A part of me feared that they would answer with happy palliatives and brusque monologues about how everything turned out great, peachy, fabulous — and I would know that underneath those rushed narratives would be the lingering dark feelings of inadequacy, despair and self-doubt.
But, without knocking many of the fine stories that take place in the middle of Superman's career (Superman: Peace On Earth, Lost Souls, etc), the character is such a primal piece of American myth-making that it makes sense that the most powerful narratives would be the two distinctive Campellian archetypes: the hero's journey and the old man coming to terms with death.
Here, the perfect narrative would be that Giggs or Neville are promoted and it becomes United's Guardiola moment: an untested, adored former player becomes manager and leads the club to glory, as Guardiola did when appointed at Barcelona in the summer of 2008.
It's been pointed out how differently the pregnant-daughter-and-Down-syndrome-infant narrative would be received if the Palins were black, how foolhardy even the most valiant right-to-lifer would have to be to jump on that bandwagon.
While these were no doubt prompted by the fear that Nadal's unadorned narrative would be too skimpy, the end result is oddly effective, like a literary portrait in the round.
Apart from anything else, it invites voters to respond: "about time, too".Finding and sticking to a core narrative would be easier if the party was still under the thumb of its famous control freaks.
He may have been wagering that the momentum lost by cutting away from his narrative would be offset by the richness of this context.
Ironing out that narrative would be crucial in the district court judge's determination of how egregious Slager's actions were — and how much time he deserved to do.
He spent weeks toying with the idea of creating a series of disconnected vignettes whose narrative would be absorbed "by osmosis"; the relentless questioning this received from the cast contributed to him abandoning the idea.
That tasting provides the climax to "Bottle Shock," and even if the potential surprise of its outcome were not already spoiled by history, the movie's adherence to the clichés of the triumph-of-the-underdog narrative would be enough to remove any doubt.
