Narratives and reminiscences can be signposts that guide us through our lives. Their power stems from their ability to express more than can be said verbally. Often, people who lack the language abilities to describe sotuations or feelings use narratives, and this is particularly relevant to all age groups. For example, particular age groups or social gorups with limited education aren't always able to describe their feelings or opinions about given situations, so they use narratives to express themselves.

I think that nobody can live without tales told to him when s/he was young. These narratives was well entrenced inside the mind.

As human beings we are used to narratives of the past. The ancient wisdom and history is always transmitted to the later generations in the form of songs and stories. It is a great source to get to know the family history and the history of the region. I think it is an essential part of our heritage and we should be proud of it. Without that probably we would have lost a lot of history.

Before the availability of all this technology in India it is called as “Oral tradition” where artists and artisans used to transfer their skill and knowledge by adopting them as their pupils or disciples.

Dear Beata

i must say I liked your question very much.It reflects your thoughtfulness in going into a novel area. Thanks you.

Reminiscences and narratives especially heard in childhood make us feel nostalgic in later life, and those like me who is a very emotional person, value them more in helping themselves discover one's identity. They also help in fully understanding one's self-realization needs (to quote Maslow). My older son who teaches in the US often asks me on the phone,"Baba, tell me those things in detail about all that happened in that incident, something related to childhood that he has forgotten as he was very small then).

In fact, in management, and still more so in HRM that is my discipline, very widespread use of narratives, stories and anecdotes is being made both by educators and trainers/developers for creating shared vision of the organization, communicating the vision, and for changing the mindsets of the employees towards the organizational goals. These are also very useful devices for organizational transformation.

Nike, which has now been acquired by another company, had made very widespread use of these in internalizing its values and sensitizing all its employees towards that goal. They had specially trained their senior managers to make use of this very effective tool in touching the hearts of the employees, and building in them, a high sense of engagement. A good number of organizations are now following Nike's model.

In fact, I myself make a good use of stories and narrative in my classes to buttress my formulations related to people management. The best thing is that while the students may forget the points made in a usual class, but they rarely forget the stories and anecdotes told by the teacher, especially if someone identifies with a particular narrative. It has also been found that if the teacher narrates his own life 's experiences the students take still more interest in listening to her/him. And, this is still more so, if the teacher is a popular one with the students.

It is believed that they will become a very important medium of instruction in all functional areas of management.

Sorry Beata. I could not add that I have attached to my post an article on story-telling in management that might interest researchers interested in this area.

I agree with Nageswara and Debi Saini, very interesting answers.

Dear All, thank you beautifully, for wide perspectives and giving much values and sense to narratives phenomena. There are many dimensions of your wise comments as oral technologies and oral history pointed out by Nageswara and Cecilia. Cecilia made good point about narrative as survival value and I had in mind, after reading this - Queen Scheherazade,

Different groups which performing narratives I found in Mohamed's and Debi's comments. They see potential users of narratives as not educated - Mohamed or highly educated - Debi. Mahfuz and Alexandre they both highlighted immanence of narrative in human lives, what opinion as well as other, I share.

Dear Debi, thank you a lot for comprehensive comment and pdf. file. I feel narrative is right way for management purposes I think the managers who use it can win not only minds but also hearts. Dear Debi, I'm learning new competencies from you - how to be na influential manager.

My answer to the question "can we live without narratives and reminiscences?" would be a clear no!

Narratives were being used when information could not be documented, so narrative and reminiscences then served as "inputting and retrieving of data.

@ From childhood we listened to sayings, tales and stories with a moral or without. From this statement, I can say it depends on the child´s background and upbringing that may promote whether a moral lesson is deduced from a particular narrative or not. For example, before a child falls really in love with his/her parent´s religion, there must be an onset of religious narratives. These information became stored in the long term memory enabling the child to easily recall them back and reflect, in essence, reminiscing. At this juncture, we can not easily say or prove that a moral lesson was not learned by child.

The early form of narratives and reminiscences have now been replaced by printed media and electronic media, where we may not directly have any narration, nor a reason for an active reminiscence but rather grabbing a printed material or use our electronic gadget to get ourselves informed. Without information and direction, humankind is lost in the dark.

Dear Muhammad, thank you for your comment and analysis of realities of child's narratives perceptions. Interesting remarks about printed electronic media informations.

