Understanding how narratives work

This chapter focuses on the question of how narratives function in terms of how they construct the world for us. It examines the four core features identified by Margaret Somers and Gloria D. Gibson, namely temporality, relationality, causal emplotment and selective appropriation. Somers and Gibson and Bruner use two different terms – temporality and narrative diachronicity, respectively – to refer to the same feature. In both cases, temporality is understood as constitutive of narrativity rather than as an additional or separable layer of a ‘story’. Narratives are articulated in a variety of media. Anthropological and scientific narratives often encode an implicit relationship between linearity as a temporal or spatial continuum and ‘development’ in the sense of progress from lower to higher states of existence. Somers and Gibson argue that narratives are constructed according to evaluative criteria that enable and guide selective appropriation of a set of events or elements from the vast array of open-ended and overlapping events that constitute experience.