It is difficult to speak of life as a storymaking venture without falling into a number of traps, portraying a world which is: (a) overly individualistic where single agents control their own destiny; (b) overly instrumental where attempting to create a story is equivalent to pursuing means to achieve ends and narrative endings appear as nothing more than instrumental goals; (c) overly coherent and free where we each, through our choosing, live out a single, unified life story; (d) overly selfconscious, where human agents act only on the basis of deliberate choices.

In developing a narrative theory of social action and experience, I have tried to avoid the illusions that we operate as individuals outside social contexts, that we can simply will into existence what we choose, that our motivations are largely self-conscious, or that our lives have the coherence and order of the well-told tale. Rather, I have turned to narrative as a framework to highlight quite other features of human experience, particularly the deeply disturbing relationship between trying to live lives which make sense to us (even narrative sense, I would say) and finding our attempts interrupted by the world around us or, equally disconcerting, finding we need to revise our conceptions of what a good life should or could, realistically, be. If narrative offers a homology to lived experience, the dominant formal feature which connects the two is not narrative coherence but narrative drama.