Dear Kamal, you have really autoethnographic or life course view.

I would like to change a little bit the view of the question and its answer.

Traditional narratives include myths, legends, tales, and oral histories preserved by the people. Many scholars support that there is an underground connection of science and traditional narratives. Actually life cannot exist without traditional narratives.

The concept of "narrative" is strongly connected with postmodernism. In the book "The Postmodern Condition" of Jean-François Lyotard

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Lyotard, we find two chapters:

8. The Narrative Function and the Legitimation of Knowledge

9. Narratives of the Legitimation of Knowledge

We also have "metanarratives": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metanarrative

and The grand narratives of of the nineteenth century of speculation and emancipation.

Thus we see that "narratives" have a central position. Even todays Greece they use the expression for "every story" that supports a political thesis, etc.

The question is very deep and needs extensive study.

From childhood to present, the poems, folklore, myth, songs, epics, fairy tales, short stories, novels I read were/are those available in our society. Although the net has made many more accessible, I no longer have the time and energy to read them, unlike when I was a child when I had the energy and the time to "voraciously" read them. My morals, ethics, principles, concepts of right and wrong, tendency to be heroic, and others were, to a great extent, influenced by those narratives and reminiscences. My grandmother used to relate to us way back in the 1960s tales of super heroes, fairies, magical places, and others which later on, I learned were taken from the 1001 Arabian nights, Marvel comics, local folk tales, Greek mythology, the Bible and Chinese stories

Why individual narratives and reminiscences are important in life of adults?

What we are able to see through narratives and reminiscences ?

I get to know and understand the History of my own folks, and their ingenuous struggle for survival. To realize that they were human fallible creatures who made some wise and some unwise decisions. I understand why they were so willing to make so many sacrifices, when they sailed to Malaya in the 1700s from their homeland, Fujian (see pic). Some of them married the locals, so I'm Peranakan or Straits born Chinese, and for us English is the home language.

Beata: I had written the following last night when the RG site suddenly went into updation mode, and I could not post it. I am doing it now on Monday morning in India:

Very well said Kamal; I liked your use of the word "sparkle" in this context. But I don't know if the extensive exposure of children to the electronic media in today's world will replace the parents' narratives for the child by the anecdotes and stories learned from films and serials. Perhaps, this could be a fertile field for research fory communication scholars and social scientists as to what is the impact of this possible shift on the children's psyche.

Thanks Beata for your kind words about my role in your acquisition of management competencies; I think you already have these. I also like very much Muhammad's use of the narratives by the parents which prepare the child to fall in their religion.

In my case, much of the Lewis' "past perspective" was acquired through what Nageswar very appropriately refers to as "the oral tradition," as I was brought up in an ambiance of "no-education" at all rather than what Mohamed refers to as an atmosphere of "limited education." So they are folklore mainly.

Thanks Beata once again for this opportunity to discuss this very interesting issue, which took me to my childhood memory lane.

Most of our nation has their own history and its really needed to be our reflection to fulfill our country future and keep on track to do not entry to the same situation before. Its like our life, sometimes we just follow the routine but when the routine furthered, then we find other way to reach our goals.

Dear All, Thank you for contribution I'll make wider comments about your interesting views in the evening, because we at Copernicus University are in the middle of 14th Festival of Science and Art for our Toruń residents and the entire local community. So with my regular classes I'm busy until evening. I share photo gallery from 13th Festival from the last year.

http://www.festiwal.torun.pl/2013/galeria/

Gianni wrote:

Dear All, Lijo Francis, Patrick Low and others that you know are not able any longer to log in their RG account from yesterday. RG suspended their accounts without any reason. I don't know why, but I find this an outstanding abuse. Please help them and inform all other participants as this is a signal that things are not going in the right way in RG before it happens to you!

Regards

Gianni

Dear All, thank you for contribution. There are new lights brought to narratives, as mentioned by Costas, who is perceiving narratives as postmodern concept, which is dominating current political space. Miranda is emphasizing the cultural and survival fuction of narratives for her nation, however having English as first language can be a little bit surprising. Eddie, Abdalla, Debi and Sribas are highlighting education associated with the symbolic essence and roots of cultures.

