Your life is not a story: why narrative thinking holds you back
is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK. She is the author of Philosophy of Lyric Voice: The Cognitive Value of Page and Performance Poetry (Bloomsbury, 2023).
Narratives are everywhere, and the need to construct and share them is almost inescapable. ‘A man is always a teller of tales,’ wrote Jean-Paul Sartre in his novel Nausea (1938), ‘he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.’
We rely on narratives because they help us understand the world. They make life more meaningful. According to Sartre, to turn the most banal series of events into an adventure, you simply ‘begin to recount it’. However, telling a story is not just a powerful creative act. Some philosophers think that narratives are fundamental to our experiences. Alasdair MacIntyre believes we can understand our actions and those of others only as part of a narrative life. And Peter Goldie argues that our very lives ‘have narrative structure’ – it is only by grappling with this structure that we can understand our emotions and those of others. This suggests that narratives play central, possibly fundamental, roles in our lives. But as Sartre warns in Nausea: ‘everything changes when you tell about life.’
In some cases, narratives can hold us back by limiting our thinking. In other cases, they may diminish our ability to live freely. They also give us the illusion that the world is ordered, logical, and difficult to change, reducing the real complexity of life. They can even become dangerous when they persuade us of a false and harmful world view. Perhaps we shouldn’t be too eager to live our lives as if we were ‘telling a story’. The question is: what other options do we have?
