p.213 it remains true that narrative is a primary cognitive instrument - an instrument
rivaled, in fact, only by theory and by metaphor as irreducible ways of making the flux of experience
comprehensible.
p.213-214 On the one hand, there are all the occurrences of the world... in their concrete particularity.
On the other is an ideally theoretical understanding of those occurrences... But between these extremes, narrative
is the form in which we make comprehensible the many successive interrelationships that are comprised by a career.
[JLJ - career in the sense of: path or progress through life or history (Collins English Dictionary)
also see p.213 'But a particular watch also has a historical career: it is produced, shipped, stored, displayed, purchased...']
p.214 Both historians and writers of imaginative fiction know well the problems of constructing a coherent
narrative account, with or without the constraint of arguing from evidence, but even so they may not recognize the extent
to which narrative as such is not just a technical problem for writers and critics but a
primary and irreducible form of human comprehension, an article in the constitution of common sense.
p.214 story-telling is the most ubiquitous of human activities
p.214-215 There is, for example, the problem of explicating how a narrative structure determines what is
or is not relevant to it... We ordinarily recognize, and in certain clear cases with no uncertainty at all,
whether in the recounting of a coherent narrative a specific incident or detail is relevant or irrelevant to that narrative...
it would seem that we must be in possession of implicit criteria of relevance.
p.218 The cognitive function of narrative form, then, is not just to relate a succession
of events but to body forth an ensemble of interrelationships of many different kinds as a single whole.
[JLJ - body forth: represent in bodily form, to give form or shape to mentally.]