Abdalla pointed out the story of brother Grimm. Would you please share the tales or narratives, which once became important to you ?

Dear Jalal, thank you for information. Some of us already sent individual requests to RG staff, for restoration Lijo's and Patrick's accounts on RG.

Beata

You are perhaps the best of analysts on RG in terms of the comments on the answers to your questions and also perhaps on those of others and all the views expressed. So nice. Thanks, Keep it up! Enjoy your festival. Best wishes!

Dear Debi, thank you for your kind words. I coordinated yesterday workshop prepared by my students form Students' Scientific Circle - section Special Pedagogy. My four students prepared for 30 girls and boys (freshmen) from of gymnasium, workshop about manners of knowing reality by persons with disabilities and polite rules of behaviour towards persons with disabilities (physical, hearing, vision, and intellectual). I know children and their teachers enjoyed it. I attache photo, when Agnieszka is showing alternative manners of perception by persons with vision disfunction. There was lot of laugh and fun yesterday. I hope children will better understand persons with various disabilities.

I teach narrative coaching to practitioners practitioners and in organizations. As part of our process we see time as fluid in the sense that we can reconfigure our relationship with the past, present and future. Taking a mindful approach, we help people to reflect on the patterns in their stories through reminiscing and conversing with others.

This often provides them with an opening to help them shift their identities and their narratives in ways that will better serve them. As with a good story we are keenly interested in the character's deepest desire and what would truly bring them fulfillment. Reminiscence is one way to get at that desire, as is imagining into the future.

Dear David, thank you for support and comprehensive explainations. I appreciate your contribution.

Dear Larisa, I'm deeply grateful for your thoughts and references, of all books and papers concering disabilities issues in cultural contexts. Thank you kindly.

Surely, it decorates our life. Besides, it's our experience and we are able to be convincing in our lectures.As a rule, adult public asks me about my impressions on traveling around the world, practical application of my conceptions and curious events.My own children like to listen to about their heroic acts in their childhood, about our old nearest and dearest, my acts and my problems in youth As for my students, they adore my narratives about school and university life (they think it's a prehistorical period), and I try to be humorous or romantic.I think, it's a way to mutual understanding and belief.

Dear Irina, thank you for your interesting observations and experiences. My own children adore when I tell stories from their childhood, recalling any linguistic examples of their thoughts and language development, naming things.

Dear Kamal, you are right, mamories should be transferred. I care about such family stories during holidays, recalling narratives about my parents and grandparents too, and many, many family anecdotes.

When I say "I," I am referring to the narrative that gives me my identity. We are one long narrative that we tell to ourselves over and over again. That is the reason why Freud thought that a successful psychoanalysis would result in a re-telling our own narrative in a less traumatic way. Following this logic, to die would be to stop telling narratives about ourselves and others. Without them it would be impossible to know who we are.

Dear Emilio, right indeed and interesting interpreted by you. Yes, we probably would die (intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, maybe even bodily) if we decided throw narratives of our lives.

Dear Beata and colleagues - I find this discussion fascinating. As speech pathologists we are interested in narratives, but often for a (very) different reason (for example to look at clients' structural language abilities). We generally deal with clients (young and old) who have difficulties communicating, and narratives, because of their intrinsic / cognitive complexity and their importance to everyday functioning, are a good context for assessment and intervention.

I would be very interested in some references (empirical?) to read up on some of your statements/questions, including "Scientists believe that a grown man through own narratives combines different life experiences" and " Scientists (cultural anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists,pedagogues, andragogues) speak about the creation of own identities through narratives." Perhaps I should have posted this as a separate question.

Dear Marleen, thank you for kind words and thoughts. Please join us in other questions which are on my profile.

As soon as they are capable of speech, people create narratives because they function in their lives. They may help shape one's identity, entertain an audience, teach, impart cultural values, and world views and help one adapt to what society sees as right or wrong within that group's perspective. Personal experience narratives ( see Dolby-Stahl) are honed as they are told throughout a person's life. Other narratives such as myths, legends and folk tales (often called fairy tales) are so significant that they reach back as far as documentation exists (for example, the story, of the flood is found in Sumerian lore and many other societies). Each of these types of traditional narratives have had numerous books written about them.

At its most basic, we all tell stories every day.

