Narrative analysis is an exploratory approach that focuses on stories told by people. The analyst explores the connection between descriptive means and the narrator's overall understanding of his story.
Before the advent of narrative analysis, the researcher wondered what was going on in this person's life. Narrative analysts ask questions about how narrative text is structured and why it is structured the way it is. Narrative analysis allows you to understand how people present themselves and their experiences (to themselves and others).
Stories people create
Narrative is a coherent story containing facts and events. In a story, real or imaginary, there are characters who are included in the plot by the author. The connection between the elements of the narrative is determined by its meaning, which can be judged only by comprehending the ending of the narrative.
To put it simply, all elements of the narrative are used by the narrator to bring the story to a close, so it is the ending that brings these elements into 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 him.story, and what can be omitted.
Key elements and characteristics of the narrative:
- characters and actions of the story may be fictitious;
- narrative elements are united by cause and effect;
- based on a solid plot;
- the narrative should include the author's point of view, which is often the "moral of the story".
Historians were the first to use the concept of narrative. It was originally understood as "the interpretation of some aspect of the world from a certain position" in a specific socio-cultural context. But the essence of the narrative - the plot - has been studied by philologists for a very long time and scrupulously.
The concept of narrative has proved 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 always mean not the objective basis of the story (pure facts and reality), but the work of the narrator - what he saw the facts, how he connected them into a story, what meaning put into the story.
Each person sees something different in what is happening. 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 up to him with a new situation, then he will not be able to use them.
Each person comprehends his life, himself, relationships with other people with the help of narratives. Without them, no one could remember anything, and it would be impossible to think about the world. No narrativeexperience would disintegrate for a person into a meaningless set of facts from which nothing can be learned.
What can text do? Stories that make people
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.
Riker emphasizes that experience is not given to a person directly, that is, an event can only be understood through a narrative about it. The personality of a person leaves an imprint on how he sees, selects and structures facts. For example, one person in difficult circumstances will focus on his helplessness and the catastrophic nature of what is happening, another, in the same circumstances, may perceive difficulties as a reason for development.
Rosenweld and Ochberg believe that personal stories are not only a way to tell (to others or yourself) about your life, they make a big contribution to how a person eventually becomes, how he sees himself. Text tells us and changes us.
On the one hand, the image is formed from stories, on the other hand, a person is influenced by his image of himself when he composes a story. It turns out that every time people, telling their personal stories, complement the stencil narrative through which they see the world. You can compare the narrative with a carved picture in a magic lantern, and a person's gaze with light, while the world is the walls on which images appear.
Analysisstories
Narrative analysis appeared in response to the researchers' awareness of the independence of the text. The focus is on the elements of the narrative (the connection and nature of events, the attributes of the characters accompanying the plot, the narrator's assessments, etc.) and the role that it plays in shaping a person's self-awareness.
An unstructured interview is 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 connected with the interpretive turn that has taken place in the social sciences. The theory of interpretation involves working with representation - the expressed subjective experience of a person. Interpretation is the search for meaning hidden 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 meaning he sees in the story. Someone in an insignificant event will see confirmation of their luck, while 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.
The Narrative Analyst is a detective wading through the explicit, overt meaning of a story to its real meaning for the narrator. The analyst restores the three-dimensional meaning along its light outline in the narrative.
The process of interpretation, which is influenced by many factors (the subjectivity of the narrator, the subjectivity of the analyst,different levels and number of hidden meanings in history) can be attributed to the shortcomings of the method. Rich opportunities for obtaining material for analysis - to 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 a story. The first task of the analyst is to isolate the "body" of the narrative. The difficulty lies in the fact that the moment of the beginning and end of the narrative is difficult to determine. Not every narrator uses introductory words that unambiguously indicate the beginning and end. To determine the narrative, you can use the signs according to Kalmykova and Mergenthaler:
- sequence of events leads to change of characters;
- clear definition of the location and time of the event and its participants;
- short story leading up to the main story;
- point after which the narrative returns to some previous situation;
- direct speech of the characters.
The second task is to define the structure of the narrative. According to Labov, there are six elements of structure:
- pre-narrative brief introduction;
- certainty of place, time, action, characters;
- causal relationship between events;
- the narrator's point of view on what is happening in the story;
- resolving the general situation the person was talking about;
- return tothe point in time from which the narrative (code) began.
Greymas, based on Propp's classification, describes five features that can exhaustively encode a plot: contract, struggle, communication, presence, fast travel. Bruner identifies other structural elements: agent, action, goal, means, situation, problem.
Shank is completely limited to three questions: who did what and why. Terekhova illustrates the convenience of Peirce's semiotic triads for interpreting the narrative (representative - sign, object - what the sign refers to, interpretant).
The third task of the narrative analyst is to construct and analyze the schema. Depicting the connection of narrative elements in a diagram helps to move away from explicit meaning and focus on structure. After completing the analysis, the researcher suggests the reason for the appearance of the narrative, its function and the logic of change.
The fate of the text
Narrative analysis in sociology is multi-layered, each layer corresponds to a certain mood and action of the narrator and analyst. For example, an unstructured interview:
- at the moment of perception, the narrator constructs the world: selects the important, dismisses the unimportant (the narrator selects 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 listeners, self-presents himself;
- at the time of recording, the analyst selects information - he already begins the process of interpretation(because the analyst chooses what information to record and what not);
- when an analyst transgresses to analyze texts, he falls into the grip of the need to bring many fragments of an interview to a single meaning, direction, now he needs to create his own narrative, in which the analysis of others' narratives will be inscribed;
- analyst releases text, and now everyone can explain someone else's interpretation.
It is easy to imagine how the personal motives of the analyst and narrator can obscure the process of interpretation. At each stage of storytelling, the narrator and analyst exist in a social field, and therefore construct their representations by paying attention to group norms.
CV
Narrative text analysis:
- Studies how people create and use stories to interpret the world.
- Does not consider stories as a source of information about the real world and human experience.
- Implies that a narrative is an interpretation, a version of life through which people form an identity, present themselves, understand the world and other people.
Special features of data collection:
- qualitative approach (e.g. semi-structured and unstructured interviews);
- analyst says little, his main role is to listen;
- no preference between imaginary and real stories.
Narrative analysis is based on the principles of structural analysis, so for working with text can be usedany schemes that allow you 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 reveal the text, get closer to the real motives and desires of the narrator. Criticism of the narrative approach is associated with the complexities of the process of interpretation.
The importance of narrative analysis for people cannot be overestimated. It is thanks to narrative analysts that a person can honestly look at his motives and goals, understand how he slows himself down, what image of himself he has. Honesty and understanding your limitations are the basis of a happy and fulfilling life.
