Implicit narratives and narrative agency

Abstract

This article proposes the concept of implicit narrative as an analytic tool that helps to articulate how cultural models of narrative sense-making steer us to certain patterns of experience, discourse, and interaction, and the concept of narrative agency as an analytic tool for theorizing and evaluating the processes in which we navigate our narrative environments, which consist of a range of implicit narratives. As a touchstone for developing these theoretical concepts, which serve not only narrative studies but also overlapping fields such as memory studies and cultural studies, the article analyzes the implicit cultural narrative that has most strongly dominated public discourse on the coronavirus pandemic: the narrative of war. Thereby, the article also contributes to the analysis of pandemic storytelling and its effects on us, as the cultural memory of the pandemic is currently taking shape and affecting our orientation to the future.