"What happened to you today" or "you'll never guess what happened to me today," lead to stories. We are narrators--telling tales is part of being human.

These reminiscences and narratives are sources for measuring our past, our present, our progress, and our future. They can be redefined and rewritten over time. They can be appropriated and shared or critiqued and unraveled.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236336264_Supportive_Culture_of_Learning_May_Fail_Academically?ev=prf_pub

In this piece I share the "metaphor of the woven blanket" as centerpiece of the writing.

Article Supportive Culture of Learning May Fail Academically

ABSTRACT Each of us grows up in a home with a distinct history and a distinct perspective on the meaning of larger historical events. Our parents' stories shape our historical consciousness, as do the stories of the ethnic, racial, and religious groups that number us as members. We attend churches, dubs, and neighborhood associations that further mold our collective and individual historical selves. However, movies and media influence most. The focus of this article review concerns the need to teach skills for critical review of media in order to improve our history and societal education processes.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236982698_Collective_Occlusion_American_Narratives_and_Silencing_of_Important_Cultural_Memories?ev=prf_pub

Article Collective Occlusion: American Narratives and Silencing of I...

What I came across during my childhood days must have shaped my personality. The environ where I grew up was certainly responsible for why I am what I am.

Not really narratives and reminiscences, but what one had actually to endure during childhood shapes one's philosophy of life.

Dear Hemanta, nice remarks. I can agree, with some modification, that many of things that shape our reality and world depends, of our response to the critical life events, during life course, as E. Ericson noticed.

Dear Beata,

I would not like to narrate how I had to spend my childhood. I can just say that the treatment that I had to endure as a child was enough to lead me to be a hardcore anti-social element. However, my grand father was a pious person. His personality had a great effect on me, and I ended up being an academician. Even now, when I remember my childhood days that were devoid of love and affection, I find it unbelievable how I could become what I currently am! Self-belief is very important, I believe.

Dear Hemanta, Beata et al., I would like to respond to Hemanta's post. Currently I'm doing a research on motivation in learning science. Self efficacy or belief/ confidence is the variable that has greatest relationship to achievement in several studies, including Glynn et al, and mine.

So it's not the pampered children who do well in life, perhaps quite the reverse. What do you think about this?

Dear Hemanta, your story is really moving. I knew also of life struggles shared by the other professor, Debi S. Saini. Analyzing our reminiscences, thinking of happenings and looking for interpretations, I noticed in peoples lives some regular pattern. In many cases, this was very important to have just one, good and cordial person during worst time. This helped to survive in childhood by persons, I interviewed as researcher.

I appreciate your comment and I'm glad you joined discussion, dear Hemanta. To be great adults we have to achieve much aware forgiveness to people, self. Then we are finally free to move on.

Dear Hemanta, please join the other topics discussions I posted on my profile.

Dear Miranda, I think it is possible, your statement. I would like to read you final research report.

Dear Beata, I´m also studying narratives and I was wondering what kind of suggestion I could offer you since we have already had many important comments.

As most of the collaborators, I think we cannot live without narratives and for this reason I start citing the first sentence of "Identity and story: creating self in narrative" edited by Dan P. McAdams, Ruthellen Josselson, and Amia Lieblich, which says "We are all storytellers, and we are the stories we tell".

Many authors have said that narative is the most basic discursive genre we use and the nursery of all the other ones. So I onde more agree that we cannot live without narratives. But what I would also consider is probably some other social reflections, such as: how are we defining narrative? In in prototypical and classical terms or are we trying to even redefine what is considered narrative? Is this redefinition linked to histocial changes? How is it? And after this, I would also think of are all narratives valued in the same way? Whose narratives are legitimized in which society/community? How these legitimized narratives are entangled in language and culture or in performative sociabilitites? In which social historical context are (some) narratives valued and legitimized? How truth can be entangled in some narrative performances? Or even, instead of trying to answer the question "who" I am by doing narrative analysis, I´m trying to consider other questions in the analyses such as "with whom I am", "where I am", "when and how I am" (Ritivoi, 2008; Foucault, 2011; Kraus, 2013).

