Short answers, pulled from the story.
A narrative is any account of a series of related events or experiences that appears across all mediums of human creativity including speech literature theatre dance music song comics journalism animation video games radio and visual arts. These accounts range from the shortest simple sentence to extended works containing multiple books or television episodes.
The formal process of constructing such an account entered English from French during the 15th century as the noun narration and adjective narrative derived ultimately from the Latin verb narrare meaning to tell. This word itself traces back to the adjective gnarus which means knowing or skilled.
Archaeological evidence of stories exists at the Indus Valley Civilization site Lothal where artists depicted birds with fish in their beaks resting in trees below fox-like animals. These features show clear and graceful animal forms dating back thousands of years according to S.R. Rao's 1985 publication on Lothal published by the Archaeological Survey of India.
Tzvetan Todorov proposed a narrative model viewing all narratives cyclical with three part structure allowing progression from equilibrium establishment disruption restoration return to similar space before events unfolded. Roman Jakobson attested that literature exists as separate entity encoding distinctive literary qualities distinguishing it from other forms of discourse while semioticians prefer view that all texts whether spoken or written are same except for encoded literary qualities.
Western Apache tribe stories warn misfortune befalls people when they do not follow acceptable behavior one story speaks offense mother meddling married son life under attack neighboring tribe Pimas Apache mother hears scream thinking son wife screaming tries intervene yelling alerts Pima tribe location promptly killed due intervening son life according to Basso 1984 Stalking with Stories Names Places Moral Narratives Among Western Apache.