The self – or life – personal experience – is essentially constructed by or through narrative – by the stories that we tell ourselves or that others tell about us - life as narrative.
“a life as led is inseparable from a life as told… not how it was but how it is interpreted and reinterpreted, told and retold” –Jerome Bruner
The model of narrative in some senses formulating reality – being extensively applied to other contexts in which we interpret or control the world.
Story-telling – personal tales that have structured ideas of urban culture – stories about a city with self narratives of urban residents – revolves around the multiple ways in which we use narrative to formulate ideas and experience – self narrative – to hear their individual voices – to uncover their taken-for-granted narrative conventions – in the same spirit an outsider might wish to ask about in the taken-for-granted ways of our own culture – what could seem natural the familiar accounts we hear and tell about the firsthand experiences of our own lives – laying aside issues of the truth or falsity of stories formulated and told.
