Julie Beck covers a lot of ground as she explores narrative’s potentially powerful influence on our lives. Identify at least three notable assertions or other moments in Beck’s text that caused you to sit up straighter and take note. Explain what exactly caught your eye. Did you react as a believer or doubter? Did you build a connection between the text and the world or the text and your self?
This essay by Julie Beck did a great job of explaining how narratives work. Narrative are the ideal format that we want all stories to follow, even our life stories. “(W)hen people think about their lives to themselves, it is always in a narrative way” (Beck). A moment in Beck’s text that I immediately caught was her explanation of how the actual story that we pack our life into is our personal choice. The same person can have the same experience, but the way that they include it into their life story will be completely different. Telling our story “is a way of making sense of the world around us” (Beck). In other words, our life is chaotic and filled with many plots. Condensing our lives into stories helps us to understand and process events.
Another point that Beck made that really caught my attention was her point about Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. I read this book in high school for my AP Literature class and interestingly enough, our teacher made us read through the book twice. The first time we read the book simply for plot, and the second time through we looked more deeply into the meaning behind the plot, the hidden metaphors, and the emotions of the characters. I found it very interesting that this is how I read the book considering Beck’s point about how things can be lost on you in a story. Had I only read the book once I probably would’ve hated it, but reading it through again allowed me to understand and appreciate many aspects that I had missed before.
I loved Beck’s point about how standard narratives do give us an example of how to structure our own, but how they can also let a lot of people down. If your own life isn’t able to follow the narrative norm, you may be left ostracized or disappointed. There are many times that people can not control the reasons why their life does not fit into the standard narrative, and they have no way to make it fit. Standard narratives can “provide unrealistic expectations of happiness” (Beck).
Great job, I like how you made a self-text connection with the book you read in English in high school. I also agree that Beck did a good job explaining a narrative, and how they work. You put in good quotes from the text as well. Also, you did a really good job summariseing Becks points, and you did it in your own words.