GLOSARIO DE TERMINOS.

The narratives that we create form a coherence and unity from the chaotic elements that make up our pre-understandings of life. Advocates of the thesis that we view our lives as stories, see constructing stories out of our experiences as helping to provide a form to our otherwise formless existence, giving shape to our lives and thereby imbuing them with meaning: ‘Emplotment endows the experience of time with meaning’ (Ezzy 1998:244). While literary scholar James Phelan does not view his

154 own life as a ‘single coherent grand narrative’, he nonetheless finds that the application of narrative to short episodes in his life means he is able to identify and provide coherence to ‘more manageable clusters of events and their significances’ (2005:209). Literary scholar James L. Battersby also views story-telling as a suitable medium for structuring shorter episodes of our lives: ‘if an episode can be discriminated [in time], it can be presented in a narrative’ (2006:31). The tendency to find form and structure in our lives is, Battersby suggests, seemingly natural for human beings:

We are form-finding creatures by native endowment, it seems. Making sense is what we are obliged to do, and making sense is a form-finding activity, and where there is form there is story potential (2006:38).

In telling me about their lives, all the participants found story-forms in their experiences of the past and in their anticipations of the future that enabled them to construct wider narratives that provided coherence, shape and meaning to their present self-interpretations. But only two of the participants viewed the whole of their lives in narrative form. Abigail and Stacey took the opportunity provided by the photography task and the interview to tell me about their lives understood as a narrative whole, both making use of the term ‘life story’ to frame their understandings of what it was they were telling me.

Abigail chose to take a photograph of a clock, which elicited the wish ‘that the clock could go back’ so she could return to a time before her family became ‘a bit split up’. Some of the happiest ‘moments’ in her life had been those spent with her family during past Christmases, which she thought ‘kind of make up your childhood’. But the photograph also prompted a reflection on her imagined future, and the ability to move between past and future was important for her understanding

155 of life as a story of journeying or questing. Lasting happiness was central to this narrative: ‘at the end of the day, once you’ve made your life and you’ve settled it and you’re happy with it, I think that’s when you’ve completed your journey.’ The story of her quest so far incorporated rituals and festivals that marked moments of growing up and other important stages on the journey. Other projected rites of passage included marriage, which she saw as a ‘whole new beginning’ in life, but she was disappointed that there were not many opportunities to enjoy these types of rites of passage as a young person. She thought that it would be nice if ‘our country’ had a similar celebration to the Jewish ritual of Bar Mitzvah because ‘it’s another step in growing up’ that could mark a transitional period and important episode in the story of her life.

Abigail often reflected on how other people might interpret or read her ‘life story’ as a whole. She had taken a photograph of herself looking into a mirror to represent the importance of other people’s impressions of what she was like ‘as an actual person’. This was not because she was overly concerned about what others thought of her appearance, but rather that they might think of her ‘as someone who is going to achieve something’. She was also interested in the lives of others, imagining that they too might have similar stories to tell:

I always think when we have assembly [at school], I look around and I think all of these people, they all have their own little story, and there’s seven billion of us on the earth and everyone’s got their own little story and it would be nice to learn about other people’s stories.

But underlying this interest seemed to be a need for reassurance that her thoughts and experiences were similar to those of other people. ‘I’ve got my own story to tell

156 about my life and I’m sure everyone else does’, she said. ‘I know what I’m doing and I wonder if it’s similar to everyone else, the way people think.’

Abigail’s interest in telling a life story, as well as her concern about other people might think of it, was shared by Stacey, whose desire for her life to be remembered as an example for others seemed to be reflected in the way she approached the photography task and interview. Significant people in her life included her adoptive parents, who helped her think about what was right and wrong by talking about the different paths it was possible to follow in life. Taking the ‘right path’ would mean ‘going up’ and ‘achieving everything’, and Stacey was determined to lead a good life and move in this direction. But she also wanted to pass her knowledge of right and wrong on to others, which was why she wanted her life to be a ‘story’ that could be used as an example for people to follow after she had died:

I want to do good things and then that person becomes like me, the child becomes like me, and it keeps going like that and people will be, like, ‘oh, I remember’. Like, when I’m long gone and dead, that they’ll remember me, like, cos I’m a good person.

Stacey often emphasised the importance of memories and the act of remembering. She had photographed framed pictures that reminded her of past episodes in her life, because she thought she was ‘really bad at remembering’. It was important for her to be able to ‘explain them’ to others, including me, because they helped to ‘represent’ her ‘past life’, enabling her to ‘tell sort of like a story’ about happier times. It therefore sometimes seemed as if she understood the interview as an opportunity to document her story so far, which was perhaps why she concluded by saying, ‘that’s the end of my life story’.

157 A person’s ‘life story’ need not be understood as referring to their life in its entirety. Rather, it could be used to explain how a person came to be at a particular point in time, referring to the ‘internalized and evolving narrative of the self that incorporates the reconstructed past, perceived present and anticipated future’ (McAdams 1996:307). Such an understanding of the relationship between narrativity, selfhood and time is an example of what Strawson terms the ‘psychological Narrativity thesis’, which asserts that human beings ‘experience their lives as a narrative or story of some sort’ (2004:428). This involves more than simply viewing oneself as a human being with a beginning, middle and end; rather, it requires ‘some sort of relatively large-scale coherence-seeking, unity-seeking, pattern-seeking, or most generally, form-finding tendency’ (2004:441). However, this understanding of life as a narrative is not necessarily the only or most suitable way for humans to view their lives through time. While Ricoeur appears to assume that narrative is universally important for interpreting our lives, others have argued that it is something that might be best suited to his modern European and Christian perspective on life (Gallois 2007:44; Klepper 2013:15) or that the tendency to see one’s life in a narrative form is more likely amongst individuals who have a particular personality type (Strawson 2004). As Battersby notes, ‘Narrative is really but one way among many ways of talking about or construing relations between this and that’ and ‘each and every one’ can be, he says, ‘marvellously serviceable in the cause of self-representation’ (2006:39). But it is important to note that, having been invited to explain what they considered to be important in their lives, story-telling was perhaps tacitly encouraged during the interviews with participants. As Battersby notes:

158 Ask me about me, my life, about what I’m doing, where I’m going, where I’ve been, what I’ve done, what it’s like being me, and I’ll tell you a story. And I’ll do so because I had a beginning, and ever since I can remember I’ve been on a journey, moving relentlessly forward (2006:37).

And yet people vary in the extent to which they make use of form-finding and story- telling in their lives. Some people may not view their lives as a grand narrative, but still find that certain episodes from their past are made more coherent when structured as a story. But, to the extent that participants chose to adopt a narratival approach to their self-interpretations during their interviews, Ricoeur’s work on how

narrative construction relates to perceptions of time elucidates in more detail how

participants’ past experiences and anticipated futures can be ‘alive’ (Strawson 2004:432) in their present self-interpretations.