Critical approaches to literature in secondary English require greater attention to narrative discourse. In this conceptual article, I provide interpretative tools from contemporary narratology and demonstrate their critical potential for high school English. In particular, I outline critical literacy's vital but overattentive focus on the contents of story (characters, ideas, themes) and argue for more robust instruction as to how a story is told: the techniques and telling functions of narrative. Using the canonical novel The Great Gatsby as an extended example, this article focuses on the power of attention to narrative discourse, the inescapable organization and presentation of narrative events by a teller who organizes a story to affect a reader. I argue that a renewed instructional focus on narrative discourse does not mean abandoning concerns with the storyworld or the characters of literature. Rather, it envisions a critical literacy which helps students see how the mimetic and the synthetic dynamics of narrative work together. Transcending canonical literature, instructional attention to narrative discourse is crucial in an evolving media landscape, where the techniques of disjointed narration and multivalent telling are rapidly extending beyond conventional literature and into television, film, YouTube, and even into the language of business, politics, and marketing. Teaching narrative form, consequently, is vital for the project of critical literacy in our contemporary media environment.