The Life Story…

The main draw from this lecture seemed pretty clear “Is life a story?”. The quite escalated debate that ended our lecture had our class talking. It had my friends talking. The general consensus was that Adrian was wrong. Of course life is a story we’re alive until we’re dead. Our legacy lives on through stories of relatives.

That’s where the confusion begins, I think.

A story, or narrative is written in such a way that an even unravels due to the causal plane that the author/storyteller creates. An example that came up in class was that a man was a World War 2 soldier, after the war he found the love of his life and died of old age. Surely that’s a story, surely that’s a life. But there’s a line, it’s not story and life hand in hand. It’s a story of a life in which that particular person has told in their own way.

I think what Adrian meant was that through our perspective and our experience of life is a description. Sure there will be moments when something becomes the direct effect of something else, but everything in between can be completely unrelated and irrelevant to that particular arc.  Narratives don’t play by that rule, everything exists for a reason and that reason is to contribute to a believable, logical narrative.

The word ‘life’ is  a pretty confusing word to use, to a lot of people’s defence, maybe the word “Experience” might have been better? But that may bring up an entirely different argument.

Even a movie about life needs a narrative.