ABSTRACT
Narrative understanding is the outcome of our successful dealings with certain narratives – those narratives that reveal meaningful connections between particular happenings and provide insight into why psychological beings respond to such happenings. Narratives afford a unique kind of understanding of the way real or imagined events relate and the various perspectives that can be taken toward such events. To understand narratively is to grasp the significance of what goes on in a particular episode of inter-connected happenings. In most cases this involves getting to grips – in more or less sophisticated ways – with a myriad of attitudes that are taken toward such happenings by the characters internal to the narrative and narrators and authors that are external to it. To take a mundane example, we gain a narrative understanding of what someone has done and why if we are provided with a coherent and revealing account that provides details of how a specific series of events unfolded and what those involved in such goings-on thought and felt about them. Storied deliverances of that kind are a staple of everyday conversations. Yet understanding of essentially the same sort is part and parcel of our adventures with more carefully crafted fictive products – namely, stories conveyed in great literature, drama and cinema – as well as factual narratives, such as autobiographies, biographies, and histories.
