The Storytelling muthos

The three key features of the muthos in stories

In my posts so far, I’ve shown how Aristotle’s muthos theory applies to media and marketing narratives. But the muthos theory was developed by Aristotle primarily as a tool for building and analyzing storytelling narratives. When applied to stories, the muthos has three fundamental features. Using a range of examples from ancient tragedy to movies, in the following three posts I’ll take a deep dive into each individually. Here’s a quick overview of these three features of the muthos.

First, as we’ve seen with media narratives, Aristotle emphasizes that the events in the muthos must be connected by probability or necessity, while the events in the episodes should be at least plausible or appropriate. But in stories, pinpointing exactly which events are in the muthos is particularly important and challenging. These events define the chain of necessity, which is the first key feature of the muthos.

Second, Aristotle states that all the muthos events must fall between the beginning and end of the narrative. This requirement may at first seem like a footnote, but it's one of the most important features of the muthos in storytelling. It means that the muthos events are only distributed over a certain portion of the story as told – and never part of the backstory or aftermath. Where the muthos begins, where it ends, and how big that portion is within the story determine the overall structure of the narrative. This is the second key muthos feature, placement and portion.

Third, the chain of muthos events must end in a certain way. Aristotle insists that the last event in the muthos must complete a shift from good to bad fortune, or from bad to good fortune for the main character. This also means the muthos must have a minimum size, since it has to have at least enough events to cover this shift. This third key feature of the muthos is termed the change of fortune.

In my next post, I’ll show how Aristotle himself outlined and analyzed the chain of necessity in Euripides’ classic tragedy, Iphigenia in Tauris.