cultural narrative essay

Cultural Identity Essay

27 August, 2020

12 minutes read

Author:  Elizabeth Brown

No matter where you study, composing essays of any type and complexity is a critical component in any studying program. Most likely, you have already been assigned the task to write a cultural identity essay, which is an essay that has to do a lot with your personality and cultural background. In essence, writing a cultural identity essay is fundamental for providing the reader with an understanding of who you are and which outlook you have. This may include the topics of religion, traditions, ethnicity, race, and so on. So, what shall you do to compose a winning cultural identity essay?

Cultural Identity Paper: Definitions, Goals & Topics 

Before starting off with a cultural identity essay, it is fundamental to uncover what is particular about this type of paper. First and foremost, it will be rather logical to begin with giving a general and straightforward definition of a cultural identity essay. In essence, cultural identity essay implies outlining the role of the culture in defining your outlook, shaping your personality, points of view regarding a multitude of matters, and forming your qualities and beliefs. Given a simpler definition, a cultural identity essay requires you to write about how culture has influenced your personality and yourself in general. So in this kind of essay you as a narrator need to give an understanding of who you are, which strengths you have, and what your solid life position is.

Yet, the goal of a cultural identity essay is not strictly limited to describing who you are and merely outlining your biography. Instead, this type of essay pursues specific objectives, achieving which is a perfect indicator of how high-quality your essay is. Initially, the primary goal implies outlining your cultural focus and why it makes you peculiar. For instance, if you are a french adolescent living in Canada, you may describe what is so special about it: traditions of the community, beliefs, opinions, approaches. Basically, you may talk about the principles of the society as well as its beliefs that made you become the person you are today.

So far, cultural identity is a rather broad topic, so you will likely have a multitude of fascinating ideas for your paper. For instance, some of the most attention-grabbing topics for a personal cultural identity essay are:

• Memorable traditions of your community
• A cultural event that has influenced your personality 
• Influential people in your community
• Locations and places that tell a lot about your culture and identity

Cultural Identity Essay Structure

As you might have already guessed, composing an essay on cultural identity might turn out to be fascinating but somewhat challenging. Even though the spectrum of topics is rather broad, the question of how to create the most appropriate and appealing structure remains open.

Like any other kind of an academic essay, a cultural identity essay must compose of three parts: introduction, body, and concluding remarks. Let’s take a more detailed look at each of the components:

Introduction 

Starting to write an essay is most likely one of the most time-consuming and mind-challenging procedures. Therefore, you can postpone writing your introduction and approach it right after you finish body paragraphs. Nevertheless, you should think of a suitable topic as well as come up with an explicit thesis. At the beginning of the introduction section, give some hints regarding the matter you are going to discuss. You have to mention your thesis statement after you have briefly guided the reader through the topic. You can also think of indicating some vital information about yourself, which is, of course, relevant to the topic you selected.

Your main body should reveal your ideas and arguments. Most likely, it will consist of 3-5 paragraphs that are more or less equal in size. What you have to keep in mind to compose a sound ‘my cultural identity essay’ is the argumentation. In particular, always remember to reveal an argument and back it up with evidence in each body paragraph. And, of course, try to stick to the topic and make sure that you answer the overall question that you stated in your topic. Besides, always keep your thesis statement in mind: make sure that none of its components is left without your attention and argumentation.

Conclusion 

Finally, after you are all finished with body paragraphs and introduction, briefly summarize all the points in your final remarks section. Paraphrase what you have already revealed in the main body, and make sure you logically lead the reader to the overall argument. Indicate your cultural identity once again and draw a bottom line regarding how your culture has influenced your personality.

