Our lives through storytelling

Antoine Roquentin, the protagonist of “Nausea" by Jean Paul Sartre is talking about the subject of “adventure” when he says, "For the most banal to even become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story."

Joan Didion states, "We live entirely . . . , by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience." The "narrative line" is the plot of a story.  A story links events and actions of characters, plot adds the dimension of cause and effect. So Didion is saying that we must not only tell the story of our lives we must also impose a plot so we can explain the cause of our actions and the effect those actions have.  Our story and its plot is the way we make sense of our lives.

Sartre and Didion are both arguing that we see everything that happens to us through the stories we tell and that for these stories to explain things fully they must contain a plot. Most people tell stories without calling them stories. Observe yourself and others and see if you think this is true.


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