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Article published In:
Memory and Narrative
Edited by Alma Jeftic, Thomas Van de Putte and Johana Wyss
[Narrative Inquiry 33:2] 2023
► pp. 288–316

Implicit narratives and narrative agency

Evaluating pandemic storytelling

ORCID logo | University of Turku
This article proposes the concept of implicit narrative as an analytic tool that helps to articulate how cultural models of narrative sense-making steer us to certain patterns of experience, discourse, and interaction, and the concept of narrative agency as an analytic tool for theorizing and evaluating the processes in which we navigate our narrative environments, which consist of a range of implicit narratives. As a touchstone for developing these theoretical concepts, which serve not only narrative studies but also overlapping fields such as memory studies and cultural studies, the article analyzes the implicit cultural narrative that has most strongly dominated public discourse on the coronavirus pandemic: the narrative of war. Thereby, the article also contributes to the analysis of pandemic storytelling and its effects on us, as the cultural memory of the pandemic is currently taking shape and affecting our orientation to the future.
Keywords: implicit narrative, narrative agency, pandemic storytelling, narrative hermeneutics, narrative of war, covid-19, Michael Rosen’s Many Different Kinds of Love
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Conceptions of narrative: Narratives as dialogical practices in narrative hermeneutics
  • Situating implicit narratives in the conceptual landscape
  • Narrative agency
  • Pandemic storytelling: The implicit narrative of war
  • Narrative awareness
  • Narrative imagination
  • Narrative dialogicality
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 April 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.21076.mer
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