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Daniel Kies Department of English College of DuPage |
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| Composition 1
English 1101 |
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Paragraph Organization
Narrative
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One of the best ways to structure a historical or biographical paragraph may simply be to tell a story. This is the central nature of narrative organization. However, if we are writing a literary essay, about the novel 1984, for example, we should never write long narratives retelling the story in the novel. First of all, there is no need for a plot summary for the benefit of an instructor who knows it well. Secondly, it is such a commonly read book that likely even the average person is already familiar with the story. Narrative is best used to illustrate the "personal, developmental path" a person has taken to reach a particular point in his/her life.
Consider this example from the The Scriptorium's biography of the novelist Jeanette Winterson, written by Tim Conley. Notice how the paragraph of narrative is the start of a longer narrative biography that is meant to illuminate the many bold ideas presented in the introductory paragraph:
When Jeanette Winterson was asked (so the story goes) by a British newspaper questionnaire distributed among the nation's writers, whom she considered to be the greatest living prose stylist in English, her answer was unequivocal: Jeanette Winterson. Such boldness, such arrogance, which from the six-barrel pen of a Norman Mailer might have been acceptable and even considered flavourful, was not expected from a British writer, let alone a British woman. It could be argued that this and other, similar gestures, faithful as they are to those of Winterson's heroes, Byron and Gertrude Stein, prompted the London literati to revoke the status of darling they had been preparing for her.
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Born in 1959, adopted and raised in the small English town of Accrington by Pentecostal Evangelists, Winterson's maturation was constituted by an intense struggle between conflicting conceptions of sexuality, divinity, and literature. Much of these experiences was eventually fuel for the fire of her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), which won the Whitbread Award for First Novel and much praise and admiration. "Small bookshops and word of mouth were the start of my career," she notes in her 1991 introduction to the novel. The stern religious upbringing which gave her an addict's first taste of rhetoric -- she was delivering public sermons at a remarkably young age -- by the same token denied her (where it could) her explorations into other kinds of passion.
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