Best Tips For Writing Cultural Identity Essay

Writing a ‘cultural identity essay about myself’ might be somewhat challenging at first. However, you will no longer struggle if you take a couple of plain tips into consideration. Following the tips below will give you some sound and reasonable cultural identity essay ideas as well as make the writing process much more pleasant:

• Start off by creating an outline. The reason why most students struggle with creating a cultural identity essay lies behind a weak structure. The best way to organize your ideas and let them flow logically is to come up with a helpful outline. Having a reference to build on is incredibly useful, and it allows your essay to look polished.
• Remember to write about yourself. The task of a cultural identity essay implies not focusing on your culture per se, but to talk about how it shaped your personality. So, switch your focus to describing who you are and what your attitudes and positions are. 
• Think of the most fundamental cultural aspects. Needless to say, you first need to come up with a couple of ideas to be based upon in your paper. So, brainstorm all the possible ideas and try to decide which of them deserve the most attention. In essence, try to determine which of the aspects affected your personality the most.
• Edit and proofread before submitting your paper. Of course, the content and the coherence of your essay’s structure play a crucial role. But the grammatical correctness matters a lot too. Even if you are a native speaker, you may still make accidental errors in the text. To avoid the situation when unintentional mistakes spoil the impression from your essay, always double check your cultural identity essay. 

A life lesson in Romeo and Juliet taught by death

Due to human nature, we draw conclusions only when life gives us a lesson since the experience of others is not so effective and powerful. Therefore, when analyzing and sorting out common problems we face, we may trace a parallel with well-known book characters or real historical figures. Moreover, we often compare our situations with […]

Ethical Research Paper Topics

Writing a research paper on ethics is not an easy task, especially if you do not possess excellent writing skills and do not like to contemplate controversial questions. But an ethics course is obligatory in all higher education institutions, and students have to look for a way out and be creative. When you find an […]

Art Research Paper Topics

Students obtaining degrees in fine art and art & design programs most commonly need to write a paper on art topics. However, this subject is becoming more popular in educational institutions for expanding students’ horizons. Thus, both groups of receivers of education: those who are into arts and those who only get acquainted with art […]

The Ultimate Narrative Essay Guide for Beginners

A narrative essay tells a story in chronological order, with an introduction that introduces the characters and sets the scene. Then a series of events leads to a climax or turning point, and finally a resolution or reflection on the experience.

Speaking of which, are you in sixes and sevens about narrative essays? Don’t worry this ultimate expert guide will wipe out all your doubts. So let’s get started.

Table of Contents

Everything You Need to Know About Narrative Essay

What is a narrative essay.

When you go through a narrative essay definition, you would know that a narrative essay purpose is to tell a story. It’s all about sharing an experience or event and is different from other types of essays because it’s more focused on how the event made you feel or what you learned from it, rather than just presenting facts or an argument. Let’s explore more details on this interesting write-up and get to know how to write a narrative essay.

Elements of a Narrative Essay

Here’s a breakdown of the key elements of a narrative essay:

A narrative essay has a beginning, middle, and end. It builds up tension and excitement and then wraps things up in a neat package.

Real people, including the writer, often feature in personal narratives. Details of the characters and their thoughts, feelings, and actions can help readers to relate to the tale.

It’s really important to know when and where something happened so we can get a good idea of the context. Going into detail about what it looks like helps the reader to really feel like they’re part of the story.

Conflict or Challenge 

A story in a narrative essay usually involves some kind of conflict or challenge that moves the plot along. It could be something inside the character, like a personal battle, or something from outside, like an issue they have to face in the world.

Theme or Message

A narrative essay isn’t just about recounting an event – it’s about showing the impact it had on you and what you took away from it. It’s an opportunity to share your thoughts and feelings about the experience, and how it changed your outlook.

Emotional Impact

The author is trying to make the story they’re telling relatable, engaging, and memorable by using language and storytelling to evoke feelings in whoever’s reading it.

Narrative essays let writers have a blast telling stories about their own lives. It’s an opportunity to share insights and impart wisdom, or just have some fun with the reader. Descriptive language, sensory details, dialogue, and a great narrative voice are all essentials for making the story come alive.

The Purpose of a Narrative Essay

A narrative essay is more than just a story – it’s a way to share a meaningful, engaging, and relatable experience with the reader. Includes:

Sharing Personal Experience

Narrative essays are a great way for writers to share their personal experiences, feelings, thoughts, and reflections. It’s an opportunity to connect with readers and make them feel something.

Entertainment and Engagement

The essay attempts to keep the reader interested by using descriptive language, storytelling elements, and a powerful voice. It attempts to pull them in and make them feel involved by creating suspense, mystery, or an emotional connection.

Conveying a Message or Insight

Narrative essays are more than just a story – they aim to teach you something. They usually have a moral lesson, a new understanding, or a realization about life that the author gained from the experience.

