ABSTRACT
Part of the reason many people do English is that they are swept away by stories. They find books ‘unputdownable’ and read late into the night. This is part of the power of narrative. It isn’t just books, of course. Soap operas, plays, films and in fact nearly every sort of text rely on this
narrative drive, the desire to find out ‘what happens next’. Narrative is everywhere. It isn’t only in fiction: it is also central to each of our lives. When we are born (or at least when we can take notice of what’s going on!) we find ourselves ‘thrown’ into the middle of things and other people’s lives. In order to make sense of what’s going on, we tell ourselves stories. I’m sure that most of us have – when we were younger – done the same thing as the main character in the Irish novelist James Joyce’s (1882-1941) book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. At school, he wrote down ‘his name and where he was: Stephen Dedalus, Class of Elements, Clongowes Wood College, Sallins, County Kildare, Ireland, Europe, The World, The Universe’. This is a sort of story, about identifying who and where he was. And we are told, and tell ourselves stories about, what has happened to us or who we are and who we want to be, whether we write them down in diaries or transform them into poems or fiction or – more often – just think and talk them through. These stories are how we organise and sort out the chaotic world. They are how we give the world meaning. For example, if you are asked to tell someone about yourself – at a job interview, say – you quickly outline the broad story of who you are, where you come from and so on. You probably would not relate some anecdote from your childhood or describe in agonising detail your morning’s journey. You present your story of yourself, organising the narrative and selecting what you take to be the most effective and meaningful facts. This ‘organising’ is a way of constructing the story of yourself: an activity that everybody undertakes, consciously or not.
