(Sure enough, one did: "OK, this sounds dramatic. What's the story?") Or have I– have most of us succumbed to the tedious, excessively revelatory ways of modern American society, which assumes that every ounce of everyone's life constitutes a narrative-in-waiting, a parable, a morality tale which assumes, in fact, that nothing is ever banal.
Naipaul's themes are fate, dissolution, bad luck; but he is also concerned with, beyond the story, the music – that is, a span of time, constituting a narrative or a life, comprising pauses in which the sword falls repeatedly, and in which nothing much is achieved.
Or: "Followed by Love, Sweetie, Butt," meaning that the next course was an order of a pasta called love letters, sweetbreads, and halibut, and the pasta chef would answer back, "Love," and Dom, the sauté chef, would answer, "Sweetie, Butt" — a sequence of words that, if listened to with any detachment, seemed to constitute a narrative in their own right.
Wright called it "a wonderful, quirky novel" that "giddies with the quality of its imagination", and constitutes "a playful narrative that breaks the rules of narrative and gets away with it".
It is clear that the predatory and destructive nature of tiger is profiled against this historical, cultural, and intertextual background, which constitutes a culturally inherited narrative of the tiger as vermin, and of the tiger fighter as hero.
These narrative threads are, as the title suggests, parallel: they have barely any relation to one another and do not constitute a direct narrative line.
But that doesn't change the fact that the current fad for stories (and/or lamentations) to the effect that "Obama is surrounding himself with Clinton people" (with the implication that "this isn't the change we voted for") constitutes an unusually bogus "narrative".
I argued, in my second book, Speaking in Plain Sight, that a family photo album effects a silent conversation, one that constitutes an unspoken familial narrative, which adds to what's reported from sib to sib, generation to generation.
Using philanthropic and social investment as a strategy to connect with yourself, business and society - incentivise stakeholders; benefit from wonderful collaborations; enjoy thinking and learning beyond expectations - transforms our narrative of what constitutes a leader and a change-maker.
The experience of having your baby admitted to a NICU constitutes a deviation from the more common, dominant narratives on birth and new motherhood.
