Contingent Narratives: Fears and Tremblings

Abstract

Two brief studies are presented concerned with narrative thinking in relation to unpredicted immediate experience – ie. with what I call contingent narratives. The first study is a heuristic inquiry into the experience of travel/motion fear, and the second study is concerned with experiential accounts of an earthquake that occurred in Leicestershire in October 2001. The data were examined within the framework of Bruner’s (1996) “nine universals of narrative realities”. The striking feature that emerges from both of these studies is the way in which someone will immediately engage with “narrativizing” the event in question. A model of the narrative construction of reality is discussed, which proposes that contingent narratives are a dominant feature of everyday lived experience, and consequently quickly become embedded into our memory of events