Narrative: reality or construction of reality

Abstract

In the article the main characteristics and the main features of narrative are determined. The author considers narrative enables social construction of reality and finding of the basis of being. Social reality opens the opportunities of the analysis, it gives different material for understanding how narratives are displayed in different spheres of social life. In the article narrative is defined as a fundamental component of social interaction which carries out the function of creation and translation of social knowledge. With the narrative there is the selection and interpretation of facts and events, and their transformation in a specific subject that must explain why these events happened exactly this way. Narrative as a specific type of knowledge, is not simply records events, it constructs and interprets them as an important part of the whole, and the whole may be the situation or the society, the project or the life of a person.

There is the great number of interpretations of the experience, giving sense, as a social subject is autonomous, and the world is always open to new interpretations and transformations. Narratives are as a method of giving meaning to human action. Narrative analysis does not establish the truth of an individual explanation, it is not the main task for it. Because the narrative is self-description of the subject, where the acts of telling about yourself are fundamental to the reality of subjective existence. Narrative analysis considers language especially as a method and condition of constructing. There is the general representation of social reality in narrative, and this social reality is the result of constructivist activity and interpretation.

So, the most researchers believe that the conception of the past can not be objective in principle. This position offers to recognize the narrative knowledge as knowledge, which depends on the specific social and political reasons.