Undermining and Constructing Coherence in Traditional Narrative Paradigms: Contemporary Views

Abstract

In an effort to make sense of our existence, we narratize our lives and live the narratives that result. Narratives are not only told purposefully as stories to ourselves and our acquaintances, but are also embedded unintentionally in many of our daily conversations. Our narratives serve to temporally sequence the events in our lives, coordinate people, actions, objects, and places, provide perspective, and convey meaning to our experiences. We use narratives to guide future actions, to communicate with others and develop relationships, and to fit our lives into a cultural frame within which we come to know and reaffirm who we are. We evaluate our lives by judging our stories, using as standards the narratives we were offered as models, whether they be the life narratives of others, fairy tales and folklore, fictional works of literature or film, or other story sources. Thus, narratives are both deeply personal subjective constructions and highly public objective transactions. Satisfaction with our narratized lives depends on our level of satisfaction with how we are able to make real events conform to our narrative structural expectations, expectations based on these received models. Sometimes the models that are available to us do not allow us a means to integrate life and narrative and the story breaks down; the extranarrative intrudes and disrupts our sense of control, continuity, and stability.All the articles in this issue concern broken or problematic narratives. Two of the four articles examine factors that can contribute to the collapse of the narrative, and two deal with means of recovery from disrupted narratives. Using Samuel Beckett's late prose fiction as a Received

The Postmodern Self

“…The narrative serves as a statement against chance, arbitrary occurrence, meaninglessness, and entropy. Narratives offer a degree of consistency and coherence to the often random, disconnected events of life (Fireman & McVay, 2002). Through “atonement,” “upward mobility,” “recovery,” “enlightenment,” “development,” many narratives redeem and in doing so use the pains of the past in service of the present and future (McAdams, 2006).…”