And in doing such reflections I remembered Couze Venn (2000, p. 42) - Occidentalism - saying that "Narrative is the form in which being comes to know itself as a being in time, for time is not a thing, it cannot be directly represented or possessed, but is indirectly communicated and experienced in the form of narrativity. Narrative, in that sense, is `the guardian of time', as Ricoeur (1988) puts it. Specially, the existence of a self as a temporally circumscribed entity takes the form of a narration. Thus, every self is a storied self. And every story is mingled with the stories of other selves, so that every one of us is entangled in the stories we tell, and are told about us. The understanding of subjectivity cannot be separated from the way selves are narrated. The who is a narrated identity."

"A who or self `happens' at the relay point where the history of a culture, sedimented in its stock of knowledge, its narrations, its texts, joins with the history or biography of a named person. In this way every self is sutured in history" (Venn, 2000, p. 43).

Well, I hope you may like some of these reflections.

Best wishes.

Thanks, Kamal. It´s quoted from the Introduction of the book I mentioned "Identity and story: creating self in narrative".

http://www.amazon.com/Identity-Story-Creating-Narrative-Study/dp/159147356X

http://lib.freescienceengineering.org/view.php?id=768291

I like it very much, because I think it synthesizes all the long discussions we do in our theoretical chapters, papers and so on. It looks like an excelent epigraph

for me.

There is just an addtion I would made and that can be recovered in Venn´s quotation. What I mean is that "we are the stories we tell" but also the stories that are (re)told about us by other people, because whenever I tell something about me, I´m also telling things about other people. In other words, whenever I position myself, I also position my alterity(ies). Conversely, when people tell stories about themselves, they may be also telling stories about me.

We are always telling and retelling our own and other´s stories and in doing so I think we are always engaging ourselves in the maintenance or change of our own stories and those from the other ones. But always in a dialogical and reciprocal way.

As I type, I am in a cubicle in Oman, my headphones are attached to my head as I listen to songs from South Africa. The song I am listening to at this moment sings of Mandela in a language I do not know, but the music takes me back to the mid-1980s when I had lived with South African and Zimbabwean friends.

We youths had opposed apartheid--even as we had lived in America and at the small college in Kansas where we met and studied. We organized a teach-in on South Africa with peers from the Peace Club on campus. Within a year the Senator from Kansas, Nancy Kassebaum, would introduce a law into the USA Senate banning USA economic support for South Africa in order to end Apartheid. A memory can be an individual one that links to local, national, or global memories.

My memories direct the music and the music directs me. Empowerment long ago was a thing related to my memory and to this music. It brings me a sense of hope currently as we face global and local issues of stress, change, and war in this millennium.

Memories shape ourselves--or do they simply inform or help us to put things together we would normally have not noticed nor comprehended?

In the end, identity informs memory but memory in the form of music or narration has a frame. These can be individual or group memories. The frame can change over time but does that mean that the frame was inadequate for a time frame.

Group memories are how we reach out to other and nod our heads when someone shares a memory. We then say, "Uh Huh, I think I understand."

It is how individual memories (more than identity) help us link to others which is of most importance in my concerns for narratives and historiography.

Http://webpages.dcu.ie/~sheehanh/myth.htm

I remember looking at this question earlier and thinking how interesting it was and that maybe I should reply. Life jumped in in the meantime and it was back to writing up some recent research. However, the twists and weaves of life as a researcher in the early 21st century has brought me back, reflecting on this has led me to respond…

This is an important question answered well and succinctly by Kamal Eddin. Reminiscing, as I whimsically suggest through my first paragraph, helps us construct the narratives that provide our identity. However, there lies under this much deeper questions of what it is to be human. Giddens likens these narrative constructions to the 'project of the self' which mostly, I think, holds true for us. In earlier research using reminiscence with people living with dementia it raised questions about the continuation and disruption of narratives and reminiscences, about self-integrity within these and whether engagement in these projects excludes those who have serious cognitive and memory impairments. The subsequent question much be that if we cannot reminisce our construct narratives we are no longer human - a difficult philosophical conundrum in an ageing world.

Very interesting issue that, as usual, has many sides. I really don't know how to define people with cognitive and memory impairments. I don't know whether they are "human" or not. That depends on the definition that we use in these cases. But two questions come to mind immediately: how human are those around people with that kind of impairments?, and what are the requirements to be "human"?

