Throughout history, humans have been inherently drawn to storytelling. From ancient cave paintings to contemporary literature, storytelling seems to have played a significant role around the world. People from a range of disciplines have long questioned why all known cultures have included storytelling as one of their art forms. By examining the issue from a number of different perspectives, we will attempt to understand the power that narratives possess in human development.

Stories tap into fundamental aspects of human psychology, making them powerful tools for communication and connection. Literary critics have pointed out various results of engaging with narratives. For example, some say they make us feel love or hate for characters and involve us in their triumphs and disasters. Some point out that narratives take us to new worlds and allow us to forget our own lives for a period of time. Others say that they put the reader into the shoes of characters to see what life might be like for such people, thereby developing a deeper knowledge of the human condition. In my case, narratives have helped me to understand people I meet in real life and why they behave in certain ways because I have met their equivalents in great works of literature.

It is tempting to believe that all cultures tell the same kind of stories. In an experiment in the 1930s, Sir Frederic Bartlett, a British psychologist, set out to check the truth of this. He asked white Americans who spoke English to read a complicated Native American folk tale called The War of the Ghosts and later recall and retell the story from memory. He observed that as the participants recalled the story, they made changes and omissions, transforming the narrative to fit their own narrative frameworks. Bartlett concluded that the changes resulted in the story becoming more aligned with the cultural background of the white Americans in terms of characters, objects and plot lines. For others, his experiment demonstrated that recall is an active process, challenging the traditional view of memory as a passive recording of information.

We begin to consume narratives as very young children in the fairy stories or folk tales which we are first told by parents and carers and then read for ourselves. By their very nature, the stories are rich in moral lessons and always feature one or two characters who face challenges, make choices and ultimately succeed. Good always triumphs and, presumably, it is intentional that this should be the main lesson of the earliest narratives we are presented with. Even if they are set in a magical world of some sort, these stories also introduce children to the roles which are played by real-life people in the culture they are growing up in. Hidden within the simple plots, repetitive language, and recurring character types, there is always an element of threat. For instance, giants, wicked stepmothers, or trolls present challenges that the child must confront alongside the hero or heroine, who is typically safe in their own home, possibly in their own bed. Recently, there has been a movement to remove these elements on the grounds that they are frightening, missing the fact that this is the whole point. The stories were not written as language tools or to suggest mythical beings actually exist but to take children on a scary, imaginary journey and so prepare them for the journey of life.

Sociologists have pointed out another role of folk tales – the preserving and transmitting of customs across generations. Oral traditions and myths pass on cultural heritage, enabling the collective memory of a society to endure. However, until recently, the stories did not allow for social change. Nowadays, I feel some narratives enable the rising generation to explore and examine norms and attitudes to others from different cultures and with different abilities. While the underlying plots are the same, some of the best children’s fiction not only reflect cultural values today, but also plays an active role in shaping them.

Looking to the future, it seems to me that there is too much concern among educators about the medium by which people engage with narratives. Narratives started with cave paintings, telling the story of a successful hunt, perhaps, then came oral tradition, whereby stories were passed from generation to generation. It is possible that we are moving back to visual and oral dissemination of stories becoming more common than through the written word, but as I see it, that is entirely irrelevant to the purposes that storytelling serves, as detailed above.