Why Narrative?
According to Jerome Bruner:
“Living in a culture requires not only knowing what’s conventionally expected, but having some sense of the unexpected troubles that the conventional can produce. And now at last can we come to the functions of narrative, and why it is in effect universal. It is precisely narrative’s function to instantiate and localize what is conventionally expected in a culture, and also to illustrate the troubles and perils that the conventionally expected may produce. I shall argue that story telling – fictional and “real†alike – is every culture’s way of altering its members to just such vicissitudes.†(Bruner, 2006, p.231)