Narrative plot

The narrative plot can be described as “the integration of various events, happenings, and actions of human life into a thematic whole” (Oliver, 1998, p. 253) and is regarded as the centrepiece of narrative analysis that provides meaning to the narrative. As Polkinghorne

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(1995) explained: “In the context of narrative inquiry, narrative refers to a discourse form in which events and happenings are configured into a temporal unity by means of a plot” (p. 5). Time is a crucial part of the narrative plot, and hence narrative analysis is bound by a temporal structure that manifests as a beginning, middle, and end of the story (Oliver, 1998); or, as Connelly and Clandinin (1990) held, by past, present, and future events, which can be configured into the beginning, middle, and end of a narrative “to render some explanation otherwise not seen in the data” (Oliver, 1998, p. 254). The term “narrative practice” was coined by Gubrium and Holstein (1998) “to characterize simultaneously the activities of storytelling, the resources used to tell stories, and the auspices under which stories are told” (p. 164).

According to Polkinghorne (1991), narrative is one of the “cognitive organizing processes” (p. 135) that humans use to interpret and give meaning to cues emanating from external perceptual senses, internal bodily sensations, and cognitive memories. This is accomplished by identifying these cues as part of a structure. He wrote: “Narrative is the cognitive process that gives meaning to temporal events by identifying them as parts of a plot. The narrative structure is used to organize events into various kinds of stories” (p. 136). Also referring to narrative form and structure, Gergen and Gergen (1986) suggested: “Perhaps the most essential ingredient of narrative accounting (or storytelling) is its capability to structure events in such a way that they demonstrate, first, a connectedness or coherence, and second, a sense of movement or direction through time” (p. 25). Furthermore, they contended that, in order to succeed as a narrative, such account depends on two related ingredients: firstly, the establishment of a “goal state or valued endpoint” (p. 25); and secondly, the selection and arrangement of events “in such a way that the goal state is rendered more or less probable” (p. 26). Gubruim and Holstein (1998) agreed that, “*a+s texts of experience, stories are not complete prior to their telling but are assembled to meet situated interpretive demands… storytelling is an ongoing (sic) process of composition rather than the more-or-less coherent reporting of experience. Narration is constructive, a way of fashioning the semblance of meaning and order for experience” (1998, italics in

original). McAdams (2008) added: “Much like playwrights or novelists, people work on their

stories in an effort to construct an integrative and meaningful product” (p. 243). What the above narrative researchers were referring to is what Polkinghorne (1988) later described as

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the narrative plot; an organizing scheme that identifies the significance and role of individual events in the narrative:

The plot functions to transform a chronicle or listing of events into a schematic whole by highlighting and recognizing the contribution that certain events make to the development and outcome of the story. Without the recognition of significance given by the plot, each event would appear as discontinuous and separate, and its meaning would be limited to its categorical identification or its spatiotemporal location (Polkinghorne, 1988, pp. 18-19).

It is through its ability to structure events into a plot that narrative is able to contribute to the shaping of identity. Polkinghorne (1991) explained that “individuals construct private and personal stories linking diverse events of their lives into unified and understandable wholes. These are stories about the self. They are the basis of personal identity and self- understanding and they provide answers to the questions ‘Who am I?’” (p. 136). The elements of a narrative plot are perhaps best captured by Kvale (1996) who wrote: “A narrative contains a temporal sequence, a patterning of happenings. There is a social dimension, someone is telling something to someone. And there is meaning, a plot giving the story a point and unity” (p. 282). Gubrium and Holstein (1998) explained as follows:

If personal experience provides an endless supply of potentially reportable, storyable items, it is the incorporation of particular items into a coherent account that gives them meaning. Local, broader cultural resources each provide familiar or conventional guidelines for how stories unfold, but they do not determine individual story lines. There is a persistent gap between what is available for conveying a story and how a particular narrative unfolds in practice. Telling one’s experience in the context, say, of a group that shares a relatively crystallized repertoire of story lines present one with a set of discernable plots, offering ways of giving shape and substance to experience in those terms (p. 166).

