Contingent Narratives: Fears and Tremblings

Two brief studies are presented concerned with narrative thinking in relation to
unpredicted immediate experience – ie. with what I call contingent narratives.
The first study is a heuristic inquiry into the experience of travel/motion fear,
and the second study is concerned with experiential accounts of an earthquake
that occurred in Leicestershire in October 2001. The data were examined
within the framework of Bruner’s (1996) “nine universals of narrative
realities”. The striking feature that emerges from both of these studies is the
way in which someone will immediately engage with “narrativizing” the event
in question. A model of the narrative construction of reality is discussed, which
proposes that contingent narratives are a dominant feature of everyday lived
experience, and consequently quickly become embedded into our memory of
events.