The very ambitious goal of this blog is to answer the question “what kind of story are we in?” Now, I’m not sure if this prompt was meant to inspire an existential crisis, but it did and here we are. For some reason it made me instantly default to wondering if we’re all just in a giant simulation and that’s the kind of story we’re in. I decided not to expand on that idea, so, you’re welcome.
I want to dive right in, but I feel that I can’t answer this question effectively without first addressing some of the vocabulary I will be using in this blog. After reading the introduction of the Narrative Reader, I harborded a lot of mixed feelings about what constituted a “narrative” and a “story” and whether or not the distinction really needed to be made at all. For the purposes of this blog, the words “narrative” and “story” will be used interchangeably, as will “narrator” and “storyteller.” So many of the ideas we’ve encountered about narratives thus far show that trying to separate these terms from one another is an incredibly difficult task and I agree with the sentiment.
While this seems like it’d be a simple question to answer at first glance, it actually contains a lot of layers. The first thing I want to address is that we do not participate in a single story. We never have and we never will. While we may be in one general, overarching story we actively participate in on a daily basis (the life we live), there is an extensive web of smaller stories we also participate in (the consequences of choices we make, the lives of people we encounter). These stories can also stretch across cultures, but are bound by the need for language to be told. Each of these stories are linked together and dependant on the other one to exist.
Another area I’d like to take a moment to focus on is the that many of the stories that we participate in have existed long before us and will continue to exist long after we’ve died. When we are born we enter as a part of our parents’ storylines and when we die we will still live in stories lived and told by our friends and family. We can never be part of a single story, as the daily interactions we have with others and even the smallest choices we make cause new stories to be born and others to end. The idea that some stories will continue to exist regardless of our physical attachment to them is a crucial part of defining what kind of story we are in.
It’s difficult to provide a simple answer to the prompt’s question, which I’m sure you could already tell, so I hope that the following will suffice for a starting point to answering this very dense question. I propose that we’re not in a story. We’re in a million, complex, interwoven, continuous stories where we wade back and forth between the roles of narrator and listener. The specific contents of each of these stories will vary from person to person, for a number of reasons, so it would be difficult to speak on what takes place in each of these stories, but their existence and our participation in them cannot be denied.
I want to dive right in, but I feel that I can’t answer this question effectively without first addressing some of the vocabulary I will be using in this blog. After reading the introduction of the Narrative Reader, I harborded a lot of mixed feelings about what constituted a “narrative” and a “story” and whether or not the distinction really needed to be made at all. For the purposes of this blog, the words “narrative” and “story” will be used interchangeably, as will “narrator” and “storyteller.” So many of the ideas we’ve encountered about narratives thus far show that trying to separate these terms from one another is an incredibly difficult task and I agree with the sentiment.
While this seems like it’d be a simple question to answer at first glance, it actually contains a lot of layers. The first thing I want to address is that we do not participate in a single story. We never have and we never will. While we may be in one general, overarching story we actively participate in on a daily basis (the life we live), there is an extensive web of smaller stories we also participate in (the consequences of choices we make, the lives of people we encounter). These stories can also stretch across cultures, but are bound by the need for language to be told. Each of these stories are linked together and dependant on the other one to exist.
Another area I’d like to take a moment to focus on is the that many of the stories that we participate in have existed long before us and will continue to exist long after we’ve died. When we are born we enter as a part of our parents’ storylines and when we die we will still live in stories lived and told by our friends and family. We can never be part of a single story, as the daily interactions we have with others and even the smallest choices we make cause new stories to be born and others to end. The idea that some stories will continue to exist regardless of our physical attachment to them is a crucial part of defining what kind of story we are in.
It’s difficult to provide a simple answer to the prompt’s question, which I’m sure you could already tell, so I hope that the following will suffice for a starting point to answering this very dense question. I propose that we’re not in a story. We’re in a million, complex, interwoven, continuous stories where we wade back and forth between the roles of narrator and listener. The specific contents of each of these stories will vary from person to person, for a number of reasons, so it would be difficult to speak on what takes place in each of these stories, but their existence and our participation in them cannot be denied.
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