Narrative is so deeply ingrained as a cultural form that we take for granted the ways in which storytelling engages our interest, curiosity, fear, tensions, expectations, and sense of order:

For we dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticise, construct, gossip, learn, hate, and love by narrative. In order really to live, we make up stories about ourselves and others, about the personal as well as the social, past and future

Indeed, narrative is so familiar that it has become naturalised: we are no longer conscious of its significance for the ways in which we live our lives.

http://www.craigbellamy.net/2006/10/26/new-media-and-cultural-form-narrative-versus-database/