p.4 As I have argued extensively elsewhere, we organize our experience
and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative - stories, excuses, myths, reasons for doing and
not doing, and so on. Narrative is a conventional form, transmitted culturally and constrained by each individual's level
of mastery and by his conglomerate of prosthetic devices, colleagues, and mentors. Unlike the constructions generated
by logical and scientific procedures that can be weeded out by falsification, narrative constructions can only achieve
"verisimilitude." [JLJ - the quality of appearing to be true or real.] Narratives,
then, are a version of reality whose acceptability is governed by convention and "narrative necessity" rather than by empirical
verification and logical requiredness
p.5 once the "cognitive revolution" in the human sciences brought
to the fore the issue of how "reality" is represented in the act of knowing, it became apparent that it did not suffice to
equate representations with images, with propositions, with lexical networks, or even with more temporally extended vehicles
such as sentences. It was perhaps a decade ago that psychologists became alive to the possibility of narrative as
a form not only of representing but of constituting reality
p.6 A narrative is an account of events occurring over time.
p.7 Narratives are about people acting in a setting, and
the happenings that befall them must be relevant to their intentional states while so engaged
- to their beliefs, desires, theories, values, and so on... But intentional states in narrative never fully
determine the course of events, since a character with a particular intentional state might end up doing practically
anything. For some measure of agency is always present in narrative, and agency presupposes choice - some element of "freedom."
If people can predict anything from a character's intentional states, it is only how he will feel or how he will have perceived
the situation. The loose link between intentional states and subsequent action is the reason why narrative accounts cannot
provide causal explanations. What they supply instead is the basis for interpreting why a character acted as he or
she did.
p.8 The accounts of protagonists and events that constitute
a narrative are selected and shaped, in terms of a putative story or plot that then "contains" them. At the same
time, the "whole" (the mentally represented putative story) is dependent for its formation on a supply of possible constituent
parts. In this sense, as we have already noted, parts and wholes in a narrative rely on each other for their viability.
In Vladimir Propp's terms, the parts of a narrative serve as "functions" of the narrative structure as a whole. But that
whole cannot be constructed without reference to such appropriate parts. This puzzling part-whole textual interdependence
in narrative is, of course, an illustration of the defining property of the hermeneutic circle. For a story can only be "realized"
when its parts and whole can, as it were, be made to live together.
p.9 there is compelling evidence to indicate that narrative
comprehension is among the earliest powers of mind to appear in the young child and among the most widely
used forms of organizing human experience.
Many literary theorists and philosophers of mind have argued that
the act of interpreting in this way is forced on us only when a text of the world to which it presumes to refer is in some
way "confused, incomplete, cloudy."
p.13 Narrative "truth" is judged by its verisimilitude rather than its verifiability.
There seems indeed to be some sense in which narrative, rather than referring to "reality," may in fact create or constitute
it
p.15 Narrative genre, in this dispensation, can
be thought of not only as a way of constructing human plights but as providing a guide for using mind,
insofar as the use of mind is guided by the use of an enabling language.
p.15 Because its "tellability" as a form of discourse rests on a breach
of conventional expectation, narrative is necessarily normative. A breach presupposes a norm.
p.21 What I have tried to do in this paper is to describe some of the properties
of a world of "reality" constructed according to narrative principles.
