Hinchman's 'Life As Narrative'

The term ‘narrative’ is diversely understood in popular culture and in the field of social research. By and large the term ‘narrative’ is understood as narration of events and/or stories. According to Hinchman & Hinchman, “Narratives (stories) in the human sciences should be defined provisionally as discourses with a clear sequential order that connect events in a meaningful way for a definite audience and thus offer insights about the world and/or people’s experiences of it” (Goodson and Gill, 4). When narratives are understood in the form of stories, as mentioned in an article “Life as Narrative’ by Bruner, the Russian formalists have distinguished three aspects of story: fabula, sjuzet and forma – meaning theme, discourse and genre respectively. The first two, i.e. fabula and sjuzet are explained by modern literary theorists as the timeless and the sequenced aspects of the story. Sjuzet weaves this timeless fabula and creates a linguistic tapestry of lived experiences that are expressed through forma. Integration of theme, discourse and genre in relation to Hinchman’s definition, sjuzet organizes events in a sequential

In this sense, it becomes a fundamental genre where in our real or probable experiences are visualized, verbalized, and constructed in sequential manner. As described in Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies,

Within contemporary theory, narration is understood as a rhetorical mode established by a writer that presents the reader with the characters, dialogues, actions, settings, and events that constitute a fictional story or factual report. In Narrative Discourse Revisited (1988), Gerad Genette constructs narration as a productive act that translates knowledge about a subject to discourse about a subject. The production of discourse is an inherent power of narration because it reports worldviews and inscribe identities. (John