Stories That Hold: Narrative, Identity, and the Work of Continuity
*last updated on April 12, 2026
In the essay Stories We Tell, I focused on a tension: stories help us make sense of reality, but they can also distort it. That remains true. Yet there is another dimension that needs to be held alongside it. Not all storytelling is primarily about interpretation. Some storytelling is about survival—about holding together identity, memory, and continuity when these are at risk of being lost.
This essay is an attempt to make that distinction clearer. It helps to separate, at least analytically, two broad functions of storytelling. One is interpretive: stories that explain events, assign meaning, and organize perception. These are the stories through which we decide what a situation means, who is right, what someone’s action reveals, or what kind of person someone is. The other is continuity-preserving: stories that carry memory across time, sustain identity, and maintain connection to people, place, and past.
In life, these functions often overlap. But they are not the same. The concern raised in Stories We Tell applies most directly to the first type. Interpretive stories can become rigid, selective, and self-serving. They can reduce complexity, reinforce certainty, and justify harm. The second type operates under different conditions. When continuity itself is threatened—through displacement, cultural disruption, or historical erasure—storytelling is not primarily a tool of interpretation. It becomes a way of keeping something alive.
There are contexts in which storytelling is not simply one option among many ways of making sense of the world. It is one of the few available ways to maintain connection. For many Indigenous communities, for example, storytelling is not merely expressive or symbolic. It can be a way of transmitting knowledge tied to land and environment, preserving relationships to ancestors, maintaining cultural coherence across generations, and resisting erasure. When people are separated from their land, their language, or their historical continuity, stories can function as a form of reassembly. They do not merely describe identity; they help sustain it.
In that context, treating storytelling mainly as a source of distortion misses something essential. It overlooks the fact that some stories are not primarily attempts to simplify reality or impose coherence on it. They are efforts to preserve continuity under conditions that threaten to break it.
Recognizing the limits of stories still matters. But there is a risk in applying that recognition indiscriminately. If one takes the insight that stories can mislead and uses it to dismiss or weaken forms of storytelling that are helping hold together disrupted identities, the critique becomes misaligned with its object. Questioning whether a narrative simplifies reality is one kind of inquiry. Questioning whether a community should maintain its stories at all is another. The first can be a form of careful attention. The second can become a form of erasure, even if unintentionally.
There is a related tension here with philosophical positions that question the solidity of the self. Insights from traditions such as Buddhism suggest that the self is not a permanent, independent essence. That insight can be valuable. But when applied without context, it can slide into something too blunt, as if the preservation of identity through story were unnecessary simply because the self is not ultimately solid in some metaphysical sense. This overlooks a practical reality: people live, relate, and suffer through forms of identity that, whether ultimately fixed or not, are experientially and socially real. To disregard that is not clarity. It is a failure to account for how human life actually works.
There is also an asymmetry here that matters. Groups that displace others, dominate institutions, or shape dominant public narratives are also telling stories. Their stories can be expansive, self-justifying, and widely circulated. When the same skepticism is applied to all storytelling without attention to context, an unintended flattening can occur. Stories that sustain continuity under pressure begin to look equivalent to stories that legitimize or normalize that pressure. This does not mean that one set of stories is beyond reflection or critique. But it does mean that the conditions under which stories are produced matter. Without that awareness, the language of “stories are just stories” can obscure differences in function, context, and consequence.
So the original paradox remains. Stories can mislead, and stories can also sustain. These are not mutually exclusive truths. The same narrative can do both, depending on how it is held, used, and situated. The question, then, is not whether to keep or discard storytelling. It is how to relate to different kinds of stories with appropriate attention. That means remaining aware that interpretations are partial, recognizing when stories are serving emotional or identity-related functions, distinguishing between stories that simplify reality and stories that preserve continuity, and staying open to revision without turning that openness into a demand for erasure.
It is possible to hold two positions at once without collapsing them into each other: to remain cautious about how easily stories become substitutes for reality, and to recognize that in some contexts stories are among the few means available to hold reality together across disruption. The challenge is not to resolve this tension once and for all, but to stay attentive to it.
Stories do not only shape how we see the world. In some cases, they are part of what allows a world—shared, remembered, and inhabited—to persist at all.
