ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. Stories are everywhere in human lives, and storytelling is indeed part of all human cultures. The author claim is that story and metaphor are two distinct sense-making processes that people constantly make use of both in everyday life and in great artistic achievements. In artistic works, like fictional stories or visual works of art, the two types of organization coexist in complex ways, and this type of dual organization will be explored in chapters devoted to specific case studies. The present work draws on existing research in narratology, narrative psychology, and cognitive science, and presents an outline of a theory of narrative understanding. It is the author contention that the study of narrative presents a unique way to approach the study of the human mind. The chapter presents therefore an exploration of how people think in narrative.
