Narratives are everywhere. They are produced in every minute of every day and they participate in just about every aspect of society and our own individual existence. As individuals, for instance, we tell stories all the time, both publicly to other people and privately to ourselves, about such things as how we feel, what we have been doing, our hopes and plans for the future, why we hold the beliefs and values that we do, and so on.<\/p>\n
The same is true of society and of the various institutions and practices of which it is comprised. Whether we consider politics, media, the law, medicine, the natural sciences, religion or any other large-scale social human endeavour, they all depend upon narrative (the telling of stories) to do their work. Politicians, for instance, might tell us the story of their lives in order to persuade us they are like us, that they understand our needs, and that they are therefore worthy of our vote. Like\u00a0journalists and lawyers, meanwhile, they compete\u00a0with one another to produce the most plausible story of what has happened and why it has happened so that we will then support their solution for what they think should be done about it. Therapists and doctors, too, frequently reconstruct the story of their patients\u2019 life experiences, their health issues and current illnesses in order to identify an appropriate diagnosis, while the natural sciences adopt alternative stories about how the universe came into existence and how it functions in order to construct and test alternative models for explaining specific physical phenomena.<\/p>\n
As all these examples indicate \u2013 and as the obvious importance of storytelling in most of the world\u2019s religions further testifies \u2013 to call something a narrative is by no means to belittle it or accuse it of being pure fiction. On the contrary, it is to affirm the vital contribution storytelling makes to every significant aspect of human life.<\/p>\n
This, incidentally, provides further justification for something we will be insisting on throughout this module: that\u00a0we need to place at least as much\u00a0emphasis on the telling\u00a0<\/em>of a story as we do on the story itself. For it is not only (or even, arguably, primarily) what<\/em> we say about ourselves or the world around us \u2013 or what<\/em> a politician, journalist, lawyer, doctor, scientist or theologian says about those things \u2013 that reveals the most about us or them, but also how<\/em> we put together our stories and say those things. In uncovering this, the tools of narratology (the study of narrative) are a vital resource.<\/p>\n