The Constructive Function of Narrative in Postmodernism

In its various social and cultural representations, narrative has become fundamental to various fields ranging from literature, humanities and social sciences to human reality in general. Narrative, in postmodernism, is no longer limited to theoretical discourse but more importantly its dialogical and cross-cultural nature has conferred upon it a constructive and therapeutic function. Postmodern narrative has been a shift towards a hermeneutically-oriented understanding of the ontological significance of narratives. It has led to a view of narrative as an essential component of human existence and subjectivity as being constituted in a process of narrative interpretation that takes shapes in dialogical relation to socially and culturally mediated modes of sense making. The so-called narrative turn which emerged in the mid-1960s was contributive to this constructive role of narrativity in postmodernism. Story-telling, the core feature of the novel, becomes an ontologically significant activity in the way we ascribe meaning to the world and also the way we become associated with it through experiences. Furthermore, new perceptions of the issue of history by philosophers of history as Arthur Danto and Hayden White, the emphasis on the way in which we make sense of our experiences in time by thinkers like Paul Ricoeur and Charles Taylor, considering the self as a rhizomatic story by Deleuze and Guattari, and the central and problematic role of narrative discourse in understanding the human situation by Richard Rorty, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Judith Butler, and Amy Allen have all contributed to our perception of postmodern narrative and selfhood. This paper studies the postmodernist shift from traditional and modernist logical understanding (verifiable reality) of self to a narrative social understanding (constructed reality) of identity.