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Why narrative?

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 Why narrative?

Michael Bamberg
Clark University

This article addresses recent contestations of the role of narrative inquiry in the
field of identity analysis and in qualitative inquiry more generally. In contrast to
essentializing tendencies in the field of narrative inquiry (which have been con-
tested under the headers of narrative exceptionalism, narrative imperialism, and
narrative necessity), I am reiterating my proposal to theorize narrative inquiry as
narrative practice (formerly ‘small story approach’) within which narratives and
narrative inquiry present a more modest but thoroughly viable contribution.

Keywords: identity dilemmas, narrative exceptionalism, narrative imperialism,

narrative necessity, narrative practice

Let me start with the question whether there is some basic agreement or lowest
common denominator (maybe also in a least sophisticated jargon) among people
working on, with or through stories for why narrative.1 Probably we would agree
that our shared interest lies, broadly speaking, in what people do when they engage
in storytelling:2 Why they use stories in the first place and what they accomplish
through storytelling that is different from other kinds of “spoken or unspoken ac-
tivity” (Atkinson, 2010, p. 661). So we typically may take a closer look at (i) where
and how people “break into storytelling mode,” i.e., how storytelling differs from
what was going on and/or talked about before; (ii) how storytellers manage their
telling in terms of the formal (structural) properties of how they weave place, time
and characters (content) into plot-like themes, how they manage to hold the floor
throughout their storytelling activity, and keep their audience engaged; and (iii),
how storytellers end their storytelling activity and return to the here-and-now of
the story-telling situation.3 In brief, and as a form of common agreement, we, as
narrative inquirers, are interested in how storytelling activities are (contextually)

Requests for further information should be directed to: Michael Bamberg, Department of
Psychology, Clark University, Worcester, MA 01610. Email: [email protected].

Narrative Inquiry 22:1 (2012), 202–210.  doi 10.1075/ni.22.1.16bam

issn 1387–6740 / e-issn 1569–9935 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
 Why narrative? 203

embedded, what they consist of, and how we can take their form, content, and
context as cues toward an interpretation what the particular story meant — what
it was used for and what functions it was supposed to serve.
But why center on stories and storytelling activities? Why not other speech
activities or genres, such as descriptions of people, objects or places, rationally
laid-out arguments (in monologues or as interactions between people), lists of
objects or events (as in route directions, recipes, or in cv’s), or profiles/inventories
of personality characteristics (as in online dating or on other social network sites).
What is so special about stories that narrative inquirers feel they owe a privileged
status over other speech (and non-speech) activities? Surveying cumulatively re-
cent journals and edited volumes, the narrative terrain seems to have become in-
creasingly contested (see for instance the debates following Anderson, 2006, and
Thomas, 2010; the discussions around Sartwell, 2000, 2006; and Strawson, 2004;
and in addition contributions that surfaced in previous issues of Narrative, cf.
Eakin 2005, 2006; Phelan, 2005; and in Narrative Inquiry, cf. Atkinson & Delamont,
2006; Bamberg, 2003, 2006; Georgakopoulou, 2006; Juzwick, 2010; Rymes, 2010;
Westlund, 2011; Woods, 2011). Since there is no space to work through these con-
testations in more detail, I will only sketch the reasons that narrative researchers
have claimed for their endeavors in the recent past.
Apart from the claim that narrative is ubiquitous, and plays a central role
in literate traditions and literary theory, narrative researchers typically focus on
narrative form and narrative content as legitimatizations for narrative inquiry.
Narratives are about people (characters), who act (events) in space and time; typi-
cally across a sequence of events (temporality). The narrative form (structure) is
said to hold the content together (what the story is about — its plot) and sequen-
tially arrange the story units (orientation, complication, resolution, closure) into a
more or less coherent whole (cf. Bamberg, 2012 for more detail). The characters are
typically presented from a third- or a first-person perspective. However, when a
first-person perspective is taken to refer to the speaker, as usual for personal nar-
ratives, narrative inquirers begin to divide into different camps: those who con-
tinue to apply the same interpretive procedures as when dealing with other stories,
treating storytelling as an activity like other speech activities that deserve to be in-
vestigated in their own rights; and those who treat these kinds of first-person sto-
ries as self disclosures that reveal aspects of the speaker’s autobiography and sub-
jectivity, i.e., as speakers’ answers to the who-am-I question (cf. Bamberg 2011a).
It is precisely at this point, that narratives for some narrative inquirers become the
privileged, exceptional genre that serves the purpose of identity inquiry like no
other (speech) activity; and it is typically here that references kick in to claims by
Bruner, MacIntyre, Polkinghorne. Sarbin, Taylor and others with regard to narra-
tives’ life-like tendencies or life’s narrative tendencies (cf. Bamberg, 2006 a); where

