We have all had the experience of arguing about the meaning or meanings of a narrative. In other words, we have argued about how to interpret the narrative. “Meaning” is yet another debatable term in this field, but in general, we think of meaning as having to do with ideas and judgments.

The rhetoric of narrative is its power. It has to do with all those elements of the text that produce the many strong or subtle combinations of thought and feeling we experience as we read. These include those elements that inflect how we interpret the narrative: that is, how we find meanings in it. Arguably, everything in the text contributes to its impact and our interpretation of it, and so everything has some rhetorical function.

As I noted in Chapter 3, when it was revealed that Barbellion (Bruce Cummings) had not died when the narrative of his life said he had, the whole public reception of his narrative changed, even though every word of it remained the same. But how would the public reception have changed had Bruce Cummings published his diary as a novel, that is, as fiction? The answer is easy: there would have been no disappointment, for the simple reason that Barbellion would never have existed, at least in real life.

p>If, with its immense rhetorical resources, narrative is an instrument of power, it is often about power as well. This is because, in almost every narrative of any interest, there is a conflict in which power is at stake. You might say that conflict structures narrative. The ancient Greek word for conflict (or contest) is agon, and how the agon played out formed the spine of any Greek tragedy.

Here is a narrative. It is a hot day in the summer of 1892. Father and stepmother rise and have breakfast at 7:00. The elder daughter is away, and the younger daughter arises just before 9:00 and has a light breakfast. Her father, an elderly man by now, almost seventy (the younger daughter is thirty-one), goes off downtown on business. A banker, he is an important and wealthy man in this sleepy Massachusetts town.

When we think of narrative, we usually think of it as art, however modest. We think of it as novels or sagas or folk tales or, at the least, anecdotes. We speak of a gift for telling stories. But as true as it is that narrative can be an art and that art thrives on narrative, narrative is also something we all engage in, artists and nonartists alike. We make narratives many times a day, every day of our lives.

In defining interpretative meaning as a compound of ideas and judgment, we need to be careful – especially with the word “judgment,” since for some this word can conjure up the image of a judge making blistering judgments. But judgment, in the broad sense that we are using it, is an attunement of feeling to its object.

There are many ways to interpret narrative, but almost all of them belong to one of three fundamentally distinct approaches: the intentional, the symptomatic, and the adaptive. Before I set these out, however, I need to focus on an assumption that has been lurking behind most of what I wrote in the last chapter. This is the assumption that narratives are “whole” in the sense that everything in a narrative somehow belongs and contributes to its meaning.