We Live Our Lives By Stories

There are few threads that commonly connect human beings, that every human being that we think of as “human” experiences. There are so few things about which we can say “All humans that we consider to be humans, not just beings who are wearing human flesh but are not human in how they think, have experienced with certainty.” Parenting is not one, there are many orphans who have never known their families, their mothers nor their fathers. We can rule out war, because there are tribes of peoples out there who have never known that there were peoples beyond themselves to war with until civilization finally found them. It is not theater, or writing, for those are fairly recent creations of civilization. But there is one definite constant, and that is the tradition of telling stories. All societies tell stories, and all stories follow the same patterns. We live our lives by these stories, and think of our lives in terms of stories, because that is how we have always, and probably always will, explain the world to ourselves, and we can see this because there is real evidence, from the Monomyth, to Jungian Archetypes, to the 2, or 20, or 36 or however many types of narrative you wish to support at any given time, all pointing to common literary experiences that hold universally.


Now, for the single greatest resource of collective archetypes, tropes, and various tools of story telling, you should go look at Tvtropes.org. This website is an enormous wealth of various literary and narrative based syntax by which we can find similar threads in all stories, and each page includes not only a break down of the “trope”, but also go into examples drawn from various types of media, as well as real life examples. I lay this down as the first bit of proof, that if we did not, on some level, define our lives by the stories we tell, how could we attribute narrative tools and mechanisms to real life peoples and events? I challenge you to spend time browsing on this website for any period of time without beginning to think “hey, I know someone like that”, or “yeah, I know a situation like this” about a real life thing or person. In fact, go do it a little right now, then return here and finish reading, it’ll give you some insight into exactly what I mean by “narrative tools”, a term I’ll be using throughout this post and feel needs little explanation at this point (I will go into the term in depth later, for the moment just think of them as types of plots, characters, and events that go on in stories).


Now, the simple fact that we can attribute narrative tools and tropes to real life things, people, and events is not enough to claim that we define our lives by them. I ask you this though? How are we taught our first lessons in life? When we are young and listen to bed time stories from our parents, or they play audiobooks for us on the nights they are too tired to read to us themselves (and in my case, it was always both, first a bed time story, then fall asleep listening to an audiobook). These stories do more for our development than we might think. They instill in us values, world views, thinking patterns, and reasoning abilities based upon what we hear and relate to when we are young. Jonathan Young put it best in this article when he said:

These tales are psychological mirrors and we become more complex as we mature. The storytellers intentionally loaded the adventures with heavy symbolism to reveal more meanings as we develop a deeper awareness of ourselves. Bedtime stories have enormous influence over our identities. People identify with certain characters in the stories they heard in childhood. To some degree, many live out these stories, largely unaware of how much the old tales may be shaping our lives. 

Nothing could be more truth than this statement, and these stories remain true, on some level, inside of us throughout our lives. Little Red Riding Hood tells us about how we should avoid strangers and beware dangers, as well as instilling the sense that authorities can and will save us when all seems lost. The Three Little Pigs tells us how hard work and dedication will protect us from danger and reward us in the end. And is there a person alive today who does not know the story of the prince and the dragon? Told and retold a thousand times until we don’t even think of it as a story anymore. The princess is kidnapped by a dragon and the prince rides out to save her, slaying the dragon and bringing her back to the kingdom to be crowned king and marry her. It is something so integral to how we think of the world that a thousand teenage girls each year wait to meet their “Prince Charming”, their knight in shining armor, and end up horribly disappointed. They have it PROGRAMMED into them on some level to want a boy who is handsome and brave and rescues them from danger. At the same time, the boys are instilled with a need for physical prowess, an idea that there are things a boy does and does not do, that they have to be there to save the girl and fight some imagined or real dragon for the right to deserve her. This is but the simplest example of how stories shape our lives, but it is such a basic one that it has come to have a name all it’s own: The Monomyth.


The Monomyth, as we understand it, is the Heroic Journey, and was has most famously been explained and analyzed within Joseph Campbell’s seminal work: The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The story is simple, it tracks the progress of the hero through his journey away from the world he knows, into the depths of hell and adventure, through some transformative experience, to triumph over the evil that drug him away from the world he knew, and back to the real world, his home, transformed and with skills he can apply to make the world he once knew a better place. For an incredibly instructive diagram of these events, I encourage the reader to look here. Read through that list counter-clockwise, and you’ll no doubt think of a thousand different legends, stories, and tales by which you can place it. The most obvious being the Lord of the Rings, but similar examples can be seen in Harry Potter, Eragon, and other modern tales. You can even apply it to real life. We set out from the world we know, we are transformed, we go through hell, we learn something new, gain a powerful skill, and overcome the challenge we face before returning home, our new skill in hand, to make our world better. Then, we once more experience the call to adventure, and once more we seek out a new skill, a new ability, a new experience, to overcome the challenge at hand, and a thousand, thousand times throughout our lives we will live out that cycle until our dying breath.