Building Empathy and Understanding

By telling their stories, people can give others insight into different perspectives, feelings, and situations. Sharing these tales can create compassion in the reader and help broaden their knowledge of different life experiences.

Inspiration and Motivation

Stories about personal struggles, successes, and transformations can be really encouraging to people who are going through similar situations. It can provide them with hope and guidance, and let them know that they’re not alone.

Reflecting on Life’s Significance

These essays usually make you think about the importance of certain moments in life or the impact of certain experiences. They make you look deep within yourself and ponder on the things you learned or how you changed because of those events.

Demonstrating Writing Skills

Coming up with a gripping narrative essay takes serious writing chops, like vivid descriptions, powerful language, timing, and organization. It’s an opportunity for writers to show off their story-telling abilities.

Preserving Personal History

Sometimes narrative essays are used to record experiences and special moments that have an emotional resonance. They can be used to preserve individual memories or for future generations to look back on.

Cultural and Societal Exploration

Personal stories can look at cultural or social aspects, giving us an insight into customs, opinions, or social interactions seen through someone’s own experience.

Format of a Narrative Essay

Narrative essays are quite flexible in terms of format, which allows the writer to tell a story in a creative and compelling way. Here’s a quick breakdown of the narrative essay format, along with some examples:

Introduction

Set the scene and introduce the story.

Engage the reader and establish the tone of the narrative.

Hook: Start with a captivating opening line to grab the reader’s attention. For instance:

Example:  “The scorching sun beat down on us as we trekked through the desert, our water supply dwindling.”

Background Information: Provide necessary context or background without giving away the entire story.

Example:  “It was the summer of 2015 when I embarked on a life-changing journey to…”

Thesis Statement or Narrative Purpose

Present the main idea or the central message of the essay.

Offer a glimpse of what the reader can expect from the narrative.

Thesis Statement: This isn’t as rigid as in other essays but can be a sentence summarizing the essence of the story.

Example:  “Little did I know, that seemingly ordinary hike would teach me invaluable lessons about resilience and friendship.”

Body Paragraphs

Present the sequence of events in chronological order.

Develop characters, setting, conflict, and resolution.

Story Progression : Describe events in the order they occurred, focusing on details that evoke emotions and create vivid imagery.

Example : Detail the trek through the desert, the challenges faced, interactions with fellow hikers, and the pivotal moments.

Character Development : Introduce characters and their roles in the story. Show their emotions, thoughts, and actions.

Example : Describe how each character reacted to the dwindling water supply and supported each other through adversity.

Dialogue and Interactions : Use dialogue to bring the story to life and reveal character personalities.

Example : “Sarah handed me her last bottle of water, saying, ‘We’re in this together.'”

Reach the peak of the story, the moment of highest tension or significance.

Turning Point: Highlight the most crucial moment or realization in the narrative.

Example:  “As the sun dipped below the horizon and hope seemed lost, a distant sound caught our attention—the rescue team’s helicopters.”

Provide closure to the story.

Reflect on the significance of the experience and its impact.

Reflection : Summarize the key lessons learned or insights gained from the experience.

Example : “That hike taught me the true meaning of resilience and the invaluable support of friendship in challenging times.”

Closing Thought : End with a memorable line that reinforces the narrative’s message or leaves a lasting impression.

Example : “As we boarded the helicopters, I knew this adventure would forever be etched in my heart.”

Example Summary:

Imagine a narrative about surviving a challenging hike through the desert, emphasizing the bonds formed and lessons learned. The narrative essay structure might look like starting with an engaging scene, narrating the hardships faced, showcasing the characters’ resilience, and culminating in a powerful realization about friendship and endurance.

Different Types of Narrative Essays

There are a bunch of different types of narrative essays – each one focuses on different elements of storytelling and has its own purpose. Here’s a breakdown of the narrative essay types and what they mean.

Personal Narrative

Description : Tells a personal story or experience from the writer’s life.

Purpose: Reflects on personal growth, lessons learned, or significant moments.

Example of Narrative Essay Types:

Topic : “The Day I Conquered My Fear of Public Speaking”

Focus: Details the experience, emotions, and eventual triumph over a fear of public speaking during a pivotal event.