The reasoning behind the construction of a plot is similar to the reasoning behind the development of a hypothesis, “*b+oth are interactive activities that take place between a conception that might explain or show a connection among the events and the resistance of the events to fit the construction” (Polkinghorne, 1988, p. 19). He explained the notion in more detail in a later publication:

Emplotment is a procedure that configures temporal elements into a whole by ‘grasping them together’ and directing them toward a conclusion or ending. Emplotment transforms a list or sequence of discontinuous events into a unified story with a point or theme. Through the operation of emplotment, particular actions take on meaning as a contribution to the unfolding plot of the story. Without the recognition of significance conferred by being taken up into a plot,

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each event would appear as discontinuous, and its meaning would be limited to its categorical identification or its spatiotemporal location (Polkinghorne, 1991, p. 141).

According to Daiute (2011), the whole point of narrative emplotment is to make sense of a complication or ‘trouble’:

If narrative is a sense-making process, trouble is certainly at the center. Trouble is the seed of plot development; trouble in the narrating situation can guide a narrator to craft different stories for diverse audiences, and trouble in social institutions constraining narrators may give way to stories transgressing societal canons (pp. 329-330).

In the context of everyday narratives, ‘trouble’ occurs when the expected circumstances in a story’s setting is disrupted (Daiute, 2011). There must be something special or ‘troubling’ about a story or else it would not be told. The value of looking for ‘trouble’ in narratives of identity can be inferred from Phinney’s (2000) comment that: “When an individual life undergoes dramatic change, it can serve as a natural experiment that provides insight into processes that are difficult or impossible to capture by other means *other that narrative+” (p. 30). As Bruner (1999) suggested, ‘trouble’ is any disturbance or imbalance between agent, act, goal, means and setting; it is what creates “the engine of the story” (p. 7).

Story typically begins with a steady state of some kind: something canonical, expectable. It heats up when the expectable is violated, thrown into an imbalance of its components. That violation or disruption sets in motion whatever acts can be taken to restore the original canonical state. If those acts fail and that state is not restored, we are compelled to find a new order, a ‘turning point.’ And when we are done with the telling, the story ends with a coda that makes it possible to get on with ordinary ‘forward living’ by fixing it ‘backward’ (Bruner, 1999, p. 7).

Hence Gergen and Gergen’s (1986) notion of a “goal state or valued endpoint” (p. 25) cited above can be seen as resolution of the ‘trouble’ or a restoration of the imbalance that it caused. An alternative view is held by Conle (2000b) who argued that, despite its pertinence, this view of “trouble as the driving engine for story telling” (p. 190) could possibly be misleading in understanding the inquiry that drives personal narrative theses in education. She explained as follows:

Yes, there is trouble; there is tension, there is a problem and there is a solution sought. But the solution is not the relief needed by someone who is sick or in need of care. The problem, although it may be connected to some sort of unwellness (sic), is primarily an impetus for inquiry. In that sense, it is more like a subconscious question mark about something that is emotionally as well as intellectually interesting (Conle, 2000b, p. 190).

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She continued that this view of the role of ‘trouble’ in narrative inquiry is odd in an academic tradition that has tended to keep emotion and intellect apart; an academic tradition that has, for example, disregarded the emotional dimensions in the life-long quests of great inquirers (p. 190). While her view is worth noting, I am not convinced that it applies to the narratives of individual teachers in this study; where the answer to the question: “What is the story about?” (Mishler, 1986b, p. 236), is likely to point to the teacher experiencing some kind of ‘trouble’ that makes the story worth telling. Moreover, as Burns and Pachler (2004) noted, “it is key for teacher narratives to move beyond mere anecdote in order to become meaningful learning tools. Narratives of experience offer challenges to accepted norms or ‘given’ assumptions about learning and what is being and should be learnt” (p. 152).

Sarbin (1986), considering narrative and story to be coterminous, wrote: “The story is held together by recognizable patterns and events called plots. Central to the plot structure are human predicaments and attempted resolutions” (p. 3). Furthermore, he proposed a “narratory principle” based on the assertion that “human beings think, perceive, imagine, and make moral choices according the narrative structures” (p. 8). Hence, as Polkinghorne (1991) explained: “Storytelling and story comprehension are ultimately grounded in the general human capacity to conceptualize – that is, to structure experiential elements into wholes” (p. 142). In addition to the basic explanatory storied plot structure of beginning, middle, and end; Clandinin and Connelly (1990) also noted a temporal structure of past, present, and future. Capitalizing on Carr’s (cited in Clandinin and Connelly, 1990) notion of narrative structure being related to three critical dimensions of human experience: significance, value, and intention; they suggested that the past conveys significance, the present conveys value, and the future conveys intention. The explanation being that: “Because collaboration occurs from beginning to end in narrative inquiry, plot outlines are continually revised as consultation takes place over written materials and as further data are collected to develop points of importance in the revised story” (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990, p. 10). This was confirmed by other researchers (e.g., Polkinghorne, 1991; 1988; Mishler, 1986a; 1986b; Riessman, 1997; Gubrium & Holstein, 2012) who suggested that emplotment is negotiated during the construction of the narrative that captures the narrated event. Gubruim and Holstein (1998) warned that we must be sensitive to issues of

