Narrative Criticism

The Core Assumption

Meaning lives in the telling of the story: its narrator, point of view, plot, and gaps.

The Four Assumptions

Where meaning lives

Meaning lives in the narration itself: in how the story is told, by whom, from what point of view, and with what gaps and repetitions.

What the text is

The text is a crafted narrative whose narrator controls information, so the telling, not only the tale, carries the meaning.

Who may interpret

The interpreter is the reader trained in narrative poetics who can describe the narrator's techniques and the reader's guided response.

What counts as a good reading

A reading is adequate when it accounts for the narrative's point of view, characterization, plot dynamics, and gaps as a coherent communicative act.

Genealogy

This method arose in the 20th c period (1970s and 1980s, with roots in Alter and in Russian and French narratology).

Key proponents: Robert Alter, Meir Sternberg, Adele Berlin, Shimon Bar-Efrat.

Key texts: The Art of Biblical Narrative by Robert Alter; The Poetics of Biblical Narrative by Meir Sternberg; Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative by Adele Berlin.

The Procedure

These are the same steps The Workshop will walk you through.

1. Identify the narrator and point of view

   State who narrates, what the narrator knows, and where the narration adopts a character's perspective.

   Why this step matters: Biblical narrators are usually omniscient yet reticent, and their shifts of view are signals.

   How to do it: Mark passages where the narration enters a character's thoughts or evaluates events directly.

   What goes wrong here: Assuming the narrator's reticence means absence of judgment.

   You record: Narrator analysis. Done well when: Each claim about point of view is tied to a specific verse.

2. Trace the plot

   Chart the story's exposition, complication, climax, and resolution, noting reversals and recognitions.

   Why this step matters: Plot is the skeleton on which characterization and theme hang.

   How to do it: Use the characters' goals and conflicts to segment the plot rather than chapter divisions.

   What goes wrong here: Retelling the plot without analyzing its construction.

   You record: Plot chart. Done well when: The chart identifies a genuine turning point and shows what changes there.

3. Analyze characterization

   Describe how each character is built: by direct statement, speech, action, contrast, and analogy.

   Why this step matters: Biblical characterization is economical; a few strokes carry great weight.

   How to do it: Note first words and first actions, which biblical narrative uses as character signatures.

   What goes wrong here: Psychologizing characters beyond what the narration supplies.

   You record: Character profiles. Done well when: Each trait is supported by a narrated word or deed.

4. Work the gaps

   List the story's significant gaps and the readings they permit, and say which the narration favors.

   Why this step matters: Sternberg showed that gap filling, guided by the text, is the engine of biblical narrative reading.

   How to do it: Distinguish gaps the text later closes from gaps it deliberately leaves open.

   What goes wrong here: Treating one's own gap filling as the text's statement.

   You record: Gap analysis. Done well when: Permitted fillings are distinguished from the text's own disclosures.

5. State the narrative's claim on the reader

   Summarize the judgment or response the narration steers its implied reader toward.

   Why this step matters: Narrative criticism ends with the communication achieved, not only its devices.

   How to do it: Phrase the claim in terms of what the reader is led to affirm, question, or feel.

   What goes wrong here: Reducing the claim to a moral detachable from the story.

   You record: Implied reader statement. Done well when: The statement is supported by the narrator, plot, and character analyses.

Inputs Required

• A biblical narrative passage
• Narratological categories: narrator, plot, character, point of view
• Attention to the passage in its full narrative context

Outputs Produced

• A narrator and point of view analysis
• Character and plot analyses
• A statement of the narrative's effect on its reader

Quality Criteria

Under this method, a good reading is one that meets these tests:

• Verse level support for every device claimed
• Coherent account of the whole story
• Discipline about gaps and their fillings
• Attention to the implied reader

Common Errors

• Importing the modern novel's psychology into sparse ancient narration
• Describing devices without asking what they accomplish
• Ignoring the narrator's theological standpoint

Strengths

• It gave precise tools for the Bible's dominant literary form, narrative.
• It showed how reticence and gap filling make readers participants in judgment.
• It recovered the evangelists and the Pentateuch's narrators as master storytellers.

Weaknesses and Critics

• It brackets the historical reference that biblical narrative often asserts.
• Its technical vocabulary can describe a story exhaustively without interpreting it theologically.
• It presumes a unified narration that historical criticism sometimes disputes.

James Barr: Barr objected that narrative readings can float free of the language and history of the text, treating modern narratological categories as though they were the ancient authors' own and neglecting what the words actually denote. (The Bible in the Modern World and semantic essays, by James Barr)

Stephen Prickett: Prickett and other literary historians cautioned that narrative criticism's implied reader is often the modern academic reader in disguise, projecting contemporary reading habits onto ancient audiences. (Words and the Word by Stephen Prickett)

Internal Schools

Sternberg's poetics: Sternberg grounds narrative analysis in the Bible's own ideology of omniscience and reticence, with gap filling as the central dynamic.

Berlin's poetics: Berlin systematizes character and point of view with categories drawn from general narratology, applied with linguistic precision.

Exemplar Readings

Alter on David and Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11): Alter shows how the narrator's economy, David's repeated sending and the verbs of taking, and the single reported speech of Uriah build a devastating characterization without one word of direct condemnation until Nathan's parable.

Sternberg on the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22): Sternberg analyzes the story's gaps, repetitions, and controlled disclosure, showing how the narration withholds Abraham's thoughts and God's purposes so the reader undergoes the test's uncertainty with the characters.

What This Method Cannot Do

Site Stance

The site has not yet assigned its stance on this method. The stance assignments wait on the named reviewers, the same naming the Christian Assessment verdicts wait on. The method stands here in full in the meantime: a stance discloses the site's judgment, and it never filters what a reader may read or run. The stance values and their criteria stand on the criteria page.

Run This Method in the Workshop

Open this method on the bench →

Across the Site

This method belongs to the Literary, Rhetorical, and Social-Scientific Approaches family. Its sources stand in the References register; its family stands among the site's tools; the positions it produces can be compared in the Diptych.

Primary Sources

• The Poetics of Biblical Narrative by Meir Sternberg
• Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative by Adele Berlin
• The Art of Biblical Narrative by Robert Alter

Secondary Sources

• Words and the Word by Stephen Prickett
• Narrative Criticism surveys in The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation
• The Bible in the Modern World by James Barr

All methods