This time the narrative realized his aspirations, and the show, which ran until 2003, became a cult hit.
"If we wanted to make a piece that had some sense of narrative — Pilobolus has had a hard time with narrative — we realized that we wanted to work with someone who was constantly dealing with story, but story in the sense of gesture," Mr. Kubovy said.
As I began to write more and more, whether it was for my school newspaper or a personal narrative, I realized I had uncovered a side of me I had never known to exist.
After all, "War and Peace," "A Tale of Two Cities," "The Scarlet Letter" and "Ragtime" are all historical novels, yet are rich and fully realized narratives.
The video was helmed by Isaiah Seret, an up-and-coming music video director with a knack for creating beautifully realized narratives at pop song length.
King's worst crime is obliviousness: in the course of the narrative he realizes that, transfixed by professional baubles, he hardly noticed when his wife stopped loving him or when his daughters became mired in anger and rebellion.
The author of "The Corrections" is back, not quite a decade later, with an even richer and deeper work — a vividly realized narrative set during the Bush years, when the creedal legacy of "personal liberties" assumed new and sometimes ominous proportions.
Remender was unsure how to develop the Thompson narrative until he realized that he was a tragic hero: a violent man, haunted by a drinking problem and physical abuse suffered at the hands of his father.
But both these and the five other pieces in "Prose" seem more like efforts at resistance to traditional narrative forms than fully realized stories.
It's a well-drawn picture, but what captivates is the tenderly realized human narrative in the context of a vast metropolis.
