Karine Zbinden defines fabula as:

FABULA (or "story"). A term belonging to the study of prose, fabula designates the raw material which will be processed to become a narrative. The story is the purely chronological series of events, which will be recounted, in the order in which they took place, which is not necessarily the order of the narration. The fabula will be organised into siuzhet to become a narrative. [127]