Descriptive Narrative

Description : Emphasizes vivid details and sensory imagery.

Purpose : Creates a sensory experience, painting a vivid picture for the reader.

Topic : “A Walk Through the Enchanted Forest”

Focus : Paints a detailed picture of the sights, sounds, smells, and feelings experienced during a walk through a mystical forest.

Autobiographical Narrative

Description: Chronicles significant events or moments from the writer’s life.

Purpose: Provides insights into the writer’s life, experiences, and growth.

Topic: “Lessons from My Childhood: How My Grandmother Shaped Who I Am”

Focus: Explores pivotal moments and lessons learned from interactions with a significant family member.

Experiential Narrative

Description: Relays experiences beyond the writer’s personal life.

Purpose: Shares experiences, travels, or events from a broader perspective.

Topic: “Volunteering in a Remote Village: A Journey of Empathy”

Focus: Chronicles the writer’s volunteering experience, highlighting interactions with a community and personal growth.

Literary Narrative

Description: Incorporates literary elements like symbolism, allegory, or thematic explorations.

Purpose: Uses storytelling for deeper explorations of themes or concepts.

Topic: “The Symbolism of the Red Door: A Journey Through Change”

Focus: Uses a red door as a symbol, exploring its significance in the narrator’s life and the theme of transition.

Historical Narrative

Description: Recounts historical events or periods through a personal lens.

Purpose: Presents history through personal experiences or perspectives.

Topic: “A Grandfather’s Tales: Living Through the Great Depression”

Focus: Shares personal stories from a family member who lived through a historical era, offering insights into that period.

Digital or Multimedia Narrative

Description: Incorporates multimedia elements like images, videos, or audio to tell a story.

Purpose: Explores storytelling through various digital platforms or formats.

Topic: “A Travel Diary: Exploring Europe Through Vlogs”

Focus: Combines video clips, photos, and personal narration to document a travel experience.

How to Choose a Topic for Your Narrative Essay?

Selecting a compelling topic for your narrative essay is crucial as it sets the stage for your storytelling. Choosing a boring topic is one of the narrative essay mistakes to avoid . Here’s a detailed guide on how to choose the right topic:

Reflect on Personal Experiences

• Significant Moments:

Moments that had a profound impact on your life or shaped your perspective.

Example: A moment of triumph, overcoming a fear, a life-changing decision, or an unforgettable experience.

• Emotional Resonance:

Events that evoke strong emotions or feelings.

Example: Joy, fear, sadness, excitement, or moments of realization.

• Lessons Learned:

Experiences that taught you valuable lessons or brought about personal growth.

Example: Challenges that led to personal development, shifts in mindset, or newfound insights.

Explore Unique Perspectives

• Uncommon Experiences:

Unique or unconventional experiences that might captivate the reader’s interest.

Example: Unusual travels, interactions with different cultures, or uncommon hobbies.

• Different Points of View:

Stories from others’ perspectives that impacted you deeply.

Example: A family member’s story, a friend’s experience, or a historical event from a personal lens.

Focus on Specific Themes or Concepts

• Themes or Concepts of Interest:

Themes or ideas you want to explore through storytelling.

Example: Friendship, resilience, identity, cultural diversity, or personal transformation.

• Symbolism or Metaphor:

Using symbols or metaphors as the core of your narrative.

Example: Exploring the symbolism of an object or a place in relation to a broader theme.

Consider Your Audience and Purpose

• Relevance to Your Audience:

Topics that resonate with your audience’s interests or experiences.

Example: Choose a relatable theme or experience that your readers might connect with emotionally.

• Impact or Message:

What message or insight do you want to convey through your story?

Example: Choose a topic that aligns with the message or lesson you aim to impart to your readers.

Brainstorm and Evaluate Ideas

• Free Writing or Mind Mapping:

Process: Write down all potential ideas without filtering. Mind maps or free-writing exercises can help generate diverse ideas.

• Evaluate Feasibility:

The depth of the story, the availability of vivid details, and your personal connection to the topic.

Imagine you’re considering topics for a narrative essay. You reflect on your experiences and decide to explore the topic of “Overcoming Stage Fright: How a School Play Changed My Perspective.” This topic resonates because it involves a significant challenge you faced and the personal growth it brought about.

