Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Matthew Anstey" <manstey AT portal.ca>]

Gday Lee,

You asked,

>How can we determine a factual narrative from a fictional narrative?

You have strayed into an area of intense debate among philosophers,
linguists, postmodernists, and a whole lost of other -ists. I doubt that an
answer could be given until you decide what you mean by 'factual' and
'fictional'. "Fictional narrative" sounds tautologous, so I think you may
mean either nonhistorical or not-purporting-to-be-historical narrative.
"Factual narrative" is also problematic at face value, since how are any
facts embedded (or "emplotted" to use Ricoeur's term)  in a narrative, and
what are facts? Perhaps though I am over-reading your question and you
simply mean narratives relating to real-world events and narratives relating
to imaginary-world events. This answer surely relies mainly on the reader's
prior beliefs as to what constitutes the real-world, so textual markers can
be misleading. Texts can be presented as real-world-narratives, like Jonah,
but are dismissed by some because they do not confirm to the principle of
analogy (ie people don't get vomitted up by giant fish and then sit under
Mac-trees with Mac-worms). Other texts are presented as rather imaginary
(either exclusively or partially - eg Gen 3 with talking snakes and whirling
swords; or Leviathin; Rahab the sea-monster etc) but many take them to be
historical. Others may also be "possibility-realists" and think for
philsophical reasons that the imaginary-world (or the world of the
imagination) is "real" in some way.

This is just a sampling of the issues involved, but I think that your
question cannot be answered syntactically at all, and semantically it is not
at all clear what would count as real or imaginary. People tend not to get
bogged down in the extreme cases at either end (Medusa vis-a-vis WWII) but
in the middle ground.

With regards,
Matthew Anstey