叙事或记叙，最简单的意思，即是对于故事的描述，但在文学、符号学等领域成为重要的概念，有其特定的意义，并发展出专门探讨叙事相关问题叙事学这门学科。

A narrative or story is any report of connected events, actual or imaginary, presented in a sequence of written or spoken words, or still or moving images.

Narrative can be organized in a number of thematic and/or formal categories: non-fiction (such as definitively including creative non-fiction, biography, journalism, transcript poetry, and historiography); fictionalization of historical events (such as anecdote, myth, legend, and historical fiction); and fiction proper (such as literature in prose and sometimes poetry, such as short stories, novels, and narrative poems and songs, and imaginary narratives as portrayed in other textual forms, games, or live or recorded performances). Narrative is found in all forms of human creativity, art, and entertainment, including speech, literature, theatre, music and song, comics, journalism, film, television and video, radio, gameplay, unstructured recreation, and performance in general, as well as some painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, and other visual arts (though several modern art movements refuse the narrative in favor of the abstract and conceptual), as long as a sequence of events is presented. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to tell", which is derived from the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled".