Given the presence of narrative in almost all human discourse, there is little wonder that there are theorists who place it next to language itself as
the distinctive human trait. Frederic Jameson, for example, writes about the "all-informing process of narrative," which he describes as "the central function or instance of the human mind." Jean-François Lyotard calls narration "the quintessential form of customary knowledge." Whether or not such assertions stand up to scrutiny, it is still the case that we engage in narrative so often and with such unconscious ease that the gift for it would seem to be everyone's birthright. Perhaps the fullest statement regarding the universality of narrative among humans is the opening to Roland Barthes' landmark essay on narrative (1966). It is worth quoting at length:
The narratives of the world are numberless. Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances -as though any material were fit to receive man's stories. Able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting (think of Carpaccio's Saint Ursula), stained-glass windows, cinema, comics, news items, conversation. Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative. All classes, all human groups, have their narratives, enojoyment of which is very often shared by men with different, even opposing, cultural backgrounds. Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself.
[...] Narrative capability shows up in infants some time in their third or fourth year, when they start putting verbs together with nouns . Its appearance coincides, roughly, with the first memories that are retained by adults of their infancy, a conjunction that has led some to propose that memory in itself is dependent on the capacity for narrative. In other words, we do not have any mental record of who we are until narrative is present as a kind of armature, giving shape to that record. If this is so, then "our very definitions as human beings," as Peter Brooks has written, "is very much bound up with the stories we tell about our own lives and the world in which we live. We cannot, in our dreams, our daydreams, our ambitious fantasies, avoid the imaginative imposition of form in life." The gift of narrative is so pervasive and universal that there are those who strongly suggest that narrative is a "deep structure," a human capacity genetically hard-wired into our minds in the same way as our capacity or grammar (according to some linguists) is something we are born with. The novelist Paul Auster once wrote that "A child's need for stories is as fundamental as his need for food."
[...] whether from nature or from nurture or from some complex combination of the two -the question remains:
what does narrative do for us? [...] if we have to choose one answer above all others, the likeliest is that
narrative is the principal way in which our species organizes its understanding of time. [...] it makes evolutionary sense. As we are the only speies on earth with both language and a conscious awareness of the passage of time, it stands to reason that we would have a mechanism for expressing this awareness.
