In this chapter I want to discuss what has been called the ‘narrative mode of understanding’ (Bruner 1986), the ability to create, narrate, and comprehend stories. This ability enables us, I suggest, to grasp a flow of social events and to convey that grasp to others. To share stories in this way is a particularly powerful form of interactive planning: for in fashioning an account of what has been happening and what is happening, we lay down the background against which future mutual action may sensibly unfold. Stories, moreover, have the capacity to frame a markedly intricate and elaborate flow of social events, indeed just the sort of flow that seems even more characteristic of human than of other social primate societies (Byrne and Whiten 1988; Whiten 1991; Carrithers 1991a, 1992). We understand our social world by means of stories, and we use those stories to create distinctively human society.

The general idea

As I understand it, narrative thinking differs from, but complements, the other means of interactive planning discussed in this volume. This is partly a matter of scale. Conversation and discourse analysis (Streeck, Drew, Brown, this volume) work usually on two interlocutors interacting for perhaps no more than a few seconds or minutes. On the other hand, narrative thought may easily comprehend more – sometimes many more – than two people and may cover days, years, or even a lifetime and beyond.