Narrative history isn't necessarily about what we know about history, but how we communicate the knowledge we have to our audience.

Paraphrased from Scottish philosopher William Bryce Gallie: In its most basic form a story describes a sequence of actions and experiences of a number of people, real or imaginary, presented in a characteristic situation, either changing it or reacting to changes that affect the situation from the outside. On a deeper level a story allows the reader to understand the successive actions and thoughts and feelings of certain described actors. Ideally, a story should be self-explanatory, even when following the story requires us to adjust the perceptions and expectations we had of how the story would develop when we first started reading it. The narrative is a way for the historian to translate knowing into telling, to make the human experience understandable in the form of structures of meaning, to give our audience the “plot”, as Hayden White defines it: “…by "plot" we mean a structure of relationships by which the events contained in the account are endowed with a meaning by being identified as parts of an integrated whole.”

But knowing what a story is isn’t enough. What qualities should a narrative history have to be considered ‘good’ narrative history? It should be able to properly convey the truth to its readers, based on the historical fact. But it should also meet the criteria of being a good narrative, a story. It should be written in a way that makes truth, and the underlying facts it’s based on, accessible to the reader. The idea of a perfect narrative, an ideal narratio, is discussed at length by Frank Ankersmit in his book Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language. This kind of analysis is particularly valuable because it focuses not only on what narrative history is or isn’t, but also what qualities a narrative history should possess in order to be considered good narrative history.

Ankersmit lays out eight proposals of what the ideal narratio might be. Of the eight propositions of laid out in Ankersmit’s work I personally believe that the essentialist’s proposal is the strongest. According this proposal a historian should, given the fact that a complete description is impossible, focus on what is important or essential for a correct understanding of the past. The strength of essentialism is that it compromises between complete and perfect information, which can neither be available to the historian nor conveyed to the reader in any coherent fashion, and overly reductionist approaches such as the simplest narratio.

The question as to why we communicate through stories has been discussed extensively by philosophers of history. The power of the narrative form is explained by William Henry Walsh: “…the narrative form in cases of this kind is really no more than a pedagogical device, enabling the writer to gain entry into the minds of his readers by linking up his material with familiar experiences.” Take for example the fable of Pinocchio. By telling his story and the trials they face parents can convey to their children why they shouldn’t behave in certain ways, that certain actions have negative consequences. This implicit moral lesson is made more powerful by the fantastic elements the puppet who wants to be a real boy faces. Parents could simply tell their children to focus on their schoolwork, to avoid associating with people who might tempt them into disobedience, but these lessons are made more memorable by conveying them in the form of a fantastical narrative. Stories allow the audience to implicitly understand and memorize complex ideas and processes.