She looked back on her recent dating history as a series of mistakes: "There are no narratives for women, outside of marrying and having kids," MacNicol says.
People in her circumstances have their world suddenly inverted, and there is nothing in the manner of their taking – no narrative of sacrifice, or enduring for a greater good – to help them derive meaning from it.
Variations begin out of nowhere and occasionally end inconclusively; an adagio section pops up for the principal couple in the middle of a snapping- fingers-and-pointed toes Spanish-flavored dance; a matador, his street-dancer girlfriend and a Gypsy couple have absolutely no narrative reason for being other than to offer spectacular dancing.
But instinctively uncomfortable with public introspection and averse to exposing his private life, he offered no personal narrative for people to feel they really knew him.
If there is no good narrative for women on the road, there is even less of one for black Americans, let alone black American women.
The result has been a yawning gap with no positive narrative for the fast-changing diversity of Britain's urban life.
There was no patient narrative for such patients, in contrast to patients deemed to have discontinued because of the adverse event occurring at discontinuation.
There was no narrative space left for Garner's blithe admission of her youthful affair with an older tutor, and certainly not for her appreciation of its educative richness.
No narrative was present for the patient who experienced a "possible suicide attempt," because the patient did not experience any serious or clinically important adverse events and did not discontinue the study drug as a result of an adverse event.
He lingers over their naked bodies for no narrative reason (however dubious her role, Ms. Temple doesn't look like a little lost girl), and takes such a creepily intimate approach to Sharla's and Dottie's violent degradation that you might think he enjoys it.
