My Life Narrative

Examine the way in which people narrate their own life

Narratives of a person’s life are a story of the self and at the same time, a perspective of a self. These narratives include an event or situation, the narrator, and the feelings or the ideas that the narrator is expressing to the reader. Since these events are recalled from the narrator’s past, the narration is a memory. Since memories do not have fixing components, they are changed individually and are usually unreliable. In addition, narratives of a person’s life often have biased perspectives. This is because the narrative is affected by the narrator’s perspective. Since all life narrations are based on a person’s life, there are as many possibilities in the variance of narrations.

Life stories are important parts of personality, along with other parts, including dispositional traits, goals, and values. When people narrate their life story, they tell their past and future in order to construct their present. Precisely, people tell how they became who they are and who they are on their way to becoming to be able to tell their life story. The life story created from this is affected by the memory. The events and situations that we have gone through accumulate in our minds as a memory and are released through the telling of a life story. People narrate their life stories by combining their narrations of the events that have occurred in the past. The chain reactions of the events linked together create meaning from each of the individual events. Although the events may not be accurate through memory, it does not need to be restricted to a truth. As any creation of a narrative is a bit of a lie, “some lies have enough

This results as a great impact on a person’s life, especially when most traumas occur during childhood times. People tend to repress their traumatic experiences, however, by re narrating the event, there are new things that are revealed. Alice Walker reveals two different narratives in “Beauty: When the Other Dance is the Self”. The ideas of the two narratives are the internal narrative and the external narrative. The source event in this narrative is about her brother shooting her right eye with a BB gun and as a result, making her right eye dysfunctional. Until this event, she was “beauty” but after it, she claims that she has lost her beauty. This is her internal narrative reclaiming that she lost her beauty because of this event. However, people around her repeatedly say, “you did not change”. Until the point where she is gifted a baby, she doesn't realize true beauty. In realizing the external narrative and interpreting the internal narrative from the external narrative, she has evaluated true beauty. Similarly we can see the conflict of the two narratives in Scott Russell Sanders “UNDER THE INFLUENCE”. The event in this narrative is the narrator’s father being an alcoholic. The conflict in the narrations is one narration feeling guilty for his father’s death and the other having knowing the knowledge about alcohol. The second narrative, which has an addition of