Most people assume that our experie

Most people assume that our experience is shapeless and disparate until we give it form. One of the most common ways of speaking about this act of giving order to experience is as “narrating” events. Indeed, one of the reasons that narrative has had durability and continued popularity as a critical concept is because it seems to describe a concrete and ubiquitous act of meaning-making in everyday life. When people speak about narrative in this way, what they most have in mind is the ability of narrative to create plots, to organize events into a meaningful temporal and causal sequence. Although we might say that in telling such stories we create characters and settings, adopt the role of a narrator, perhaps even posit possible worlds—all those textual acts that we associate with narratology—the key to narrative’s ability to transcend literary study is how it organizes time. Narrative seems to take the disparate events of life— everything from everyday experience to broadly significant historical events—and construct a meaningful pattern.