Narrative analysis is a research approach that focuses on stories told by people. The analyst explores the connection between descriptive tools and the general comprehension of the storyteller by the storyteller.
Before the advent of narrative analysis, the researcher wondered: what is happening in the life of this person. Narrative analysts ask questions about how the narrative text is structured and why it is so constructed. Narrative analysis allows us to understand how people present themselves and their experience (for themselves and others).
Stories that people create
A narrative is a coherent story containing facts and events. In the story, real or imagined, there are characters who are included in the plot by the author. The relationship of the elements of a narrative is determined by its meaning, which can be judged only by understanding the ending of the narrative.
Simply put, all narrative elements are used by the narrator to bring the story to an end, so it is the ending that brings these elements to existence. This fact suggests that a person before the story knows the purpose and meaning of his story. Indeed, if a person did not know the meaning of history, he would not be able to choose what is essential for his story and what can be omitted.
Key elements and characteristics of a narrative:
- characters and actions of the story can be made up;
- elements of the narrative are united by a causal relationship;
- it is based on a solid plot;
- the narrative should contain the author’s point of view, which is often the “moral of the story”.
Historians were the first to use the concept of narrative. Initially, it was understood as “interpretation of a certain aspect of the world from a certain position” in a specific socio-cultural context. But the essence of narrative - the plot - has been studied very carefully and scrupulously by philologists.
The concept of narrative has proven to be in demand in many fields of science and even benefits marketing.
The role of narrative
Regardless of the field of science, when it comes to narrative, they do not always mean the objective basis of the story (pure facts and reality), but the storyteller’s work — what facts he saw, how he connected them to the story, what meaning he put into the story.
Each person sees something happening in his own way. A person acts depending on his own life experience and ideas about the world around him. And if a person does not see the opportunities that open to him with a new situation, then he will not be able to use them.
Each person conceptualizes his life, himself, relations with other people with the help of narratives. Without them, no one could remember anything, and it would be impossible to reflect on the world. Without a narrative, experience for a person would fall apart into a meaningless set of facts from which it is impossible to extract anything.
What can the text do? Stories that people create
Writing a story is a creative process. A person’s personal history is only a version of his real life. A person, talking about some significant event, does not retell everything that actually happened, but what he considered important.
Ricoeur emphasizes that experience is not given to a person directly, that is, an event can only be understood through a narrative of it. The personality of a person leaves an imprint on how he sees, selects and structures the facts. For example, one person in difficult circumstances will focus on his helplessness and catastrophic nature of what is happening, another, in the same circumstances, may perceive complexity as an occasion for development.
Rosenweld and Ochberg believe that personal stories are not only a way to tell (to others or to themselves) about their lives, they make a big contribution to how a person eventually becomes, how he sees himself. The text tells about us and changes us.
On the one hand, an image is formed from stories, on the other hand, a person affects himself when he composes a story. It turns out that every time people, telling their personal stories, supplement the narrative stencil through which they see the world. You can compare the narrative with a carved picture in a magic lantern, and a person’s look with light, the world is the walls on which images appear.
Story analysis
Narrative analysis appeared in response to researchers' awareness of the independence of the text. The focus is on the elements of the narrative (the connection and nature of the events, the attributes of the heroes accompanying the plot, the narrator’s assessments, etc.) and the role that he plays in the formation of human self-consciousness.
Unstructured interviews are an example of narrative analysis. The narrative approach is actively used in sociology, anthropology, psychology, history and other fields of science.
The development of the narrative approach is associated with the interpretative turn that has taken place in the social sciences. The theory of interpretation involves working with representation - a pronounced subjective experience of a person. Interpretation is the search for meaning that lurks in a story told by a person.
A person can talk about some minor event that happened to him recently. The analyst, on the other hand, finds out what strategies a person uses when he selects what he tells, what sense he sees in the story. Someone in a minor event will see confirmation of their luck, and the other, on the contrary, will emphasize the aggressiveness of the world and its injustice. All this is hidden behind the words, inside the narrative.
