Meta Narrative Theory
Disclaimer: This chapter is one of the most challenging chapters for me to write, as well as one of the most important. Part of the reason for the difficulty is that I’ve tasked myself with trying to make sense of how theory in general overlays and interfaces with reality itself. The conclusions here could apply to other disciplines as well. Hope you find it interesting.
What is Narrative Theory?
What is any theory? Where does Narrative Theory fit into the landscape of academia? Is it a theory? A philosophy? A psychotherapy? A system? Does it explain? Does it make any claims? Is it falsifiable? Does it belong to science at all? It is intended to be useful?
Narrative Theory (NT) is essentially a way of mentally cutting up the world into units that make it easy to understand and, in some cases, manipulate, not to one’s personal advantage, but for greater harmony.
The universe, reality, is ultimately uniform and lacking inherent separation and separate identity. Aside from subatomic particles, the universe is essentially just a collection of the same subatomic particles (protons, neutrons, electrons, and their constituents) in different groupings and organizations. We don’t experience any of these subatomic differences, though. We experience the world of things and objects. But are the objects we encounter really different from one another? Is the table really different from the chair that sits under it? Is the coffee really that different from the cup that holds it? Is carbon paper different from the carbon that makes up the coffee beans? The answer is no. While not identical, they are fundamentally the same.
Our minds carve up the world for convention and ease of communication, but these divisions aren’t inherent to reality. We assign words to things so we can ask for a hammer when we need a hammer, and. a nail when we need a nail. But reality is essentially a continuous, though infinitely elaborate series of combinations of the same few ingredients, like the menu at Taco Bell.
So what does this all have to do with NT? NT is a vocabulary and nomenclature that helps carve up the world of human experience, specifically in the area of thinking, how we build our subjective world, and how that world interacts with other people’s worlds. The vocabulary of NT is meant to illuminate the components of our experience (and their aggregates) as we experience them. Meaning, the theory will rarely delve into neuroscience of abstract explanations related to subconscious motives that you aren’t privy to. (I’m lookin’ at you, Psychodynamic Theory.)
NT is not meant to be a theory of everything. It doesn’t explain every aspect of thinking. In fact, I would hesitate to say it explains anything at all. It’s merely a system for parsing out the salient aspects of our every day experience. But you’ll hopefully find it useful.
The main focus of NT is, not surprisingly, the narrative. A narrative is simply a way we see something, some target. That target can be anything, an art show, a coworker, an political event, a lover, the future, and importantly, your self. These narratives are constantly fluctuating with time, with our mood, with interactions with others, even with what we eat and how much sleep we get. In NT we’ll use these ideas to build a fancy system for explaining a large swath of human thinking and behavior.