Class Notes
What are the Things that Shape You as a Researcher?
· Experiences
· Knowingly and unknowingly what we carry
· Cultural expectations
· Our Beliefs about research and other people’s beliefs about research/IRB
· Unknowingly: race, class, gender
· Theoretical positions/often unnamed, unclarified
· We privilege and value Truth; we want to rely on things we know to be labeled “true”
· James Fry A Thousand Little Pieces—memoir about living as a drug addict; being in prison
o Memoir vs. autobiography—which is more truthful?
o Do you make a conscious effort to check the facts?
o Memoir is a looser version of the truth
· Two contradictory statements can both be true (“The truths are contradictory.”) (“I was a coward. I went to war.” (How to tell…)
· “In a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.” (How to tell…)
Goals for Narrative Inquiry
One of the goals of the narrative inquirer is to unpack these things being carried. Another goal is to include them in the text so that readers and the narrator can think about them.
O’Brien, p. 36 “remembering makes it now…stories are for joining the past to the future…Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”
For O’Brien, memory is fragile—story helps preserve these ideas, precious things that can be lost. The price of loss is very high for O’Brien—it’s a serious matter—It’s not just for fun or just a literary game, this really matters to him—probably because of the content, but also because the stories haunt him over time
We want capture the real power of stories that hold strong meaning and link those to the issues of the day
3. What is truth? To what extent, if any, should researchers seek after truth?
4. How can we use fiction to report research? Does fiction have any place/purpose in research?
The way details shape the story, and are a part of it. It’s not just what happened, it’s how you tell what happened. So Lemon gets killed by sunlight. P. 90 How to tell a true war story
O’Brien, p. 89 Do we feel cheated if the story is not true?
“A thing can happen and be a lie. Another thing can be true but not real”
Does the event embody what happens?
Real vs. we can relate to it (relatable)—which one is more powerful?
Stories have a sense of truth about them because we’ve heard a cumulative effect
Some stories people don’t want to talk about
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Can we apply these ideas about war stories to educational stories?
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Despite constantly calling truth into question, O’Brien ends up being a reliable sounding narrator
O’Brien also frames the stories very effectively, causing us to think about the nature of the stories he is telling us. Education/academic narratives usually do this. But O’Brien also calls that practice into question:
“Whenever he told the story, Rat had a tendency to stop now and then, interrupting the flow, inserting little clarifications or bits of analysis and personal opinion. It was a bad habit, Mitchell Sanders said, because all that matters is the raw material, the stuff itself, and you can’t clutter it up with your own half-baked commentary. That just breaks the spell. It destroys the magic. What you have to do, Sanders said, is trust your own story. Get the hell out of the way and let it tell itself.” (Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong, p. 116)
Always a tension for us when doing narrative inquiry