-“a person’s life story is not a Wikipedia biography of the facts and events of a life but rather the way a person integrates those facts and events internally”
Basically what Julie Beck in “Life’s Stories” is saying here is that a life story has more to do with how a person feels. It also has to do with how the events and facts in a person’s life may affect them. This leads to more than just a timeline, which we all know is more relatable. This made me relate to myself int he way that I know that life is nothing like a timeline. Things all happen at once at times and it doesn’t make logical sense chronologically. I then related to television shows and how they make life seem superficial in the way that they can make things happen in a chronological way which is very unrealistic. Life is more unpredictable than this. The unpredictability of life and how things can all happen at once makes me think about how life can be perceived, and this is exactly what Beck is getting at. The perception of traumatic or happy events in life seems to make or break a person’s personality. I agree with her whole-heartedly.
-When Beck speaks about narrative storytelling in the human brain, she says “the researchers I spoke with were all convinced that even if it’s not 100 percent universal to see life as a story, it’s at least extremely common”
I have to agree with this as well because even though I have never been able to tell stories very well, I have always tried my hardest to be able to tell stories as well as the other people around me. I feel like its a necessary skill to be able to remember things better and more correctly. People that do not relay information very well are probably not good at putting things into a story into their head, in my opinion.
-A person will need to “take the stories that surround them…then identify with them and borrow from them while fashioning their own self-conceptions”
I also agree with this as I relate to how I have done this before to be able to understand the world around me. Many things that I have learned have been from wise stories or narratives in books. All things that others have created that I will then have to use to better understand the things that these stories speak about.
Ben- I really like how you started out with the argument that life is not like the ones we see on tv, predictable and follow a specific order. I feel like with this claim you could really expand and make this a supportive argument in your final paper. Life is so exciting because it is so unpredictable and if we could predict or our lives did follow a specific order then the excitement of being in charge of our own future wouldn’t exist. Great job and I think your final paper will be very interesting to read!
I love how you broke down the question and addressed the key parts. I also enjoyed how you talked about lives unpredictability and how media falsely represents life.
Great. That final quote you chose to highlight makes me think about the potentially powerful role other narratives can play in our lives. If someone were to ask how I went about fashioning my self-conceptions, I would not immediately think about the stories that surround me. Well done!