There are several possible definitions in response to both those questions, starting with the one offered by Gérard Genette in Figures III at the beginning of the 1970s, and taken up again in his Nouveau discours du récit at the beginning of the 1980s. A narrative is, primarily, a telling of events; secondly, the sequence of those events considered independently of the medium that brings them to our knowledge (médium [...] qui [...] en donne connaissance), and lastly, the act of narration in itself (l'acte de narrer pris en lui même). For the avoidance of terminological confusion, Genette reserves the term 'narrative' (récit) as such for the recounting of events, calls their sequence the 'story' (bistoire) and the act of narrating them 'narration' (narration) (Genette, 1972, pp. 71-2; 1983, pp. 10-15). This definition, though intended to apply to literary texts, can also be applied to the fugitive slave notice cited in the introduction to this chapter. The text submitted by Richard Poore to the editor of the Spanish Town Gazette is the narrative, or more accurately the micro-narrative of a story of flight, albeit a very incomplete one. It rests moreover on an act of narration, in other words a set of descriptive and narrative choices, which in the present case are quite visible. This story has a beginning - even though this is not expressly set out in the notice - and a hoped-for ending, the capture of the four fugitives. The ending is, by nature, hypothetical. Juddy and Harriet, for instance, are reported in the same newspaper two years later as still being on the run. The story rests on the actions of the protagonists and the secondary characters - the friends of Juddy, Ned and Philip, 'their friends in town, or the King's Land, St. John's', as well as Harriet's husband and his brother - and on places known to both narrator and reader. It is addressed to one specific reader: the person who might capture them, or tell the narrator the names of any person who has helped the slaves to hide