Nor does she use the bloody conflicts of Birmingham for mere narrative excitation the way that bad historical fiction might.
It's not a matter of suspense: the swaths of elaborate writing, multifarious implication, magic realist butterflying and two subplots -- both connected to Earl's death -- muffle any mere narrative expectations on the reader's part.
No refugees are named, they are only briefly alluded to, and the disastrous events of the last two years are used as a mere narrative crutch.
Time travel here is no mere narrative device.
That King's references to Exodus and Jesus were intended not as mere narrative, but as exhortation to action.
We must not enclose a writer, particularly one whose writings amount to a "mobile and contradictory whole" in one mere narrative; better to allow readers to project their own Benjamins on to the material.
Since Mr. Dobrish and several old college friends founded Adobe in 1992, it has cultivated acting based on an almost mathematical precision of detail and a restrained signature stagecraft as if to prove that style can lift an audience above mere narrative implausibilities.
They are, as such, closer to projections or predictions than mere narratives or visions of some alternative world.
In a 1947 essay, Humour in Science Fiction, de Camp wrote, "The mere fact that a narrative depends for its appeal upon humour doesn't excuse the author from writing a good story.
By reverting to narrative-driven adventure, mystery or suspense, today's brighter bestsellers have leapfrogged the mere 150 years of the self-defined "literary novel" that began with Flaubert.
