The Storytelling Animal

“ A central thesis begins to emerge: man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal”. In this passage MacIntyre details how stories give people a since of who they are in society. By knowing what role one plays in the stories of other individuals, one can in turn know who they are. He refers to our roles in other people’s lives and our own and says “we have to learn what they are in order to be able to understand how others respond to us and how our responses to them are apt to be constructed”. I analyze that as meaning that we must know our roles in people’s lives in order to understand our own. As an example I am an addition to my mother’s story. I am her eldest child and I play a major role in her adult life. A part of who she is as a person is because of the circumstances she went through carrying, birthing and raising me as her daughter. Likewise her, being my mother is an extension of who I am. My experiences and habits are taken from the choices she made as a mother. For example, my mother moved us from Oakland, CA to Sacramento, CA when I was in elementary school. She didn’t feel like the school system in Oakland was adequate enough for me being her daughter. Because of that move she created a life for me in Sacramento and it is a part of my story now. I spent the rest of my adolescent schooling in Sacramento I now go to Sacramento City College and in the fall I will be attending Sacramento State College. Overall I can not tell my story without including part of hers. My mother has a role in who I am as do I in who she is.

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