Stories and narratives help popularize profound philosophical and spiritual ideas by exemplifying them through anecdotes, tales, myths, allegories and slogans so that even the less educated or intelligent members of a community develop a profound outlook on life and a common code of conduct and manners. Thus, narratives have also been called, “equipments of living”. By “organizing and synthesizing multiple and scattered events in time and space”, human beings “come to know, understand and make sense of the world” around them, and forge their social identities. A corpus of common literature, language, traditions, beliefs and values help forge groups, organizations, religious communities, political groups and movements as well as nations. At the same time, both literary and non-literary narratives tread the borderline between fiction and nonfiction and create a “fictionality of reality” that is often difficult to decode and separate.Īs stated above, narratives bind people together into a socio-cultural and political fraternity, with common traditions, values and a distinctive sense of identity. Highly developed social and political narratives even provide “organizing framework for action”. Powerful narratives create myths, legends and heroes, bestowing esteem and pride in an individual or a group and help develop collective identity and cultural ethos. Stories grab public attention easily and remain in collective consciousness much longer than expository treatises, as they are easy to memorize. Stories and narratives are found in all cultures and are understood by all humans, irrespective of their level of education or mode of upbringing. Experts of narrative studies or ‘narratology’ have developed a concept called ‘Homo Narrans’ that explores the way human beings shape their world through the stories they tell. Thus, narratives are essential not only for constructing fantastic works of fiction, but also for providing causal explanations of radical philosophical concepts as well as mathematical and scientific summations. In brilliant minds, the faculty finds underlying rhymes and reasons even in the most heterogeneous of objects, events and concepts that leads to the creation of not only great works of art, but also of brilliant mathematical discoveries and breakthroughs in science. This is an almost continuous exercise of human thought and consciousness. The human mind has an innate tendency to make narrative connections between events, people and ideas both within the space-time construct and out of it. Stories and narratives have been in existence since the beginning of human communication and have helped in developing faculties of perception and comprehension, as well as in the formulation of language itself.Īccording to Carl Jung - widely regarded as co-founder of modern psycho-analytical movement along with Sigmund Freud-“Narration is part of human consciousness itself, as is manifest in our natural faculty to construct dreams and to develop and resonate with legends and mythical archetypes”. "Narrative' may sound like a fancy literary word, but it is actually the foundation of all strategy, upon which all else – policy, rhetoric and action – is built.” *The article is excerpted from my book: Countering the Radical Narrative, now available on MP-IDSA website for free download.
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