Whenever people read a novel or watch a film, they have to work out the role of each character in the unfolding story and see how they relate to each other. This complex process poses no difficulties for a native speaker of the language which the narrative is written in. It is very rare that people come out of a cinema or put down a novel and say, ‘What was that all about?’ Human adults are experts at understanding fictional narrative because we have encountered the code thousands of times since we first heard fairy tales.

According to Aristotle, all dramatic narrative is conflict. Coming up to date, the writer, Christopher Booker, has suggested that there are seven basic plots in narrative fiction in English, but they all involve conflict. In what are called ‘rites of passage’ stories, for example, teenagers are taken through formative episodes, emerging as adults at the end. The conflict here is between the main character and adult life. In other stories, it might be between a person and a single enemy. The French theorist, Levi-Strauss, suggested that all narratives have binary opposition, or two opposite parts, the most obvious ones being good and evil, right and wrong, strength and weakness, and youth and age.

Booker’s seven plots include some very interesting basic ideas, but there is one which appeared centuries ago. It is the plot which he calls ‘Man against Monster’. This was the basis of so many early stories from many different cultures in which the monster was a ‘real’ monster, with one eye, or snakes as hair, like Medusa, for example. This plot seems to have a lasting appeal, changing with each generation, with the monster becoming aliens in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, or the government, as in Orwell’s 1984, or abstract things, like big business. Stories with a message for the audience often use this plot today. It is even possible for the monster to be the main character.

The Russian theorist, Tzvetan Todorov, says that all narratives have stages. Firstly, the main character is living in a stable situation, married happily, successful at work or enjoying a perfect childhood. This is often exaggerated beyond normal human experience. Then an event occurs which turns the main character’s life upside down. Next, the character recognises the need for action, acts and, at the end, order is restored. However, the main character has learnt something from the experience and there is a new state of order. Interestingly, Todorov makes no distinction between the narrative conventions in Russian and other languages. Other writers have found significant differences in different languages, which seems more likely to me.

The literary critic, Vladimir Propp, claims that the writer’s control of a narrative is not restricted to conflict, overall structure and plots. According to him, the main characters perform roles, well-defined by convention. Firstly, there is the hero, whose role is to restore order, and a villain, a person who is very bad in some way. Another central character is the victim, threatened by the villain. Other characters who appear frequently in narrative include the dispatcher, who sends the hero on the journey, real or emotional, and the false hero who does not help in restoring order.

It may seem strange that, according to many researchers, the majority of human narratives have recurrent types of opposition, structure and characters. However, according to the widely accepted theory of the British philosopher, Frederick Bartlett, schema, or pictures, of real-world situations are vital in order to make sense of them. We need to know what is likely to happen when we step into a restaurant, an office or a church. We can extend this need for schema to fictional situations, although it seems likely that these differ from culture to culture. Stepping into an unknown situation, including the world of fiction, we need convention to guide us. Unless a narrative follows conventions, it will be hard for an audience to make sense of it.