Narrative Essay Topics

50 easy narrative essay topics.

• Learning to Ride a Bike
• My First Day of School
• A Surprise Birthday Party
• The Day I Got Lost
• Visiting a Haunted House
• An Encounter with a Wild Animal
• My Favorite Childhood Toy
• The Best Vacation I Ever Had
• An Unforgettable Family Gathering
• Conquering a Fear of Heights
• A Special Gift I Received
• Moving to a New City
• The Most Memorable Meal
• Getting Caught in a Rainstorm
• An Act of Kindness I Witnessed
• The First Time I Cooked a Meal
• My Experience with a New Hobby
• The Day I Met My Best Friend
• A Hike in the Mountains
• Learning a New Language
• An Embarrassing Moment
• Dealing with a Bully
• My First Job Interview
• A Sporting Event I Attended
• The Scariest Dream I Had
• Helping a Stranger
• The Joy of Achieving a Goal
• A Road Trip Adventure
• Overcoming a Personal Challenge
• The Significance of a Family Tradition
• An Unusual Pet I Owned
• A Misunderstanding with a Friend
• Exploring an Abandoned Building
• My Favorite Book and Why
• The Impact of a Role Model
• A Cultural Celebration I Participated In
• A Valuable Lesson from a Teacher
• A Trip to the Zoo
• An Unplanned Adventure
• Volunteering Experience
• A Moment of Forgiveness
• A Decision I Regretted
• A Special Talent I Have
• The Importance of Family Traditions
• The Thrill of Performing on Stage
• A Moment of Sudden Inspiration
• The Meaning of Home
• Learning to Play a Musical Instrument
• A Childhood Memory at the Park
• Witnessing a Beautiful Sunset

Narrative Essay Topics for College Students

• Discovering a New Passion
• Overcoming Academic Challenges
• Navigating Cultural Differences
• Embracing Independence: Moving Away from Home
• Exploring Career Aspirations
• Coping with Stress in College
• The Impact of a Mentor in My Life
• Balancing Work and Studies
• Facing a Fear of Public Speaking
• Exploring a Semester Abroad
• The Evolution of My Study Habits
• Volunteering Experience That Changed My Perspective
• The Role of Technology in Education
• Finding Balance: Social Life vs. Academics
• Learning a New Skill Outside the Classroom
• Reflecting on Freshman Year Challenges
• The Joys and Struggles of Group Projects
• My Experience with Internship or Work Placement
• Challenges of Time Management in College
• Redefining Success Beyond Grades
• The Influence of Literature on My Thinking
• The Impact of Social Media on College Life
• Overcoming Procrastination
• Lessons from a Leadership Role
• Exploring Diversity on Campus
• Exploring Passion for Environmental Conservation
• An Eye-Opening Course That Changed My Perspective
• Living with Roommates: Challenges and Lessons
• The Significance of Extracurricular Activities
• The Influence of a Professor on My Academic Journey
• Discussing Mental Health in College
• The Evolution of My Career Goals
• Confronting Personal Biases Through Education
• The Experience of Attending a Conference or Symposium
• Challenges Faced by Non-Native English Speakers in College
• The Impact of Traveling During Breaks
• Exploring Identity: Cultural or Personal
• The Impact of Music or Art on My Life
• Addressing Diversity in the Classroom
• Exploring Entrepreneurial Ambitions
• My Experience with Research Projects
• Overcoming Impostor Syndrome in College
• The Importance of Networking in College
• Finding Resilience During Tough Times
• The Impact of Global Issues on Local Perspectives
• The Influence of Family Expectations on Education
• Lessons from a Part-Time Job
• Exploring the College Sports Culture
• The Role of Technology in Modern Education
• The Journey of Self-Discovery Through Education

Narrative Essay Comparison

Narrative essay vs. descriptive essay.

Here’s our first narrative essay comparison! While both narrative and descriptive essays focus on vividly portraying a subject or an event, they differ in their primary objectives and approaches. Now, let’s delve into the nuances of comparison on narrative essays.

Narrative Essay:

Storytelling: Focuses on narrating a personal experience or event.

Chronological Order: Follows a structured timeline of events to tell a story.

Message or Lesson: Often includes a central message, moral, or lesson learned from the experience.