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company

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204 Michael Bamberg

it seems to be assumed that the stories we tell about ourselves is how we conduct
our lives — is who we are.4 While watered-down versions of narrative exceptional-
ism draw on parallels between narrative core concepts such as the construction of
characters in space and time, or particular (cultural) storylines and life themes (e.g.
accomplishments and accidents, childhood and family relationships, illness, love,
and turning points) which may serve the functions of scaffolds for socialization5
and lives to-be-lived, stronger versions of the exceptionality thesis anchor narra-
tive as a key concept in human evolution (e.g. Easterlin, 2012), human existence
and reflexivity (e.g. Atkins, 2008; Freeman, 2011), and the human mind and inten-
tionality (e.g. Herman, 2009; Schachter, 2011). Arguments against the universality
of a stronger exceptionality claim were raised by Sartwell (2000) and Strawson
(2004), who caution that not everyone may share the compulsion to weave their
lives into a coherent story, and have led to suggestions to look elsewhere for illu-
minations of “the rich and messy domain of human interaction” (Woods, 2011 a,
p. 402). Our own critique, that biographical accounts are typically the artifact of
(psychotherapeutically rooted) interviewing strategies that orient participants to
withdraw from everyday social-interactive encounters of small-story telling, and
ponder (if not ruminate) as a monad over the meaning of one’s life (cf. Bamberg
2006 a; Bamberg & Zielke, 2007), has resulted in suggestions to re-orient narrative
inquiry toward a more general scrutiny of narrative practices (Bamberg, 2011c).
Let me take the remainder of this contribution to sketch out what this re-
orientation vis-à-vis everyday storytelling practices looks like, how it affects the
study of identity, and how narratives/stories can be dealt with more adequate and
realistically within this type of narrative inquiry (cf. for more detail Bamberg
2011c). My focus will be on three realms of identity construction within which
narrative practices may play a role, but where they contribute in an optional and
supplementary fashion to the exploration of sense of self and identity. I will end
my contribution with brief recommendations for a more modest though neverthe-
less quite effective narrative inquiry.
The three realms of identity construction are best regarded as dilemmatic
spaces; spaces where actors (usually speakers) have choices that require a good
deal of navigation. First, in our daily practices, we continuously mark ourselves as
different, similar or same with respect to others. Integrating and differentiating a
sense of who we are vis-à-vis others is a process of moment-to-moment naviga-
tions, and stories about self and others are good candidates to practice this from
early on. However, stories are not the only candidates. Descriptions, practical rea-
soning or theoretical discourses may be equally important discursive practices
for developing and changing the membership constructions that divide and unite
people along affiliations and alignments in terms of being just like them (belonging)
— or different (as in being special and unique). The second dilemmatic space often

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 Why narrative? 205

is termed ‘agency;’ and although it seems as if agency is something that we have,

