ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the concept of narrative congruity as it pertains to the relationship between vernacular memory-narratives and official frameworks of collective remembrance. It discusses the general, narratological features of narrative as such in order to clarify the similarities and differences between fictive and non-fictive narration and distinguishes between collective and autobiographical storytelling in terms of their contrasting performative dimensions and aims. A crucial difference is that stories about the “real past” such as historical works claim to faithfully depict “what actually happened.” In turn, what distinguishes collective memory-narratives and vernacular accounts from historiography is that the former take the further step of positing analogies or homologies between past and present. Along the diachronic dimension of storytime, the larger plot sets the storyworld and dramatis personae in motion, yielding a syntagmatic segmentation into beginning, middle, and ending, appended or interspersed by evaluative commentary in which past is mapped onto present.
