Have you noticed how the word “narrative” has become fashionable? It is now used for anything at all: an advertising slogan, a political statement, a company’s history, your own post on social media. “That’s our narrative”, “that’s his narrative”, “change the narrative”. A convenient word. So convenient for anything that it has stopped being precise about anything.
And yet a narrative is not a vague cloud of meanings. It is a mechanism. It has parts: the events it is assembled from; the roles someone plays in it; the plot that ties one thing to another; and the point of view from which all of it is presented. Take any story apart into those four components and you will suddenly see what you did not notice while it rolled past you as a single stream.
Try it right now. Take a sentence you said about yourself to someone today. “I’m just made that way.” “I had no choice.” Where is the event here, and where is the role you assigned yourself? Who is the author of this point of view — you, or the person who lent it to you long ago?
Whoever sees the assembly stops being a part inside someone else’s machine.
And which story of your own have you long been accepting whole — without once taking it apart?