This book proposes a differential theory of narrative. In doing so, it goes against the most basic fundamentals of narratology. These fundamentals seem so self-evident that they are generally assumed as granted and only rarely voiced explicitly. They are exemplarily set out in this covert manner in the following programmatic statement from Roland Barthes's ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’:

While the statement's thrust seems to go against a mimetic and thus traditional understanding of narrative, it in fact leaves intact the most basic parameters that all theories of narrative have endorsed in one way or another before and ever since Barthes. These parameters are: (1) narrative is a specifically human business (both in the sense that all humans tell stories – storytelling as a pan-cultural phenomenon; and in the sense that humans tell stories whereas apes, trees, stars, and stones do not); (2) narrative is limited to the field of knowledge (as either its acquisition, storage, or expression, or any combination of these); and (3) narrative is based in experientiality (either as a means of communication or as a way of making experience intelligible in the first place, or both). In short, narrative is taken to be anthropocentric, epistemological, and experiential.

I cannot possibly go through the entire history of narratology here to substantiate this point: namely, that the richness and diversity of narratology rest on these three more or less tacit assumptions. Instead, I will have recourse to exemplary discussions of pertinent conceptualisations and theorisations throughout the book. But let me briefly point to three recent essays on the history of narratology that corroborate my claims. Jan Christoph Meister's entry on ‘Narratology’ in The Living Handbook of Narratology sketches the history of both the discipline and the term.