Some ideas on narrative

Here is a link to a very interesting post by Charles May exploring some ideas about narrative.


May is currently writing a book about storytelling and in some of his recent blogposts he is sharing a selection of his background reading for this project.



 In this post he is outlining some of the ideas he found useful from  a book by Jermone Bruner called, Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY, 2003).

Of particular interest is his outline of Bruner's characteristics of narrative and characteristics of the self.

I also like this statement by May:

In his short summary chapter, entitled simply, “So why narrative?” Bruner reiterates what he stated in the introductory chapter—that narrative is not only a human delight, it is also a serious business, the essential means by which we express human aspirations.  Stories are important because they impose a structure on what we experience.  Stories help us to cope with surprises by making them less surprising.   This “domestication” of unexpectedness that story makes possible is a crucial way our culture maintains its coherence.