‘All of Our Stories are Our Own’: Investigating the Structure of Brief Personal Experience Narratives from Pakistan

Abstract

Narratives provide a structured medium to construct and collect human experiences into a sequential word order. The current qualitative study employs the method of Narrative analysis to investigate such twenty-five narratives belonging to the Pakistani context, obtained from the collection of narratives archived on ‘The Humans of New York' (2015) blog. Labov's Natural Narrative Model (1972) has been applied to decipher the similarities and differences in structural foundation lying within these accounts as compared to those structural patterns outlined by the model itself. The findings reveal the abstracts of the stories to mingle the components of orientation and complicating action, instead of significantly separating them one-by-one. Furthermore, the orientation and complicating action portions are detailed structures, comprising of three and more statements, and include evaluation embedded within them. Such discovered patterns highlight the importance of investigating and learning about the structure of narratives, particularly for the English language teachers and learners it enables them to construct their stories, whether spoken or written, in accordance with the emerging patterns and makes them realize how different elements of the story bring about different functions.