ABSTRACT
Human life lives in story. Everyone has a story to tell and most of us want desperately to tell it. Story surrounds us as we tell our own stories, listen to those of other people, and construct them as “we become the autobiographical narratives by which we ‘tell about’ our lives” (Bruner, 1987, p. 14). As we grow and develop, so, too, do the stories we relate about ourselves grow in complexity (Fivush and Haden, 2003) such that by the time we reach adolescence and young adulthood we define ourselves increasingly by the stories we tell (McAdams, Josselson, and Lieblich, 2006). During these age periods emerges the ability and drive to think of our lives as integrative narratives of the self. Doing so prompts the process of constructing a narrative identity (Ricoeur, 1986) that represents “the stories people construct and tell about themselves to define who they are for themselves and for others” (McAdams et al., 2006, p. 4). Invoking our narrative identities, “when we want someone to know who we really are, we tell them our life story” (Polkinghorne, 1988, p. 29). Our narrative identities convey who we are with regard to roles we enact in various life domains that include work, family, play, community, and spirit. From time immemorial, story has offered us a way to fulfill our quest for meaning through our activities in these domains and bring understanding, coherence, and continuity to our lives and our situations. Telling one’s own story “is, by all accounts, ancient and universal. People anywhere can tell you some intelligible account of their lives. What varies is the cultural and linguistic perspective or narrative form in which it is formulated and expressed” (Bruner, 1987, p. 15). Underscoring the central role of narrative in all human life, literary theorist, critic, and semiotician Roland Barthes commented:
A human universal, narrative has now taken hold across the human sciences. We find its grip evidenced in a distinct turn to narrative principles and practices, a particular movement in the careers field from focusing on occupations to emphasizing life design, and the incipient yet rapidly growing interpolation of narrative into career theory and intervention. These elements frame narrative’s own story in the careers field.
