combining the three forms before.
The narrator
For narrator voice means the account what happens in the novel. The author can narrate the events directly, or choose a character, more or less prominence, go telling the story from within. In addition, the same story can be different types of narrators, ie diverse voices that provide different perspectives.
Omniscient narrator:
usually corresponds to the author’s voice, telling us what the characters do, say or think. The omniscient narrator does not justify why he knows all the data provided, and the reader accepts that all-knowing voice as the voice of the author.
Narrator character:
at times the story is narrated by one of his characters, but we must distinguish between the narrator-protagonist and the narrator-secondary. In the first case, the narrative tends to be autobiographical, as the narrator-protagonist is situated at the center of the action and tells the events from their own point of view. In the second case, the child narrator is a spectator of the action, and presented according to their degree of closeness to the players. These narrator-characters are often not omniscient, but they only have what we know from personal experience or knowledge ajeno.A of renewal of the novel in the mid-twentieth century, are becoming more common in novels that involve different visions of the characters that are involved in the action, in what may be called collective narrative. Hacho one is narrated by several different characters, so the reader gets a complete and diverse history, enriched by different perspectives.
Sometimes the author of a novel does not direct its story directly to the reader, but a fictional character. This character is called narratee.