Although I believe that we function in life through narratives and reminiscences, that not necessarily defines us one way or another. It's, for me, more a question of functioning than of definition. And when talking about this topic, I also think of the current discussion about what is to be "posthuman"? In this latter case, I have been reading lately the works by Katherine Hayles on "the posthuman" and "how we think,"and I find them extremely suggestive. I am referring to her books "How we Became PostHuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics" and "How We Think. Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis." It can be argued that these titles indicate that she is dealing with completely different issues unrelated with what we are discussing here. but I am not so sure about that. They have made me think in the philosophy of what is to be human. In any case, I recommend these readings.

Jonathan P.,

Could you elaborate on the concept of "self-integrity" that you refer to?

Paul Ricoeur is a key reference on the subject. His thesis is similar to those who consider narratives as a form embedding knowledge

Dear Andrew, please share the link.

Thank you for link with papers. I appreciate it.

In answer Kevin, the concept of 'self-integrity' follows Giddens reflexive project of the self, recognising an internal integrity in terms of dispositions but being open to change and adaptation. I was using it to consider the impact of dementia on a person's concept of selfhood and on that constructed by others observing the person with dementia.

It is a rather inchoate concept currently, but Giddens has certainly offered great work in this aeea and I would recommend you to him.

Dear Jonathan, thank you for your comments and mentioning Giddens ideas.

The novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco explores a non reminiscence subject and its implication on life

This comment refers to the need for and value of multiple narratives. While narratives are a reflection of your history, they are a constructed reality, and thus more accurately reflect perception of identity than a record of experience. A one off narrative is no more an accurate description of self than a single match a reflection of the depth of the ability of a football team. LIke most aspects of human behaviour, narratives are most valuable as a collection, to view patterns and themes. In Self integrity is the need for integration, to integrate you need one more than one link in a chain. All too often we use a single representation to define an individual.

Dear Beata, you asked a such question that every body would love to answer it. Can we live without narratives and reminiscences? YES, but then, there would be perhaps no motivation since our childhood.

Dear @Penny, thank you for your thoughts, about patterns and themes. I agree with your conclusion.

Dear @Asmat, yes, since childhood are motivated by stories and narratives. In my opinion, some of them will increase our motivation, the other may decrease. But you are right about narratives association with human motivation. Very nice remark. Thank you.

Dear Penny,

I think that the best sort of fun narrative which begins to enable us to dig deeper than individual narratives are critiques of autobiographies.

For example, I read recently, Barack Obama's "Dreams from My Father"

I then wrote my own review or response of the book.

Next, I read some critical reviews of the book.

In addition, in applying these reviews, which applied modern critical review practices, to my own understanding and reflecting on Obama's memories and my own memories of living and working in the USA in the same time period (and in one case the same city--Chicago) I had a much deeper grasp of a deep set of memories from which I could view the world today--a world dominated by a man named Obama.

In short, layered narration is the most fulfilling. Initial narrations are just that--a beginning for reference in grasping present & future concepts on the narration and themes of narration applied used by others and myself.

Thank you for that narrative of the development of narratives! The concept of a multilayered, multi-connected description through narrative, rather than a linear development of conceptual understanding, I believe is an extremely useful one.

If anybody is interested, I suggest the reading of Steven Hall's novel "The Raw Shark Texts." It is an entire novel about the meaning of memory and reminiscences. Extemely suggestive.

Dear Emilio, thank you for nice inspiration.

My very late statement:

I don´t want to live without narratives and reminiscences.

For me they are a very important part of my life. Even if stories are not 100% true or fantastic and invented. The same holds for the reminiscences. The get a changing colour by the time, bad things dissapear, some perspectives are altering. Its a part of keeping our minds healthy.

And stories of other person give a glance on their character and are an impressing part of social communication.

My bilance:

I can´t live without both.

Dear Hanno, you just made longest comment of yours I've ever read. I agree with your clear remarks. Thank you. I think already about a new question on RG. Something associated with stories from critical - turning points in life.

There is an inevitable "danger" in the single story or singular narrative. The more "stories" we have about our being, our realities, our multi-layered experiences, our countless encounters with other people's narratives, the richer our experiences and perceptions become. We co-construct our realities and experiences as we glean "hopes and impediments" from other similarly positioned selves across the world. Somehow, the tragic experiences, where "tears become a language" seems to have an inexorable hold on human experiences. This does not occlude the comic and humour and travesties...not at all. But I find that the tragic dimensions in narrative offer a more profound opportunity to seek solutions and reduce adversity in living. Oh, to be alive!