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narrative collaboration because: “Listeners are not simply narrative depositories or passive

receptors. Neither are they discursively homogeneous. They collaborate in both the whats and hows of narrative practice, invoking cultural meanings and expectations and supplying biographical particulars of their own, all in relation to the local auspices of narration” (p. 181). In other words, the audience co-constructs the meaning of the narrative. Polkinghorne (1988) explained how this happens:

Thus, emplotment is not the imposition of a ready-made plot structure on an independent set of events; instead, it is a dialectic process that takes place between the events themselves and a theme which discloses their significance and allows them to be grasped together as parts of one story. In addition, the construction of plots is not a completely rule-governed activity: It can generate unique and novel configurations (pp. 19-20).

In addition, he noted that cultural traditions offer a rich source of plot lines which may be used to configure events into stories; so that, through the intermixing the various elements of a “cultural repertoire of sedimented stories and innovations” (p. 20), the events may be linked and ordered into a plot.

Plot lines used in the construction of self-narratives are not usually created from scratch. Most often they are adaptations of plots from the literary and oral stories produced by one’s culture. Cultures collect narrative productions that distill (sic) the historical experiences of their members. These stories provide people with exemplar plots that can be used to configure the events in their own lives. Cultures hold up honored (sic) plots for emulation by their members (Polkinghorne, 1991, p. 147).

Hence, as Bruner (2004) pointed out, “one important way of characterizing a culture is by the narrative models it makes available for describing the course of life” (p. 694). Therefore, “*p+lot lines can be used imaginatively as decisions are made about actions in the re- creation of a typical story” (Polkinghorne, 1988, p. 20). For example, when a young boy decides to confess to his father in the hope that he would be forgiven for telling the truth as in some other story where this is actually the case. Another example is what psychotherapists refer to as ‘life-scripts’; that is, one could story one-self as either a winner or a victim, which then could become a self-fulfilling prophesy. What this illustrates is that having a clear plot does not mean that a story is necessarily true. As Phillips (1997) cautioned: “The conditions which the need for a clear plot imposes upon a story are epistemically irrelevant; the plain fact of the matter is that unification of the narrative, having a clear conclusion to which the narrative coherently leads, and so forth, can all be

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achieved without the story being true” (p. 105). Often these conditions are imposed by the genre of the narrative with very little epistemological justification; and often the narrative must serve both: the genre and the epistemic standards (Phillips, 1997, p. 105). In addition, there is the danger that the narrative researcher might have such set beliefs about the plot of a particular story that “the subsequent selection of events to include is likely to be ‘plot driven’ not ‘truth driven’ – after all, the demands of the narrative genre become central if one is engaged in constructing a narrative” (Phillips, 1997, p. 105). The relation between the narrative plot and the self-concept is perhaps best summarised by Polkinghorne (1991) who wrote:

Human existence is temporal. We do not come to self-understanding by seeking to know what kind of thing we are. Rather, we come to know ourselves by discerning a plot that unifies the actions and events of our past with future actions and the events we anticipate... Narrative structuring gives sense to events by identifying them as contributing parts of an emplotted drama. Self- concept is a storied concept, and our identity is the drama we are unfolding (p. 149).

Ultimately, the same culturally shaped cognitive and linguistic processes that shape our life stories also shape our personal identities. As Bruner (2004) put it, “In the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we ‘tell about’ our lives” (p. 694). However, as Bullough, Jr. and Baughman (1996) cautioned: “Inevitably the stories of self we tell are partial; one cannot possibly tell the whole story, and not only because it is constantly unfolding and we do not know how it will end” (p. 388), but also because our past experiences are far too vast; so that at best, only recall that which seems to be relevant to the present perspective. In other words: “Unity *of a story+ is less a matter of discovering or uncovering a self than a reflection of surviving compelling memories for the sake of creating meaning. Where there are no patterns, there is no story, no self” (p. 388). In the following section, the relationship between narrative, identity and context will be explored in more detail.