Levi Strauss and His Approach To Narrative

• Claude Levi Strauss studied hundreds of myths and legends all around the world, from that he found out that we as humans make sense of the world, people and events by seeing and using binary opposites.
• He found out that narratives are arranged around the conflict of binary opposites.

• In the mid-20th century, two major European academic thinkers, Claude Levi Strauss and Roland Barthes, came together and discovered that the way we understand certain words does not depend so much on the meaning that they directly contain, but much more by our understanding of the difference between the word and its opposite or, as they called it, 'binary opposite'.
• They realised that words simply act as symbols for society's ideas and that the meaning of words was a relationship rather than a fixed idea just a relationship between opposing ideas.

Examples are; Good vs Evil, Peace vs War, Black vs White, Ignorance vs Wisdom, Civilised vs       Savage and Young vs Old.

Basically, Levi Strauss' theory is that the conflict is based around the binary opposites and that the binary opposites are the central climax of a narrative structure.