These tales and stories we listen to while we grow up give us a scheme of how to formulate our own experiences, We learn the world directly through experiences and indirectly through stories that are the representations of others' experiences.

Since language is for communication if we want to show ourselves we do it through our stories. We are made of stories , this is the way we communicate ourselves to others.

Reminiscence is a cognitive process (if it is not the case of a traumatic image that escapes the control of the brain), we select the memories we want to remember, sometimes we even construct them , to make a coherent, logical, understandable story out of the thousands of things that invade us every moment, and as a healthy self-defence we eliminate the memories that are irrelevant or would make our life difficult to live.

When we listen to others' stories, or when we read a book or watch a film, we want entertainement, which means that we only watch others acting, and again we learn indirectly through the stories (about love, power, etc.) so familiar, variations of the same eternal topics. We recognise ourselves in the caracters, moreover we identify with some of them and hate the others, so we can love and hate through others, without being protagonists in real time. We can understand the world and ourselves through the catarsis of good stories, that make us better. So, stories are the way we represent ourselves and understand the world, they are necessary, just as personal and collective memories that are the selected images of our identity, of our unique story.

I voted up Krisztina's point but many of us are more interested in narrations and embedded narrations culturally. For example, in the USA, famous movies or books can have a great effect on reinforcing or changing over time images that we have about our realities and heritage.

Using FORREST GUMP, I now provide 2 examples of authors embedding their narrations in some sort of societal and literary critique of memory itself:

http://eslkevin.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/robert-zemeckis%E2%80%99-forrest-gump-and-american-culture-and-memory/

and

http://eslkevin.wordpress.com/2013/05/09/blockbusting-history-forrest-gump-as-a-powerful-medium-of-american-cultural-memory/

While you read these, your own identity and memories will either be reinforced or reinformed in some way (at least over time if not immediately), especially, as long as you can reflect on the material in a rehearsed sort of way.

@Muchativugwa: ..."the tragic experiences, where "tears become a language" seems to have an inexorable hold on human experiences".

Dear Muchativugwa, well done!

Narratives and Reminiscence are a compound and complex form of food, energy and source of livelihood of the mind and general being. Humankind cannot do without them. According to Muchativugwa, Tears becoming a language is also, if not equal to saying there was a subconscious narrative the bearer of that tears may have received and returned back to an observer. Bearing in mind, that the tears may also be deemed as a product of some abstract factors that provokes reminiscences.

Dear @Kamal "if you can" or "can't" maybe ?

Narratives and Reminiscences are the one which keep the life of us to be ALIVE.... correct the mistakes of past and prepare for a better future...The past is HISTORY and it existed, there is no harm to get relieved by talking the good about that which existed (People, action and situations)...

Why do we keep records? Have we thought about this?

Record keeping is one strong culture, or even a tradition of humankind. This enables us to have an insight of what had been done, what we want to do, how a particular thing was done, where there was a mistake to avoid, how we learnt from that mistake and to give us a clear orientation to achieve a near or smooth result of whatever we plan to do.

It has been clustered or spread over so many and several methods of record keeping, be it written, audio, visual, analogue or electronic.

Have we thought about our news (whatever which medium), correspondence reports, comments and on and on. All these are a form of narratives and reminiscences, one way or the other and we live and continue to live with them.

The first question is sometimes described in terms of the narrativity debate. The seminal work (arguing 'no' in answer to your question) is by Strawson 'Against Narrativity' in 2004 in Ratio. It's brilliant.

I've used the formalist approach to narrative to look at how story-structures learned in childhood shape sense making in adult life in the attached. Contact me please [email protected] if you'd like both final pdfs for research purposes.

Article Governance, tax and folk tales

The day we no longer need narratives and reminiscences is the day we stop haveing the need to  search for meaning. Every attempt to make sense of the world is a story we tell ourselves, a collection of facts from an endless array of facts we bring together to make sense of some experience or phenomenon. This always involves a selective tradition, a tradition informed by the sense we make of previous experiences.  Memoirs, more specifically,  are our attempts to write ourselves into these stories, to have others bear witness to our existence as we understand it.  The need for this is greater in circumstanes where our experiences have been willfully rendered invisible. It is also through these stories we can all connect around our common humanity.  Cheers

Well said about "connection around our common humanity", dear Antoinette. Thank you.

