A wise person once said, “We do not need to be told when someone tells us a good story, we just know and acknowledge the good story when we hear it”. Think back into your life and remember all of the times where you did something that was not smart but now you look back and just laugh. Once you remember this moment, think about how many times you have told the story, and how many times this story was shared by a dear friend who just wanted to remind you of that one time you did something stupid. The Narrative Paradigm theory brings forward the idea that everything in our lives can be told in the form of a story. Essentially, we live in a story and the pages of the book are slowly being written day by day. The most crucial part is the fact that we do not have control over who tells our story. This is what happened in the 2018 Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House. An event happened in their childhood and no one in the family could remember what happened perfectly because they all came up with their own stories to mask the dramatic event. Once all of them came together again and shared their stories, then everything started to make sense.
Our textbook defines narration as “symbolic actions, works and/or deeds, that have sequence and meaning for those who live, create or interpret them”.(299) Later the book defines Paradigm as, “a conceptual framework; a universal model that calls for people to view events through a common interpretive lens” (299). Now looking more into a narrative, it is essentially how someone tells a story. Contrary to popular belief, Fisher does not see narrative paradigm as rhetoric, but as “the foundation on which a complete rhetoric needs to be built”(299). Transitioning to high school English, stories are filled with symbolism, therefore the story is much more than was is said or written on the page. The main portion of why people love stories is because of the interpretation that relies on the individual to decipher. After all, there are two determining factors for a narrative, fidelity, and coherence. Fidelity is basically if the story makes sense while coherence is determined by if the story comes together and floes effectively.
After reading about this theory, I found it interesting how the majority of television shows and movies actually follow the same rules and outline of this theory. In The Haunting of Hill House, a family goes through a traumatic event that follows them for the rest of their lives. Because they are all so young when the incident occurred, every one of the five children remembers the night differently. With all having different memories of what happened it was hard to piece everything together. One of the children, Steve, wrote a book and made a lot of money based on the events that happened that night, but all of the other siblings disagree with his story because they remember it differently. For the sake of spoilers, I will not clarify the event, but an event occurred which forced the family to come together and share everything they remember about the night. After their narrative, the paradigm of the stories was able to line up and they were one step closer to understanding what happened that terrible night. Originally, there was a lack of fidelity between the siblings because the other stories did not align with the beliefs of the other siblings. But as more information was shared everything started to line up. The coherence and the fidelity changed and they solved the puzzle. What is essential to take away from this TV series is the power of storytelling when persuading individuals.