A narrative analyst is a detective story, tearing through the explicit, open meaning of a story, to its real meaning for the narrator. The analyst restores volumetric meaning by its light outline in the narrative.
The interpretation process, which is influenced by many factors (the subjectivity of the narrator, the subjectivity of the analyst, different levels and the number of hidden meanings in the story), can be attributed to the disadvantages of the method. Rich opportunities for obtaining material for analysis are undoubted advantages. A person encounters material for narrative analysis in almost every interaction with others. Even an overheard conversation is most often a narrative. Therefore, there are a lot of materials for analysis.
How to analyze a story
Narrative analysis involves working with the structure of history. The analyst’s first task is to highlight the “body” of the narrative. The difficulty is that the moment of the beginning and end of the narrative is difficult to determine. Not every narrator uses introductory words that clearly indicate the beginning and end. To determine the narrative, you can use the signs according to Kalmykova and Mergentaler:
- a sequence of events leads to a change in characters;
- a clear definition of the location and time of the event and its participants;
- a short story preceding the main narrative;
- the point after which the narrative returns to some previous situation;
- direct speech of the characters.
The second task is to determine the structure of the narrative. According to Labov, there are six structural elements:
- a brief introduction to the course of the story;
- certainty of place, time, action, characters;
- causal relationship between events;
- the narrator’s point of view about what is happening in the story;
- resolving the general situation that the person was talking about;
- return to the point in time from which the narrative (code) began.
Greymas, based on Propp's classification, describes five functions that can exhaustively encode the plot: contract, struggle, communication, presence, quick movement. Bruner identifies other structural elements: agent, action, goal, means, environment, problem.
Shank is completely limited to three questions: who, what, and why did. Terekhova illustrates the convenience of Pierce's semiotic triads for interpreting narrative (the representative is the sign, the object - to which the sign, the interpreter refers).
The third task of a narrative analyst is to build and analyze a circuit. The image of the relationship of the elements of the narrative in the scheme helps to move away from the explicit meaning and focus on the structure. After completing the analysis, the researcher suggests the reason for the appearance of the narrative, its functions and the logic of change.
The fate of the text
Narrative analysis in sociology is multilayered; each layer corresponds to a certain mood and action of the narrator and analyst. For example, an unstructured interview:
- at the time of perception, the narrator constructs the world: selects the important, rejects the unimportant (the narrator selects the facts according to preferences and fears);
- at the moment of representation, the narrator constructs a narrative, sets the meaning and pace of the narration, edits the original story for the audience, self-presents;
- at the time of recording, the analyst selects the information - he is already starting the interpretation process (since the analyst makes a choice which information to record and which not);
- when the analyst transgresses to the analysis of texts, he falls into the grip of the need to bring many fragments of the interview to a single meaning, direction, now he needs to create his own narrative, which will include an analysis of the narratives of others;
- the analyst releases the text, and now everyone can explain the interpretation of others.
It is easy to imagine how much the personal motives of the analyst and narrator can obscure the interpretation process. At each stage of working with history, the narrator and analyst exist in the social field, therefore they construct their representations, paying attention to group norms.
Summary
Narrative text analysis:
- It studies how people create and use stories to interpret the world.
- Does not consider history as a source of information about the real world and human experience.
- It implies that a narrative is an interpretation, a version of life through which people form their identities, self-represent themselves, understand the world and other people.
Characteristic features of data collection:
- Qualitative approach (for example, semi-structured and unstructured interviews);
- the analyst says little; his main role is to listen;
- there is no preference between imaginary and real stories.
Narrative analysis is based on the principles of structural analysis, so any scheme can be used to work with the text to highlight significant elements in it. Labov's method is one of the most popular among researchers.
Narrative analysis is a promising research method that allows you to open the text, get closer to the true motives and desires of the narrator. Criticism of the narrative approach is connected with the complexity of the interpretation process.
The importance of narrative analysis for people is hard to overestimate. It is thanks to narrative analysts that a person can look honestly at his motives and goals, understand how he slows down himself, what kind of image he has. Honesty and understanding of one's limitations is the foundation of a happy and fulfilling life.