It’s story time: why narrative is so profoundly important to us all

Life has been narrativised by humans from the earliest times, from prehistoric art on the walls of caves to the beginnings of spoken and written language. One can only speculate about the origins of narrative, what compelled the very first stories and what they might have been about: ancestral legends or wrangles with the gods, perhaps, campfire tales of hunting exploits or battles with the elements.

Widely regarded as the world’s oldest story, or literary narrative, the Epic of Gilgamesh, with its written origins as far back as 2,100BCE in ancient Mesopotamia, has one of the oldest and most prevalent themes since storytelling began, that of the quest for earthly immortality. Gilgamesh’s fame survived long after his death, of course, his story translated into many languages and featuring in popular fiction down to the present day.

Stories, though not always as epic as this, are all around us, day in, day out: in our personal interactions, in novels, movies, poems, newspapers, magazines and TV, in our social media news feeds and across the internet. It’s been said that there’s no longer any such thing as fiction or non-fiction, but only narrative.

We all make use of stories, and our lives are shaped by them. The narrative impulse is ever-present, and it’s impossible to imagine…