page numbers from Social Research Vol 71: No 3: Fall 2004
p.691 I would like to try out an idea that may not be quite ready, indeed
may not be quite possible. But I have no doubt it is worth a try. It has to do with the nature of thought and with one of
its uses... For the last several years, I have been looking at another kind of thought... one that is quite different in form
from reasoning: the form of thought that goes into the construction not of logical or inductive arguments but of stories or
narratives.
p.692 Let me begin by sketching out the general shape of the argument
that I wish to explore. The first thesis is this: We seem to have no other way of describing "lived time" save in
the form of a narrative.
p.694 As Peter Winch reminded us a long time ago, it is not so evident
in the human sciences or human affairs how to specify criteria by which to judge the rightness of any theory or model
p.697 There is widespread agreement that stories are about
the vicissitudes of human intention and that, to paraphrase Kenneth Burke's classic, The Grammar of Motives, story
structure is composed minimally of the pentad of an Agent, an Action, a Goal, a Setting, an Instrument - and Trouble (Burke,
1945). Trouble is what drives the drama, and it is generated by a mismatch between two or more of
the five constituents of Burke's pentad
p.699 Jean-Paul Sartre remarks in his autobiography, "a man is always a
teller of stories, he lives surrounded by his own stories and those of other people, he sees everything that happens to him
in terms of these stories and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it" (Sartre, 1964).
p.709 The fish will, indeed, be the last to discover water - unless he gets
a metaphysical assist.
p.709 If we can learn how people put their narratives together when they
tell stories from life, considering as well how they might have proceeded, we might then have contributed something
new to that great ideal. Even if, with respect to life and narrative, we discover, as in Yeats's line, that we cannot tell
the dancer from the dance, that may be good enough.
