Stories for All Time

Why tell stories, if they aren’t true?

In the August issue of Scientific American Mind, Jeremy Hsu said:

1. storytelling is a human universal, and common themes appear in tales throughout history and all over the the world.
2. These characteristics of stories, and our natural affinity toward them, reveal clues about our evolutionary history and the roots of emotion and empathy in the mind.
3. By studying narrative's power to influence beliefs, researchers are discovering how we analyze information and accept new ideas.

From: http://www.umass.edu/wmwp/DigitalStorytelling/Why%20tell%20stories.htm

Why tell stories?
We embark on this endeavor because stories are ways in which we pass down information from one generation to another. Words and language are the threads of life, and from Homer's epics to Mark Twain's Mississippi adventures, stories are way to engage the imagination of a reader or listener. . . .

. . . in the end, we tell stories to understand ourselves a bit better. By exploring our inner selves through words and stories, we come to understand the "real" us that lives inside this body.


From Tim O’Brien:

Stories, retold, carry the force of legend. There's a sense of legend in that the story is still going out there somewhere. Huck is still going down that river, Ahab is still chasing that whale. Legends have to do with the repetition of things. Though there's a narrative end to Moby Dick, there's a sense, as in all stories, that everyone is still out there, still doing these things, forever and ever.