ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 addresses the basic question of what narratives do, arguing that they play a key role in everyday knowing and being. As a way of knowing, narratives enable individual events to be understood in terms of larger complex wholes. This shapes both the perceived significance of events and how they are encountered. I argue that the human capacity for knowing and understanding the world through stories is, in turn, grounded in a more fundamental, ontological role of narrative in shaping our sense of being-in-the-world. Drawing on Heidegger’s account of Dasein as temporal being, I argue that human existence has an intrinsically narrative structure which provides the necessary ground for both storytelling as ordinarily understood and narrative understanding more broadly. The final part of the chapter draws on diverse traditions of narrative theory to provide a definition of narrative, used in the subsequent chapters, based on the key elements of: temporal and spatial specificity, relationality, figuration and a sense of an ending.