Dear Beata,

I think, there are categories of people who can not live without narratives and reminiscences, and there are such "practical" people who can easily live without  them. Or with only very few. I know some of them personally. But narratives or the contexts of narratives have to be daily "bread" for social and humanitarian scientists or teachers. How can be otherwise?

"The unexamined life is not worth living", Socrates.  Narratives and reminiscences give purpose and meaning to the human experience of the one sharing and connection to those listening. 

@Михаил Андронов 

Your English is OK, well said that to "engineer human self it takes many Years" and it takes beating on the EGO stages, which Sigmund freud says as ID, EGO and SUPER EGO

Dear @Michail,

You have in Russia excellent writers to cite, for ex. F. Dostoyevsky, L. Tolstoy, B.Pasternak, M. Bułhakov, great drama writers as N. Gogol.  Your culture has plenty great poets: for example A. Pushkin. But why you have choosed to cite the monster leader, who is historically extremely controversial in my opinion ? Excuse me I do not intend rude conversation. Just was very surprised. Please dear @Michaił explain...

Dear @Michail, It happend to me, that I adore  F. Dostoyevsky's dark moods and serious moral dilemmas present in his creativity. Thank you for an answer. 

Querida Beata:

Responderé en español, que es mi lengua materna. Espero no le moleste. Su consulta sobre la narrativa y las reminiscencias (recuerdo) abre un debate clásico. En primer lugar, sobre la manera que tenemos, como humanos, de comunicar nuestra experiencia. Recientemente estaba leyendo un texto sobre el campo de experiencia y el horizonte de expectativas que poseen los estratos del tiempo humano. Koselleck, el autor que propone esto, sigue la la hermenéutica gadameriana al señalar que la comprensión del mundo se debe a la fusión del pasado/experiencia (lo vivido), el presente (viviendo, que recoge parte del pasado y el presente) y el futuro/expectativa (lo que se vivirá). Ahora bien, la forma en la que conocemos la realidad y sus niveles temporales se produce gracias al lenguaje, que guarda no sólo las ideologías, sino también una historicidad. En segundo lugar, nuestra vida está combinada por ese nivel de la comprensión (donde la realidad se hace patente a través de sus signos visibles, es decir, objetiva) y la relación con otros sujetos. Lo importante es que la personalidad sea capaz de entender las nociones (consensuadas) del bien y el mal, o sea, de aquellas que han sido discutidas a través de procesos racionales y deliberativos.

Saludos,

FLP 

Narratives and reminiscences are formative of our identity. When we narrate our past life, we actually express our attitide toward the narrated events and tend either in aconscious or unconscious ways to delete or to amplify certain details depending on the  pragmatic context of the narration ,especially our relation with the narratee. Our narratives reveal who we are through the description of who we were. Narrative are psychologically charged and can  relieve a lot of tension that exist between our ego and its past. Narrating can be used as a therapy.......

The answer to your question is clear: No, we can not live without narratives and reminiscences. Tell me what you remember, and I will tell you who you are...We are our memories and our narratives. I think that an important notion in this area is autobiographical memory. Autobiographical memory is defined as a memory for facts and events of significant personal past. Autobiographical memory is related to the self and to the experience of being an individual within a culture over time. Indeed, self and autobiographical memory are mutually constructed, as, on the one hand, personal memories are cognitively organized around the self. On the other hand, self cannot be constituted as a continuous entity over time without the existence of personal memories organized in subjective time.

Palgrave Macmillan, UK, has just published my edited essays under the title Strategies of representation in auto/biography: Reconstruction and remembering (2014). In the essays, we investigate how selves are represented, reconstructed and re-constituted in literary discourse. We examine how narrative representations confirm, validate, interrogate and pervade conversations on issues of identity, nation and history. Indeed, narratives and reminiscences are critical expressions of the re-imagined, re-membered and re-constructed selves that become "us." One's socio-cultural memory becomes, ipso facto, the "selected" socio-cultural memory of a people and their sense of belonging. It might be useful to get the book and examine some of the issues that it raises.