So we’ve proven that, at least on some level, that we live our lives by plot types. But what about character types? Do we see the world in terms of character archetypes? I would say yes, definitely. And not just in terms of characters, but in terms of events and situations in real life. An archetype is a kind of universal, it represents a thing, a very real thing, a symbol of something simple yet complex all at the same time. An archetype can be a character, or a situation, or a location, or an item, as long as it fits the base definition of that thing. Jung was one of the first to go into the "indefiniteness of the archetype, with its multiple meanings" (Collected Works of CG Jung, 16:497), and you can get a more in depth look into how archetypes function and what they are on the A.R.A.S (Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism) website. Most powerfully, at the end, it says:

All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes. This is particularly true of religious ideas, but the central concepts of science, philosophy, and ethics are no exception to this rule. In their present form they are variants of archetypal ideas created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality. For it is the function of consciousness not only to recognize and assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses, but to translate into visible reality the world within us (CW8, 342).

Think about that for a moment, think about this, and then think about the tropes and archetypes you browsed through earlier when reading TvTropes (you did browse it right?). Symbols are how we understand this world, and Archetypes are the most primal and basic kind of symbols, a writing mass of work throughout human history all interconnected and indivisible from one another, infinite and expansive and simple all at the same time. Things that are complex and divisible into infinitely smaller units, yet at the same time so simple that we can apply them over and over again to the most basic of human interactions in real life. That is what an Archetype is.


Let’s take a closer look at one of Jung’s Archetypes in particular, Anima and Animus, or the Syzygy. In principle, these are the man who completes the woman, and the woman who completes the man. I’m sure not a single one of my readers can fail to think of a couple who seemed so completely opposite of one another, that they it left the mind boggling as to why they had gotten together. This might give us some insight into that. It’s certainly a common trope within videogames and literary narratives. Look at Ron and Hermione from Harry Potter, opposites, the bungling clumsy boy who seeks to do what’s right even if it means (and sometimes especially if it means) breaking the rules, and the girl who is the opposite side of the same coin. Studious and proper, always sticking to the rules and trying to get things done “the right way.” Is it any wonder the pair end up married in the prologue of the last book? (If this is a spoiler for you, go get a life, please do not clutter up the comments section with complaints. Thank you in advance.) In even simpler terms, almost everyone believes in the idea of a soul-mate, someone who is your perfect match, who in their relationship with you fills in the weaknesses of your own personality. I know I do, I’ve seen it happen, and almost every one of us has experienced it on some level. We meet someone (or sometimes witness it in a pair of other someones), a pair of complete opposites who seem content together and love one another deeply. What can be more basic than this in human life? And yet we define it by a story, by an archetype, we take our cues from things like the Prince and the Dragon and a dozen Disney movies we grew up watching just to figure out how and where and why we should act in particular ways. Can there be any more obvious evidence of our dependence upon story telling?


Okay, so we now have pretty solid evidence that our lives, that is to say, modern lives are defined by our stories. But has this always been the case? I think it must be, because there is an enormous body of work in this direction, dating all the way back to the Renaissance in Italy. The most recent works can be seen in Northrop Frye's Theory of Narratives, in George Polti’s The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, and in the almost ubiquitous “20 Plot Types” that permeates so many writing classes and guides throughout our society. There are tons of these, ranging from 7 plot types, to a single one, to as many as 69 different plots. Some argue that this means there is no “set number of plots”, and yet he simple fact remains, however, that they EXIST. We can actually put names and formats to them, and while some are simply more broken down forms of others, and some stories are hybrids of various plots, and some stories even include multiple plots running in tandem. This doesn’t change the fact, though, that we have a set of names for these plots and what goes on inside of them. We have defined them, and we define them because we experience them. You cannot define something you have not even conceptually experienced. Stories are powerful for this reason, we relate to them because we see real life situations inside of them, and we see this universally, and always have done so. Every story can in existence, from the oldest to the newest ones can be defined by the narrative tools and tropes and archetypes that they use, even if we cannot, exactly, place a set definition on them when all the building blocks are put together.


We see our lives as stories, and we live our lives by them. We have always done so, and we can see this in how tropes and archetypes permeate our lives and the oldest of stories. The divine pair of Syzyngy, the Anima and Animus in how we see true love and soul-mates, the Monomyth and the heroic journey as how we develop and overcome challenges, and the relationship of real life situations to the plots and stories we tell ourselves. We read stories, and we tell them again and again because they are true. Not in a sense of true that they really happen, but because they tell us, through symbolism and archetypes, how the world functions, and we expect the world, on some level, to function as if it were a story being told to us by reality.