Language Models Have Interpretable Narrative Mechanisms

David Yiyang Liu, Aditya Joshi, Paul Dawson, Andrew Piper

We investigate whether language models contain internal components that contribute to representing narrativity, the degree to which a text exhibits narrative properties. Across GPT-2-Small, Gemma-2-2B, and Llama-3.1-8B, we identify attention heads, MLP neurons, and sparse autoencoder features whose activations correlate with narrativity. Ablating selected neuron and feature sets increases next-token prediction loss more for high-narrativity than for low-narrativity texts, and reduces the narrativity of open-ended generations. On downstream benchmarks, the largest effects occur in story completion and narrative question answering, although they vary across models and languages; results on confabulation and hallucination benchmarks are mixed. These findings provide causal evidence that selected sets of narrative-associated components contribute to model behaviour, while their internal organisation, relation to narrative theory, and broader functions remain open questions.