even if only in the form of a capacity, I am suggesting to view it along the lines of
navigating the sameness⇔difference dilemma as a space where we navigate two
directions of opposing fit: one from world-to-person and the other from person-
to-world: While it is possible to view a sense of who we are as passive recipients
of influences (typically from biological or outside forces such as parents, teachers,
or culture), it also is possible to view world as a product of self (where the self is
constructed as highly agentive).6 The navigation of agency⇔passivity/recipiency
as a dilemmatic space becomes particularly relevant in presentations of characters
as involved and responsible — as for claims to success and self-aggrandizement —
versus denials of culpability in mishaps or wrongdoings. Again, narratives about
(past) actions are good candidates to find and practice navigations of this sort;
though other speech (and non-speech) activities also lend themselves to accom-
plish these navigation processes. Third, when relating past to present, we can ei-
ther highlight constancy, i.e., declare that we still are the exact same person; or we
can present ourselves as having undergone some gradual (continuous) changes or
radical (discontinuous) breaks resulting in a different, new persona — changes we
can frame in terms of having been transformed, having grown, developed, deterio-
rated, fallen apart… The dilemma of how to navigate the connection of a sense of
who we used to be with how we want to position ourselves for the here-and-now is
often seen as closely coupled to issues of acquiring or developing self-worth, hav-
ing deteriorated and become useless, and of striving for (or losing out on) the life
one would like to live.7 Again, the question forces itself to mind whether storytell-
ing is an exceptional territory without which it would not be possible to navigate
the constancy⇔change dilemma, since it also seems to be possible to contrast past
and here-and-now by way of simply stating non-narrative claims.
Before revisiting this last statement and reposition storytelling cautiously as
more than just a good candidate for accounting for constancy and change, let
me briefly summarize the argument thus far: First, identity and sense of self are
lumped together as made of actions in our daily practices and routines that con-
tribute to becoming answers to the who-am-I question.8 Second, three realms
(spaces) have been unhinged as particularly interesting and relevant for answering
the who-am-I question in terms of navigating between two opposing alternatives:
(i) sameness⇔difference between self and other; (ii) world⇔person direction of
fit; and (iii) constancy⇔change across time, where the first two require choices
that do not have to account for temporal dimensions. Third, identity claims within
these different realms can be made (and usually are made) by way of different
actions, with discursive inter-actions (largely defined) in the domain of the ev-
eryday somewhat central, but not exclusive. Fourth, when it comes to the role of
narratives/storytelling for the construction of identity, there is no reason to give

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company

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206 Michael Bamberg

this type of activity any special or exceptional status over other discursive (and
non-discursive) actions, although storytelling practices serve as good resources
and opportune practice grounds for (i) positioning characters in relation to other
characters (sameness⇔difference), (ii) for positioning characters as agentive or
as recipient (world⇔person direction of fit), and (iii) for accounting for changes
in the main character’s history that did or did not occur (constancy⇔change).
Note that in all this, it doesn’t matter whether speakers disclose events or actions
of their own lives (let alone tell their whole life-stories); whether they tell events
of other people’s lives; or whether they refer to fictional characters. Rather, the
way these characters are constructed and positioned in the there-and-then of the
story-world indexes the way speakers/actors position a sense of coming across in
the here-and-now — as when answering the who-am-I question. And it is partici-
pation in these practices that may result in a sense of who we are, where “telling
our stories” is something quite mundane — nothing to be elevated or glorified into
special status.
Having clarified and somewhat downgraded the role of storytelling in the con-
struction of identity, and I think it is necessary to state this as clearly and with the
least jargon possible, there nevertheless seems to be something special when it
comes to identity-claims with regard to change (or constancy). Claims that one no
longer is the person one used to be, that one has changed, but also claims that one
is still the same, as in “nothing changed” (cf. John Edwards’ confession, Bamberg,
2010), most often are responded to by “how come — tell me?” and seem to require
some kind of explication or accounting. It is here, interactively, where storytell-
ing activities typically kick in and serve the function of navigating that in spite of
changes, one still may be trustworthy (cf. Bamberg, 2010, in press).
When it comes to privileging storytelling as exceptional space for identity
practices, it appears that navigations of the constancy⇔change dilemma have been
lavished with more attention than the other two identity dilemmas. While iden-
tity navigations between sameness⇔difference and between the two directions
of fit of the person⇔world dilemma do not require diachronicity as an essential
prerequisite, navigations between constancy⇔change do require the correlation
of two events in time — which some narrative inquirers take to be the minimal
definition of a story (cf. Labov & Waletzky, 1997). Ongoing discussions of the
relevance of time and temporality as core concepts in narratology (cf. Freeman,
1998; Herman, Phelan, Rabinowitz, Richardson & Warhol, 2012; Ricoeur 1984)
further corroborate the relevance of diachronicity/temporality and document how
easily this distinguishing characteristic can be carried over into analogies between
narrative theorizing and psychological continuity theories where change and the
maintenance of constancy are taken to be the real challenges to personhood (cf.
Schechtman, 2001).

