Status Updates From Narrative (The New Critical...

Storytelling is not a matter of folktales, literature or media but is deeply embedded in modes of interpersonal communication, bound up with the expression of desires, needs and the relations of the participants in the interaction. (p. 214)

Narrative has been crucial for human existence because it has been the pre-eminent form of representation, allowing the world to be apprehended in a specific form by humans, recording the details of a culture, but also legitimating own arrangement or re-presentation of that culture. (p.168)

Generally, narrative is not so much absent in modernism but is put to different or more detailed purposes: 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' initially seeks to reproduce the thought-patterns of infancy; Marcel Proust's narrative are concerned with the evocation of memories and sensations; Kafka's novels depict a nightmare world with a heightened sense of domination by the alien structures of society. (p.152)

First, the narrative of imperialism professes a civilizing tendency but is haunted by the desire to exploit; second, this is consonant with a general psychology in the West which seeks to repress troublesome aspects of existence such as sexuality and the bodies of others; third, the narrative of 'Heart of Darkness' dramatizes the increasing early 20th-century concern that human identity is not unified and coherent.

Chandler stated his contention that the reader is not interested in the fact that a man got killed in a story, but that at the moment of his death he was trying unsuccessfully to pick up a paper-clip. Simple narration of events, then is subordinate here to detailed description. If Chandler is correct, it suggests that there is something about digression in narrative that is potentially pleasurable for readers. (p104)