Thinking of Life like a Narrative Can Affect One’s Life
Everything we do and say impacts the choices we choose in life. Our lives are constantly being compared to stories or where we are in relation to an event. Someone who thinks of life as a narrative and that stories help them choose opportunities in life then they are a narrator. If someone who only picks a certain path because of the time, place, and knowledge given then they are a non-narrator. Narratives are tellings of stories that have a certain meaning to different people. A life narrative is a combination of stories that have influenced our decisions and impacted our lives. A senior editor Julie Beck and British analytic philosopher Galen Strawson are two people who have opposing views on whether life is a narrative. I feel the opportunities chosen during life can be persuaded by thinking of life as a narrative, therefore, impacting the overall outlook on life.
People who think as narrators tend to either have a realistic or visionary overall outlook on life. Those that think realistically tend to follow a story standard. For example, Beck wrote about how plotting points into a narrative can shape who you are in her article, Life’s Stories. Beck says “One such blueprint is your standard ‘go to school, graduate, get a job, get married, have kids.’” Children that have grown up on standardized stories tend to live alongside the story. because it’s realistic to do everything in the story. The opportunities chosen from the narratives were ones that would most likely fit their story the best. For instance, I chose the opportunity to come to college because like stories, education leads to more opportunities like being able to travel and find a job. Stories have different endings because they can take different paths. However, visionary narrators see there are opportunities where anything could occur. They do not need to follow a certain story to get to their happy ending. Visionaries strive for stories that may not seem realistic but can be possible. For example, they may hear a story of someone out skiing an avalanche in the Cascades. They know how hard and dangerous it is but they are intrigued and see that an opportunity like that is slim, so they may try skiing because of the story. Either way, a narrator views the stories they are being told, they still think life as a narrative which influences their chosen opportunities.
Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash
Whereas, if someone thinks of life as more knowledge-based then their outlook and chosen opportunities in life will be different than a narrator’s. Strawson who wrote, I am not a story, about how life may not be a narrative may think, “[M]y present overall outlook on life and behavior is deeply conditioned by my genetic inheritance and sociocultural place and time.” People who are non-narratives may feel life cannot be put into one story, life is too complex to be one story. Therefore, life cannot be a narrative because life has no guidelines coming from stories. Non-narrative people may view life as something that just happens that is only affected by the time and place they are in. In other words, people are “creatures who can ‘consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places’” (Strawson). The stories that we are told do not impact the opportunities chosen they rather are just side pieces that have been acknowledged. For example, I interviewed Scott Pusey who I feel thinks like a non-narrator because of why he came to Maine. He thinks he chose the opportunity he did because it would benefit him and his daughter not because stories of moving away told him life would be better. Whereas, I, someone who thinks of life as a narrative sees a different story for his choices. Yes, he had knowledge that moving to a new place would result in a better life for both him and his daughter. But, I feel because he knew of stories about adults starting over in a new place are better off, the opportunity to move and further his job would benefit both of them in the long run. Which shows that he may not think he chose this opportunity because of stories but he did. Even though non-narrators do not think they are thinking like life as a narrative, they are.
Narrators like me may see this year of her life story as a “contamination story”; starting out happy because it was normal, then the war started, and people may have predicted her year would be rough, which it was (Beck). Contamination stories start out positively and end terribly, like this year of the Syrian girl. Narrators think she took the opportunities she did to get out of the town because of stories of bystanders in wars and to continue on with her story.
Stories are a huge part of our lives, they help choose opportunities and how we may see the world. Narrators are people who believe life as a narrative. There are two types of narrators; realists and visionaries. Others, non-narraters, may say that narratives are just stories that only provide knowledge they do not influence our chosen opportunities. But, know that no path is definite and non-narrators may not think they are narrators but in most ways they are, so which one are you?
RailRoad Tracks in City by Pixabay
Multimodal Statement
In my essay I used different modes of Multimodal text to get my point across; the way we perceive life is reflected upon the opportunities we choose based on the way we think life is like a narrative. I have found two pictures (Visuals) that I used in my essay one is of a child sitting on a pile of books while reading a book. I feel like this picture shows that we grow up reading and learning from books. The other picture is of a train station: many tracks lead to a different destination (futures) but you can go back to where the opportunity was to change your tracks and choose a different future. The fog in the air shows that we do not know the future even if we know some aspect of what we hope is to come. Books, stories, and narratives are apart of our life even if we may not think they are. The video of a young Syrian girl provides an audio, gestural, and visual of what she went through in a year. I put this in my essay to show how the background sounds in her video help tell her story of what she was going through while not directly speaking to the camera. The gestural mode is used in her video because of the way she moves at the beginning versus towards the end. Her narrative is being told through the sounds and 1-second clips she recorded in a year. I broke up my text with the pictures and the video so, the reader is forced to stop and look at what I am trying to say. To evoke emotion from what I am trying to get across and to show that what I am saying is true or at least understandable.
