When people talk about \u2018grand narratives,\u2019 what they are referring to are those storylines which claim to express something universal about human nature and\/or the cosmos. All the major religions, for instance, offer grand narratives about how the world came into existence, how we humans were created, why we are the way we are, the meaning of life, and so on. (It should be stressed that to call something a \u2018story\u2019 or a \u2018narrative\u2019 is not in and of itself to say anything about how true or false it is).<\/p>\n
These so-called grand narratives are all around us and every single one of them makes a claim not only to explain\u00a0how things are<\/em> but also to influence the way we should behave<\/em> in the light of that understanding. In psychology, for instance, we might accept the story that unfolds about our own or a close one\u2019s life that follows from the dictum that (in the Romantic poet William Wordsworth\u2019s words) \u2018the child is father of the man.\u2019\u00a0The way individual nation states organise their social and economic structures, meanwhile, depends to a large degree on the\u00a0extent to which they accept or reject such grand narratives as \u2018evolution is the survival or the fittest\u2019 or \u2018the market is neutral and objective.\u2019<\/p>\n Individual narratives \u2013 such as those we encounter in films, plays, poems, works of prose fiction, autobiographies and the like \u2013 often piggyback on these grand narratives in much the same way they piggyback on the standard plot structures of individual artistic genres, such as the western, the detective story, the adventure story, and the like (see again here<\/a>). Their purpose in doing so can be twofold: to interrogate the validity of any one of these so-called grand narratives by seeing how it works in a particular set of situations or circumstances; and\/or to raise expectations in the reader as to how characters are going to behave or (in the case of plot) how situations come about, take place or unravel. Once again, by raising these expectations in the reader, the narrative can then play with them, either by fulfilling, delaying or thwarting them \u2013 or any combination of these things.<\/p>\n For guidelines on how you might interpret a particular narrative in the light of its appeal to a recognisable grand narrative, click here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n