Abstract—Being human inevitably means attaching meaning
to essentially meaningless universe. Storytelling is the simplest
way of attaching meaning and what differentiates human beings
from other inhabitants of the world. In this context, our reality
is determined by the stories. Like every work of literature, life
of human beings is an intertext where different texts, styles and
themes interact in a story-like order. In their novels Don
Quixote and Never Let Me Go both Cervantes and Kazuoro
Ishiguro are showing that stories can generalize and extract the
truth by penetrating to the hearth of human condition. As such,
these stories mature man’s knowledge about himself and the
world. Both writers assert that as times passes we experience
different stories and our world is continuously altered by the
new stories. Through stories we internalize our environment,
our past and present. From this perspective, this paper aims to
demonstrate our own position regarding to stories in life and
common features of human beings referring to the tradition of
storytelling.
Index Terms—Meaning, story, storytelling, understanding,
reality.
Fulya Kincal is with the Department of English Language and Literature
in 2012 and the School of Foreign Languages, University of Kırklareli,
Kırklareli, 39100, Turkey (e-mail: fulya. kincal@ kirklareli.edu.tr).
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Cite: Fulya Kincal, " Our Entire Future and the Past Are Actually Stories We
Tell Ourselves and Others," International Journal of Social Science and Humanity vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 227-232, 2015.