According to Ryan, narrative is the combination between story and discourse and defines its two components as “story is an event or sequence of events (the action), and the narrative discourse is those events as represented”. Narrative, in this view, is the textual actualization of story, while story is narrative in a virtual form. Story, like narrative discourse, is a representation, but unlike discourse it is not a representation encoded in material signs. Story is a mental image, a cognitive construct that concerns certain types of entities and relations between these entries. Narrative may be a combination of story and discourse, but it is its ability to evoke stories to the mind that distinguishes narrative discourse from other text types.