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Julie Beck covers a lot of ground as she explores narrative’s potentially powerful influence on our lives. Identify at least three notable assertions or other moments in Beck’s text that caused you to sit up straighter and take note. Explain what exactly caught your eye. Did you react as a believer or doubter? Did you build a connection between the text and the world or the text and your self?
- “Pretty much from birth, people are “actors.” They have personality traits, they interact with the world, they have roles to play—daughter, sister, the neighbor’s new baby that cries all night and keeps you up” (page 7). At this moment on the seventh page, it made me reread and think a little bit more. I never thought about people being actors since they were born. I think about people being an actor, when they are in a play or acting out something in order to be another person or thing. Personally, I do not agree with this statement and that is why I had to reread and fully understand what it was trying to tell me.
- “It is in the late teens and early years of adulthood that story construction really picks up”. This quote from the text really stood out to me. I reacted as a believer because I think that at young ages you do not understand what your own definition of a narrative is and how you tell your stories. Also, at a younger age the brain is still not developed, so I believe this is not a good fit to make your own narrative.
- “Life is incredibly complex, there are lots of things going on in our environment and in our lives at all times, and in order to hold onto our experience, we need to make meaning out of it.” I reacted as a believer because I think that different situations can make people view things differently.