Engagement: Aims to captivate the reader through a compelling storyline and character development.

First-Person Perspective: Typically narrated from the writer’s point of view, using “I” and expressing personal emotions and thoughts.

Plot Development: Emphasizes a plot with a beginning, middle, climax, and resolution.

Character Development: Focuses on describing characters, their interactions, emotions, and growth.

Conflict or Challenge: Usually involves a central conflict or challenge that drives the narrative forward.

Dialogue: Incorporates conversations to bring characters and their interactions to life.

Reflection: Concludes with reflection or insight gained from the experience.

Descriptive Essay:

Vivid Description: Aims to vividly depict a person, place, object, or event.

Imagery and Details: Focuses on sensory details to create a vivid image in the reader’s mind.

Emotion through Description: Uses descriptive language to evoke emotions and engage the reader’s senses.

Painting a Picture: Creates a sensory-rich description allowing the reader to visualize the subject.

Imagery and Sensory Details: Focuses on providing rich sensory descriptions, using vivid language and adjectives.

Point of Focus: Concentrates on describing a specific subject or scene in detail.

Spatial Organization: Often employs spatial organization to describe from one area or aspect to another.

Objective Observations: Typically avoids the use of personal opinions or emotions; instead, the focus remains on providing a detailed and objective description.

Comparison:

Focus: Narrative essays emphasize storytelling, while descriptive essays focus on vividly describing a subject or scene.

Perspective: Narrative essays are often written from a first-person perspective, while descriptive essays may use a more objective viewpoint.

Purpose: Narrative essays aim to convey a message or lesson through a story, while descriptive essays aim to paint a detailed picture for the reader without necessarily conveying a specific message.

Narrative Essay vs. Argumentative Essay

The narrative essay and the argumentative essay serve distinct purposes and employ different approaches:

Engagement and Emotion: Aims to captivate the reader through a compelling story.

Reflective: Often includes reflection on the significance of the experience or lessons learned.

First-Person Perspective: Typically narrated from the writer’s point of view, sharing personal emotions and thoughts.

Plot Development: Emphasizes a storyline with a beginning, middle, climax, and resolution.

Message or Lesson: Conveys a central message, moral, or insight derived from the experience.

Argumentative Essay:

Persuasion and Argumentation: Aims to persuade the reader to adopt the writer’s viewpoint on a specific topic.

Logical Reasoning: Presents evidence, facts, and reasoning to support a particular argument or stance.

Debate and Counterarguments: Acknowledge opposing views and counter them with evidence and reasoning.

Thesis Statement: Includes a clear thesis statement that outlines the writer’s position on the topic.

Thesis and Evidence: Starts with a strong thesis statement and supports it with factual evidence, statistics, expert opinions, or logical reasoning.

Counterarguments: Addresses opposing viewpoints and provides rebuttals with evidence.

Logical Structure: Follows a logical structure with an introduction, body paragraphs presenting arguments and evidence, and a conclusion reaffirming the thesis.

Formal Language: Uses formal language and avoids personal anecdotes or emotional appeals.

Objective: Argumentative essays focus on presenting a logical argument supported by evidence, while narrative essays prioritize storytelling and personal reflection.

Purpose: Argumentative essays aim to persuade and convince the reader of a particular viewpoint, while narrative essays aim to engage, entertain, and share personal experiences.

Structure: Narrative essays follow a storytelling structure with character development and plot, while argumentative essays follow a more formal, structured approach with logical arguments and evidence.

In essence, while both essays involve writing and presenting information, the narrative essay focuses on sharing a personal experience, whereas the argumentative essay aims to persuade the audience by presenting a well-supported argument.

Narrative Essay vs. Personal Essay

While there can be an overlap between narrative and personal essays, they have distinctive characteristics:

Storytelling: Emphasizes recounting a specific experience or event in a structured narrative form.

Engagement through Story: Aims to engage the reader through a compelling story with characters, plot, and a central theme or message.

Reflective: Often includes reflection on the significance of the experience and the lessons learned.

First-Person Perspective: Typically narrated from the writer’s viewpoint, expressing personal emotions and thoughts.

Plot Development: Focuses on developing a storyline with a clear beginning, middle, climax, and resolution.

