On Not Expecting Too Much from Narrative

Abstract: The paper offers a mildly deflationary account of narrative, drawing attention to the minimal, thus easily satisfied, conditions of narrativity and showing that many of the more striking claims about narrative are either poorly supported or refer to distinct classes of narrative—usually literary or fictional—which provide a misleading paradigm for narration in general. An enquiry into structural, referential, pragmatic, and value‐based features of narrative helps circumscribe the limits of narration and the test case of the narrative definition of the self is examined and shown to yield rather less that is often claimed.