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go about constructing and representing the rich and messy domain of human
interaction.
It is with just this domain that I want now to concern myself. Like the
domains of logical-scientific reality construction, it is well buttressed by prin-
ciples and procedures. It has an available cultural toolkit or tradition on which
its procedures are modelled, and its distributional reach is as wide and as ac-
tive as gossip itself. Its form is so familiar and ubiquitous that it is likely to be
overlooked, in much the same way as we suppose that the fish will be the last to
discover water. As I have argued extensively elsewhere, we organize our experi-
ence and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative -
stories, excuses, myths, reasons for doing and not doing, and so on. Narrative
is a conventional form, transmitted culturally and constrained by each individ-
ual's level of mastery and by his conglomerate of prosthetic devices, colleagues
and mentors. Unlike the constructions generated by logical and scientific pro-
cedures which can be weeded out by falsification, narrative constructions can
only achieve “verisimilitude.” Narratives, then, are a version of reality whose
acceptability is governed by convention and “narrative necessity” rather than
by empirical verification and logical requiredness, although ironically, we have
no compunction about calling stories true or false (For a fuller, more discur-
sive account of the nature and products of narrative thought, see (Bruner 1986,
1990) and my more recent (Bruner 2002). See also (Sarbin 1986)).
I propose now to sketch out ten features of narrative, rather in the spirit
of constructing an armature upon which a more systematic account might be
constructed. As with all accounts of forms of representation of the world, I shall
have a great difficulty in distinguishing what may be called the narrative mode
of
thought
from the forms of narrative
discourse
. As with all prosthetic devices,
each enables and gives form to the other, just as the structure of language and
the structure of thought eventually become inextricable. Eventually it becomes
a vain enterprise to say which is the more basic - the mental processes or the
discourse form that expresses it -for, just as our experience of the natural world
tends to imitate the categories of familiar science, so our experience of human
affairs comes to take the form of the narratives we use in telling about them.
MuchofwhatIhavetosaywillnotbeatallnewtothosewhohavebeen
working in the vineyards of narratology or who have concerned themselves
with critical studies of narrative forms. Indeed, the ancestry of many of the
ideas that will concern me can be traced back directly to the debates that have
been going on among literary theorists over the last decade or two. My com-
ments are echoes of those debates now reverberating in the human sciences
- not only in psychology, anthropology, and linguistics, but also in the phi-
