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Narrative as being

The ontological interweaving of narrative and narrator through childhood sensory experience

ORCiD logo with link | Puyang Vocational and Technical CollegePuyangHenan
Published online: 8 July 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.26022.zhu
Abstract
This autoethnographic narrative inquiry examines how remembered childhood sensory encounters become available, in later narrative contexts, as orientations for self-positioning. Drawing on embodied cognition, implicit narrative, narrative agency, and aesthetic agency, it analyzes three sensory nodes: color and a candy wrapper, paper-cutting and frost on glass, and radio voice and classroom reading. Rather than treating sensory memories as intrinsic aesthetic truths, the article reads seeing, touching, and hearing as representative modalities reactivated in narrative meaning-making. Based on autobiographical field texts, a sensory archival journal, reflexive memos, and critical-friend conversations as resonance points, the findings suggest that early sensory traces participate in narrative agency by offering perceptual orientations: seeing otherwise, touching with restraint, and becoming audible within a collective soundscape. The article contributes to narrative inquiry by showing how sensory compensation, tactile restraint, and auditory repositioning make remembered sensory fragments narratively available.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Theoretical framework: Embodied cognition, implicit narrative, and aesthetic agency
    • Embodied cognition: Sensory orientation and narrative formation
    • Implicit narratives and the narrative unconscious
    • Restorying and folding memory
    • Aesthetic agency and narrative configuration
  • Methodology: Restorying as generative process
    • Methodological overview
      • Research design and researcher positionality
      • Field text construction
      • Ethics and reflexive accountability
      • Analysis procedure
      • Trustworthiness strategies
  • Narrative interweaving and sensory orientation
  • Experiential analysis: Sensory narrative generation
    • Visual inscription: Color compensation
      • Narrative Slice A: The lake-blue on the cigarette box and the gaze through the candy wrapper
      • Sensory compensation and the temporary reorientation of time and space
      • Contour sketching as a narrative rehearsal of order
      • Relational recognition within a social network
    • Tactile dialectics: Intervention and restraint
      • Narrative Slice B: The resilience of red paper and the sorrow of vanishing frost
      • Fingertip resistance as the embodied ground of narrative anticipation
      • The dialectical logic of warm intervention and the collapse of order
      • Touch as intervention and restraint
      • The emergence of a tactile schema in sensory intertextuality
    • Auditory modalities: Positional reconstruction
      • Narrative Slice C: The train in the radio waves and the re-reading of a flattened classroom
      • Implicit soundscape as a narrative buffer zone
      • Frequency mimicry as the reclamation of narrative positionality
      • Positioning shift invited by re-reading
    • Summary: Sensory convergence
  • Discussion: Narrative agency and sensory reconfiguration
    • Narrative as being: Existential reorientation
      • The embodied rehearsal of order
      • Narrative positionality and reorientation
      • The embodied reconstruction of existential continuity
    • Aesthetic agency and sensory capital
    • These analytical claims also have methodological implications
  • Conclusion: Sensation, narrative, and being
  • References
References (37)
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