Open narratives are commonly featured and used in television shows and soap opera's. This is seen a lot in shows such as Coronation Street, Eastenders and other programs like these. They are classified as open narratives because of how the show and story as no sense of ending as well as a lot of other reasons also ticked by the examples shown above.
So what are the requirements and what makes something an open narrative?
It's simple, for a story to be an open narrative, the story must have:
- No sense of ending
This is explained above as well as is pretty self explanatory
- A lot of different characters
Characters of the shows like Eastenders for example fade in and out of prominence as well as narrative function often because of this, it leads to my next bullet point.
- Have more than one story line
Following up from my last point, because characters fade in and out of being the center attraction each with their own story, shows like named above have multiple different storylines all going on at the same time leaving to one episode not being the same to the next and perhaps featuring a different character.
- Time is chronological and keeps in time with 'World Time'
World time is the idea and concept of a television show or story following the events on a basis close that of how time passes in our actual lives. This means that stories within the show are told and presented in order of how they happen. For example, 'person a' might have an argument with 'person b', the show then cuts to 'person c' who may be affected by something later not relating to the cause of 'person a' and 'person b's' feud.
But why are Television shows such as Coronation Street an open narrative structure?
Let's take Coronation Street as an example, its biggest claim to fame of being an open narrative structured television show is the fact that the show itself has been running since December 9th, 1960 and within that time, multiple different stories have go on, finished and new ones have started. This is a big deal because my one of points about what makes an open narrative structured story is the fact that it has no end and that multiple stories are covered.
Another reason as to why Coronation Street is a good example is because the show keeps in time with the 'Real World'. What is meant by this is that Coronation Street features a Christmas day episode on the actual day of Christmas, as well as references to events which happen in real life.
Closed Narratives -
Whilst open narratives are featured in television shows and soap opera's, a closed narrative is seen more within films and cinema. What makes something a closed narrative structured story is amount of depth and characters within the story and its development. Like open narratives and its criteria, I have composed a list below.
The requirements -
- Interior voice-overs may be featured giving different characters thoughts and hallucinations
Characters can be given a voice over going into the mind and sub-conscious of that particular character in order to explore the thoughts and feelings of said character. This may also be done by the use of hallucinations, the character may experience supernatural happenings, and mirages internally.
- The number of characters is small
Unlike an open narrative, closed narratives feature a small number of central characters with more depth in which the audience will know about the characters thoroughly. On top of this, because there are less main characters involved, it gives a point on which the viewer can focus on instead of being subjected to multiple different stories like how an open narrative does so.
- Characters are arranged in importance
This is called a hierarchy and features the different central characters in an order of least important to most important. An example of how a hierarchy works with order of importance is schools for example. The pupils are below the teachers, the teachers are below the deputy head teachers and the deputy head teachers below the head teacher.
In a film or cinematic piece, my example would come from the original PowerRangers series, in the series we see the Red Ranger as the lead character in which second in command features the Blue Ranger. Evidence of this is the fact that the Blue Ranger was the only ranger featured in every episode (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Cranston) whilst the yellow, pink and black power ranger were lower down on the hierarchy.
- Time is compressed and differentiates with that of 'real time'
This means that instead of everything happening on a day to day basis like it would in real life and how open narrative stories have a christmas episode for instance, the story may feature a time in the past and then skip to a piece in the future, anywhere from a month to a year or hundreds of years in sci-fi pieces.
- Events and time are special to the story and are not linked to real world events
Everything which happens in a closed narrative story is special and unique to that story and real world events like a terror attack or scientific breakthrough do not become relevant nor shine into existence during the story.
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