About this project: Start page
In the essay Stories We Tell, I focused on a tension: stories help us make sense of reality, but they can also distort it. That remains true. Yet there is another dimension that needs to be held alongside it. Not all storytelling is primarily about interpretation. Some storytelling is about survival—about holding together identity, memory, and continuity when these are at risk of being lost.
This essay is an attempt to make that distinction clearer. It helps to separate, at least analytically, two broad functions of storytelling. One is interpretive: stories that explain events, assign meaning, and organize perception. These are the stories through which we decide what a situation means, who is right, what someone’s action reveals, or what kind of person someone is. The other is continuity-preserving: stories that carry memory across time, sustain identity, and maintain connection to people, place, and past.
In life, these functions often overlap. But they are not the same. The concern raised in Stories We Tell applies most directly to the first type. Interpretive stories can become rigid, selective, and self-serving. They can reduce complexity, reinforce certainty, and justify harm. The second type operates under different conditions. When continuity itself is threatened—through displacement, cultural disruption, or historical erasure—storytelling is not primarily a tool of interpretation. It becomes a way of keeping something alive.
There are contexts in which storytelling is not simply one option among many ways of making sense of the world. It is one of the few available ways to maintain connection. For many Indigenous communities, for example, storytelling is not merely expressive or symbolic. It can be a way of transmitting knowledge tied to land and environment, preserving relationships to ancestors, maintaining cultural coherence across generations, and resisting erasure. When people are separated from their land, their language, or their historical continuity, stories can function as a form of reassembly. They do not merely describe identity; they help sustain it.
In that context, treating storytelling mainly as a source of distortion misses something essential. It overlooks the fact that some stories are not primarily attempts to simplify reality or impose coherence on it. They are efforts to preserve continuity under conditions that threaten to break it.
Recognizing the limits of stories still matters. But there is a risk in applying that recognition indiscriminately. If one takes the insight that stories can mislead and uses it to dismiss or weaken forms of storytelling that are helping hold together disrupted identities, the critique becomes misaligned with its object. Questioning whether a narrative simplifies reality is one kind of inquiry. Questioning whether a community should maintain its stories at all is another. The first can be a form of careful attention. The second can become a form of erasure, even if unintentionally.
There is a related tension here with philosophical positions that question the solidity of the self. Insights from traditions such as Buddhism suggest that the self is not a permanent, independent essence. That insight can be valuable. But when applied without context, it can slide into something too blunt, as if the preservation of identity through story were unnecessary simply because the self is not ultimately solid in some metaphysical sense. This overlooks a practical reality: people live, relate, and suffer through forms of identity that, whether ultimately fixed or not, are experientially and socially real. To disregard that is not clarity. It is a failure to account for how human life actually works.
There is also an asymmetry here that matters. Groups that displace others, dominate institutions, or shape dominant public narratives are also telling stories. Their stories can be expansive, self-justifying, and widely circulated. When the same skepticism is applied to all storytelling without attention to context, an unintended flattening can occur. Stories that sustain continuity under pressure begin to look equivalent to stories that legitimize or normalize that pressure. This does not mean that one set of stories is beyond reflection or critique. But it does mean that the conditions under which stories are produced matter. Without that awareness, the language of “stories are just stories” can obscure differences in function, context, and consequence.
So the original paradox remains. Stories can mislead, and stories can also sustain. These are not mutually exclusive truths. The same narrative can do both, depending on how it is held, used, and situated. The question, then, is not whether to keep or discard storytelling. It is how to relate to different kinds of stories with appropriate attention. That means remaining aware that interpretations are partial, recognizing when stories are serving emotional or identity-related functions, distinguishing between stories that simplify reality and stories that preserve continuity, and staying open to revision without turning that openness into a demand for erasure.
It is possible to hold two positions at once without collapsing them into each other: to remain cautious about how easily stories become substitutes for reality, and to recognize that in some contexts stories are among the few means available to hold reality together across disruption. The challenge is not to resolve this tension once and for all, but to stay attentive to it.
Stories do not only shape how we see the world. In some cases, they are part of what allows a world—shared, remembered, and inhabited—to persist at all.
About this project: Start page
