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Amechanon, Vol. I / 2016-2018, ISSN: 2459-2846

In many senses, the tools of individual memory are our means of looking at the world
through both a microscope and periscope with high and low resolutions. Memory includes

an occurrence that generally has a beginning, middle, and end, even if the end is temporary
or dynamic, and can be altered at any moment. This is accomplished with the help of

narrative structure. Researchers who have adopted a narrative approach perceive it as
dialogic, allowing an opening for the encounter between researcher and the subject being

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studied and in our case, between the living and the deceased.

The personal story is a universal type of human discourse that seeks to convey a message.

This model can be deciphered by the audience (listener, reader) via well-known means – a
selected sequence of events relevant to the subject at hand organized on the basis of a

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linear plot. This relates to a certain entity, developing through cause-and-effect links .
Personal experiences are always embedded in a coherent and meaningful context in a

biographical structure that comes to expression in the activity of a group. The association
between the various events chosen by the narrator in order to represent his story is not

chronological but personal-phenomenological. The community of inquiry thus also allows
an examination of how meaning is given to diverse events in the present, in particular in

regard to their implications for the future—for example, in the development of social
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sensitivities .

Memory of the body as a foundation for personal structuring also contains a dimension in
which narrative and self are not separate. According to McAdams, the perception of self
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as a narrative allows the individual to fulfill an active role regarding his/her identity .
People transmit the events that have undergone thematization in accordance with a clear

self image. In this instance, a narrative analysis permits the revelation of the meaning of
the narrator’s individual identity, and thus, the examination of overt and hidden contextual

meanings in the text, without searching for the coherency of memory and narrative, and
rather by identifying and examining the multiple voices to be found in it.

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Sarbin, T., Narrative Psychology: The Storied Nature of Human Conduct, New York: Praeger, 1986.

188 Gergen, K.,J., Social construction in context, London: Sage, 2001.

189 Connelly, F.,M., & Clandinin, D.,J., «Stories of experience and narrative inquiry», Educational
Researcher, 19(5), 1990, pp. 2-14.

190 McAdams, D.,P., Power, Intimacy and the Life Story: Personological inquiries into identity,
Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1985.

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