The Gilded Trap of Narrative

The Gilded Trap of Narrative

“Narrative is not a type of writing.  Or not merely a type of writing.  It has deeper roots than that.  It is a property of mind, an innate and indispensable form of understanding, as instinctive as our fear of falling, as our need for human company.”  –  Thomas Newkirk, Minds Made for Stories

A few years ago I saw an interesting error occur on one of our reading assessments. Our 8th graders, who were a strong cohort, struggled mightily with an essay about two fictional passages. Both were excerpts of historical fiction about the Civil War that required little background knowledge or even deep analytical skill.

What happened?

An analysis of their annotations was revealing.  As I mentioned, both of these texts were excerpts, and both presented a conflict that wasn’t tidily resolved. Without a clear resolution, students time and again tried to impose one themselves – imagining character growth where there was none.  (“Both protagonists realize that…”)

It was happily ever after, whether it was called for or not.

In Minds Made for Stories, Thomas Newkirk makes a compelling case that narrative is the deep structure of writing.  As a former journalist, this really resonates for me. It also squares well with what we know about the brain.  Annie Murphy Paul reminded us just this week that, to a cognitive scientist, stories are “privileged” by our brains.  “We understand them more readily.  And we remember them more accurately.”  

But as a worrywart English teacher, our narrative bias also reminds me that, if we really are wired for stories, we’re potentially biased toward seeing them resolve cleanly.  When we don’t, there’s a dissonance that can be challenging for students.  Let’s call it the gilded trap of narrative – our own desire to see the fool’s gold of tidy, recognizable narrative arcs even when they don’t exist.    

I think this manifests in a few different ways, depending on how old students are.

  • In early grades, it might look like helping students avoid calling themes “lessons.” This might work for simple parables, but it’s an important scaffold to remove as students develop.  I wouldn’t ask a student “What’s the lesson of James Baldwin’s Another Country?” because that question doesn’t really make sense.  Texts have many themes, and often they are more testimonial than instructive.

  • In the upper grades, this becomes even more fun, when students get more adept at analyzing authorial ambiguity, intentional or otherwise.  In her essay, “This Amazing, Troubling Book,” that’s the type of analysis Toni Morrison does of Huck Finn – probing the things Twain “withholds” from readers and why.  A number of texts – Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao or Steinbeck’s The Pearl hinge on ambiguous moments, with large narrative consequences.

  • As students get older, our narrative bias looks more like the error the 8th graders made – stemming from a deep discomfort around stories that aren’t resolved in the way we expect.  My brother argues that this is reason people prefer the The Hunger Games series over 1984 – one closes neatly, the other leaves readers a bit disturbed.  It’s a type of text complexity we can deliberately seek out. If you teach The Giver, consider the fruitful conversations you can have about a novel that ends on a cliffhanger.  (In fairness, it’s the first in a series, even though it’s often taught as a standalone text.)

The bottom line?  It strikes me that reductive readings are a kind of theft.  If we settle on them, we miss what often makes fiction most provocative.

For our students, though, the consequences are even a bit more stark. In the world of informational text – again, full of stories – we leave our students susceptible to folks (politicians, salespeople, and pundits) who will be happy to manipulate them with simple narratives or even comfortable lies. (There are many examples of this, but here’s one on civil rights that might spark conversation amongst your students.)

As we push students to understand increasingly complex texts, it benefits to move them away from seeing themes as “lessons,” and to get them comfortable discussing unresolved conflicts or textual ambiguity.  Complex stories have complex themes; it’s what makes them beautiful.

Best we teach our students to acknowledge their own narrative bias and recognize texts for what they say – and, as importantly, what they do not. `