Walter Fisher's Narrative Paradigm

Narrative Theory in Fiction
Narrative paradigm is a theory proposed by Walter Fisher, which states that all meaningful communication is a form of storytelling or reporting of events. It promotes the belief that humans are storytellers and listeners and are more persuaded by a good story than by a good argument. Because of this, human beings experience and comprehend life as a series of ongoing narratives, each with its own conflicts, characters, beginning, middle, and end. Fisher believes that all forms of communication that appeal to our reason are best viewed as stories shaped by history, culture, and character. He states that essentially: (1) People are essentially storytellers; (2) The world is a set of stories from among which we must

There are three functions of narrative theory: poetic, dialectical and rhetorical. Poetic function observes the transformation of relationships, dialectical gives the presentation of truth and rhetorical offers analytical and evaluative readings of narratives and narrative elements in situated discourse or acts aimed at persuading, convincing, uniting or otherwise moving people towards specific ends (Lucaites 103-105). The writer and reader together, impart time and space of a narrative, the writer structuring a sequence, frame, and point of view into the text and the reader finding it out. The narrative will invite its reader into many levels of narrative time, the relationship among them contributing to meaning. A narrative not only means something but does something, being simultaneously both a structure and an act. James Phelan looks at narrative theory through a rhetorical perspective and uses that to look at fiction books and how they share a meaning to readers

The principle is well presented in A Farewell to Arms, where much of the content has been omitted, leaving the readers to explore it through their logical thinking and imagination. Hemingway leaves distinctive imprints on his short stories: a clipped, spare style, naturalistic presentation of actions and observations, heavy reliance on dramatic dialogue, and a pattern of connection extending backwards and forwards between the various stories.
Frederick Henry in A Farewell to Arms, the main character in the story survived the war at the front only to find that his wife had died at home (“though no one expected her to die”), Death, as the Henry came to realize, was not a by-product of war but a universal condition.
Just as life never permits us to say “farewell to arms” to life, there can never be “another country” where death is concerned. This implication, reinforced by the fact that the major “only looked out of the window” at the end of the story, makes the title highly suggestive and