Character Development: Includes descriptions of characters, their interactions, emotions, and growth.

Central Message: Conveys a central message, moral, or insight derived from the experience.

Personal Essay:

Exploration of Ideas or Themes: Explores personal ideas, opinions, or reflections on a particular topic or subject.

Expression of Thoughts and Opinions: Expresses the writer’s thoughts, feelings, and perspectives on a specific subject matter.

Reflection and Introspection: Often involves self-reflection and introspection on personal experiences, beliefs, or values.

Varied Structure and Content: Can encompass various forms, including memoirs, personal anecdotes, or reflections on life experiences.

Flexibility in Structure: Allows for diverse structures and forms based on the writer’s intent, which could be narrative-like or more reflective.

Theme-Centric Writing: Focuses on exploring a central theme or idea, with personal anecdotes or experiences supporting and illustrating the theme.

Expressive Language: Utilizes descriptive and expressive language to convey personal perspectives, emotions, and opinions.

Focus: Narrative essays primarily focus on storytelling through a structured narrative, while personal essays encompass a broader range of personal expression, which can include storytelling but isn’t limited to it.

Structure: Narrative essays have a more structured plot development with characters and a clear sequence of events, while personal essays might adopt various structures, focusing more on personal reflection, ideas, or themes.

Intent: While both involve personal experiences, narrative essays emphasize telling a story with a message or lesson learned, while personal essays aim to explore personal thoughts, feelings, or opinions on a broader range of topics or themes.

A narrative essay is more than just telling a story. It’s also meant to engage the reader, get them thinking, and leave a lasting impact. Whether it’s to amuse, motivate, teach, or reflect, these essays are a great way to communicate with your audience. This interesting narrative essay guide was all about letting you understand the narrative essay, its importance, and how can you write one.

Order Original Papers & Essays

Your First Custom Paper Sample is on Us!

Timely Deliveries

No Plagiarism & AI

100% Refund

Try Our Free Paper Writing Service

Related blogs.

Connections with Writers and support

Privacy and Confidentiality Guarantee

Average Quality Score

Cultural Narratives, Influencing Perspective & Shaping Society

I am working on an ebook, this is what I currently have started for a section on cultural narratives.

Relative Obscurity

Cultural narratives don’t seem to attract much discussion, generally people aren’t familiar with the concept.  They recognize the words cultural and narrative independently, but what they create and how they function when used in unison is hazy at best. 

When I have mentioned cultural narratives, people often look confused or ask what I mean by cultural narratives.  Googling cultural narratives doesn’t provide a vast selection of insightful material, it’s typically found in academic papers. The limited representation and discussion are startling considering how prevalent they are within our lives.

Cultural narratives play a critical role in shaping society and individual perspective, they shouldn’t be flying below the radar, unrecognized. How often do people lament, “that is just how it is,” “always been that way,” or “that is how we do things?” They are referencing cultural narratives, and no, they are not fixed. Rewriting cultural narratives is always on the menu, not an easy order to fill but it is there, and a vital consideration to take when the social climate is unraveling.   

Defining cultural narratives

Cultural narratives are the stories and beliefs we use to create identity, structure, and meaning. Cultural narratives offer insight into who we are, what we believe, where we came from, and what we value. Cultural narratives establish and enforce social norms and taboos. Recorded history is a form of cultural narrative. Myths and fables are forms of cultural narratives. Religion is a cultural narrative. Customs and traditions are cultural narratives.

Cultural narratives bind people together, they define and reinforce moral and ethical boundaries.  Cultural narratives establish societal norms and taboos. People build their identity, their character, through the lens of cultural narratives. A person’s ability to exist within a culture, a community, is directly tied to how they adopt, practice, and support the cultural narratives held by those people, that community.

What follows is an excerpt from:

Social Work, Volume 39, Issue 4, July 1994, Pages 351–359, https://doi.org/10.1093/sw/39.4.351

Culture, Theory, and Narrative: The Intersection of Meanings in Practice

Dennis Saleebey

Two essential characteristics of the human condition important for social work practitioners to remember are (1) human beings build themselves into the world by creating meaning, and (2) culture gives meaning to action by situating underlying states in an interpretive system. Practice is an intersection where the meanings of the worker (theories), the client (stories and narratives), and culture (myths, rituals, and themes) meet. Social workers must open themselves up to clients’ constructions of their individual and collective worlds. The major vehicles for this are stories, narratives, and myths. Acknowledging and helping to refurbish them does not doom social workers to psychologizing what are, in part, social and political problems. Social workers can assist in the “insurrection” of subjugated meanings and help get them into the agency, school, hospital, commission, institution, community, and profession through externalization. Such an approach to practice helps clients edge into the larger and often oppressive world, strengthens the self, and emboldens the folklore of the group.

