Narrating to Improve, Narrating to Survive

When Jerome Bruner presents the ten features of narrative1 explaining that his central concern is not how narrative as text is constructed but rather how it operates as an instrument of mind in the construction of reality he declares that the constructions generated by scientific procedures can be eliminated by falsification but narrative constructions can only achieve verisimilitude - a version of reality whose acceptability is governed by convention and narrative ʼnecessity.' His perspective is crucial but he fails to explain why the text operates as an instrument of mind. Part of this answer is given by the biological anthropologist Terrence Deacon, who argues that the compositional and creative power of symbolic communication, the construction of the reference notion and of narrative context developed in parallel with the brain. The answer is also given by the neuroscientist António Damásio who maintains that storytelling is a solution for the brain to make all its wisdom understandable, transmissible, persuasive and enforcible, implying that storytelling has created our selves and it pervades the entire fabric of human societies and cultures. Considering these perspectives, this paper proposes to show that narrative is not only inherent to cerebral/human development but also a useful element in man’s engagement for survival.