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 Why narrative? 207

It is interesting to see how this kind of ‘temporal continuity claim’ has recently
been pushed further into something much stronger, what Strawson has termed the
“ethical narrativity thesis” (Strawson, 2004). For instance, Freeman (2010) argues:
“it is only … through narrative reflection … that one is able to move, surely and
securely, in the direction of the good” (p. 208), and Frank (2010) states similarly:
“without stories, there would be no sense of action as ethical” (p. 665).9 Atkins
(2008) elaborates the ethical narrativity thesis somewhat by taking agency out of
the practical realm (space) of world⇔person navigation, fusing it with diachronic-
ity into what she calls ‘agency continuity’ to become the core component to narra-
tive identity. It seems that Bochner (2010, this issue) wholeheartedly would under-
write this perspective by declaring the work with narratives as distinctly essential
to explorations into the condition of human finitude, human suffering and human
happiness — making it “autoethnography’s ethical calling” (Bochner, 2012).
In sum, what the claims to narrative exceptionalism have in common is the
attempt to endow the person with something like a “narrative essence”10 — some-
thing that anchors narrative ‘deep’ in the existence of the person, and ties the per-
son and his/her existence to narrative as the roots of the human condition. In
contrast, and as I have laid out elsewhere in more detail, when people engage in
storytelling — whether they are about whole lives or a moment that is captured
in four seconds (Bamberg, in preparation), whether these stories are about oth-
ers or whether they topicalize/thematize moments of the life of the speaker (as in
self-disclosures), whether they are fictional or not — when engaging in storytell-
ing, people point indexically to how they anchor their position from where they
want to be understood. Of course, these positions are situational, and they may
change from one interactional setting to the next; but they are constitutive of so-
cial practices and repertoires (first with others in interaction, then, in a secondary
fashion, in writing, or in rare occasions of talking to oneself). Shifting the empha-
sis in narrative inquiry from the contents of self-disclosures to narrative practice
and identity navigation (Bamberg, 2011c), no longer requires claims of narrative
exceptionality or necessity and positions its status as a viable but more modest ap-
proach to identity research within the larger field of qualitative inquiry.

Notes

1.  People working on, with or through stories covers practitioners (e.g. physicians, lawyers,
counselors, consultants or therapists), storytellers (e.g. novelists, biographers or autobiogra-
phers, including autoethnographers), and story analysts (such as ethnographers <again, includ-
ing autoethnographers>, memory researchers, historiographers and researchers in the general

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company

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208 Michael Bamberg

fields of sense of self or identity). Thus, I conceive of the field of narrative inquiry rather broadly
and prefer to enter from its spoken traditions — rather than written.

2.  In order to shift the focus onto storytelling, I use narrative and story as synonyms.

3.  Note that what usually is captured by the truistic definition of narratives — that they have a be-
ginning, a middle, and an end, here is redescribed in terms of storytelling activity. Consequently,
what reader-response criticism attempts to capture in literary theory, in oral narrative inquiry is
first of all the immediate context of interaction, where stories usually are directly ‘responded’ to–
e.g. they are validated or modified in second stories, but also potentially disregarded and treated
as irrelevant to the ongoing activity (cf. Jefferson, 1978, p. 229).

4.  One often-quoted passage may suffice: “self is a perpetually rewritten story … in the end we
become the autobiographical narratives we tell about our lives” (Bruner, 1987, p. 15).

5.  Hutto’s narrative practice hypothesis is a case in point here, suggesting that storytelling func-
tions as a socialization practice into children’s ability to ‘read’ others’ thoughts and feelings, and
make sense of their actions (cf. Gallagher & Hutto, in press).

6.  On July 13, 2012, when Barak Obama publicly declared: “If you’ve been successful, you didn’t
get there on your own”, he appealed to the world-to-person direction of fit and the role teachers
and social networks play in making young people successful (Obama, 2012); while the Romney-
For-President and Ohio Business Entrepreneurs organization chose to insist on the opposite
navigation technique, according to which individual actions lead to success as the product of a
person-to-world direction of fit with individualism and uniqueness at its core (Romney, 2012).

7.  It should be noted that navigations of the previous two dilemmas are not void of evaluative
stances. Navigating, and thereby bringing off a sense of self, vis-à-vis others and vis-à-vis the
world⇔self-direction of fit (agency) are by no means neutral.

8.  Note that this definition of practical identities — with daily in situ and in vivo human inter-
actions as the empirical site where identities are brought off and practiced — contrasts starkly
with identity or sense of self as human essences to be researched in their interiorities (cf. also
Bamberg, 2011a; 2011b).

9.  see also Schachter’s contribution, this issue.

10.  As in Bruner’s (1990) original distinction between narrative and paradigmatic knowing — a
distinction he withdrew twelve years later (Bruner 2002).

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