Narrative Pictures

Abstract

This article is about visual narratives. Most of the examples used in the philosophical literature on narratives are literary ones. But a general account of narrative needs to be able to cover both pictorial and literary cases. In the first part of this article, I will argue that none of the most influential accounts of narrative are capable of this. In the second part, I outline an account of visual narratives, or, rather, of our engagement with visual narratives. There are many questions about narrative, but two seem particularly important. The first is the more straightforward of the two: what is a narrative? That is, what is the difference between a narrative and a representation that is not a narrative? There are many ways of answering this question. One would be to look for necessary and sufficient conditions. Another one would be to identify a crucial element of narratives that may not both be necessary and sufficient, but would still help us to understand what differentiates narratives from nonnarratives. Noël Carroll suggests that what he calls the narrative connection is such a crucial element, and he claims that the narrative connection, the connection between the events represented in a narrative, is a necessarily causal one.1 But recently, it has been argued that narrative does not necessarily presuppose a causal narrative connection.2 Instead of attempting to contribute to this debate about the importance of causality in defining narrative, I will try to approach the question about the nature of narratives from a different angle.

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