A social worker, according to the excerpt, brings their theories, derived through education, to meet the client.  The client brings their narratives and stories to discuss how they are interfacing with culture.  Culture is constructed of myths, rituals, and themes of the community.  

For this book, myths, rituals, themes, stories, and personal narratives are representative of the over-arching cultural narrative. 

Humans require meaning, cultural narratives work as a guide to steer humans into discovering what is meaningful and what is not meaningful according to the culture or community.  Cultural narratives also define how a person’s chosen identity, purpose, or meaning will be received within the context of the community.

As a side note, we can see how a reinforcing loop begins to be worn between the cultural narrative, the community at large, and the individual.  The individual seeking meaning uses the cultural narrative to define themselves in ways the community will find favorable.

Using the cultural narrative to define one’s meaning reinforces and validates the cultural narrative. Community members wishing to stay in favor of their peers use the cultural narrative to assess the value of those around them, reinforcing and validating the cultural narrative.

We can understand how challenging it can be to break these narratives.  Our primal biological nature seeks community for survival, acts that jeopardize a position within the community are often shunned, consciously or subconsciously.  Going against the grain is seen as rebelling, people are labeled agitator, heretic, or nonconformist.

Examining these labels is insightful.  Agitator, a person who disturbs what is accepted or deemed normal.  Nonconformist, a person who doesn’t wish to follow what is accepted or deemed normal.  Heretic, a person who doesn’t conform to what is accepted or deemed normal.

Opposite the heretics, agitators, and nonconformists are a band of individuals seeking control & power, people who realize being an authority in the narrative elevates your status.  If the masses believe a person possesses greater knowledge and ability within the narrative they are willing to be led, they will listen, they are open to suggestions & will follow. After all, people need to remain in the circle.

Evolution of cultural narratives

Cultural narratives are a key component of human existence, our ability to commune is heavily influenced and directed by cultural narratives.  Cultural narratives are not going anywhere.

How do you change something you don’t know exists?  How do you change something you don’t understand?  Cultural narratives play a pivotal role in human culture, recognizing and understanding them leads to the option of modifying them.

Cultural narratives are subject to the forces of evolution, as our body of knowledge & wisdom grows so does the opportunity for our cultural narratives.

Step 1) recognize that cultural narratives exist, step 2) understand that they are subject to evolutionary forces and that they are meant to change.

The change we seek in our modern culture and society must be addressed at the base programming level, the root.  We need to develop an entirely new cultural narrative, a new operating system.  A new cultural narrative that embodies and capitalizes on the wealth of knowledge, wisdom, and technological capabilities attained by the human species over our recorded history is coming.

The new narrative is not the old narrative, trying to conceptualize the new narrative with the mindset molded in the old doesn’t work.  It takes time to learn the new language, to see the new program from an entirely new perspective.

Establishing New Cultural Narratives

Crafting new cultural narratives is one of the few actions that can strike deep enough to institute systemic change. Installing a new cultural narrative is like installing a new operating system on a computer. An operating system’s function, a direct reflection of its name, establishes, directs, and executes how a system will operate.  A cultural narrative and an operating system mirror one another.  A cultural narrative is an operating system for culture and society.

Upgrading an existing operating system is not the same as installing a new operating system. Arguably, humanity has been upgrading the same operating system from the beginning.  I will reference this operating system as the primal biological narrative in future chapters.

Humanity has been attempting to run the same primal biological narrative, or operating system, with upgrades focused on doing the same things only better.   Doing things the same but better, to me, means keep producing excess disposable goods but making them compostable or recyclable. Use certain segments of the world’s population to serve another but make a solid effort to establish a “fair trade” policy for that labor.

Let’s keep doing what we are doing but let’s do it better, isn’t a terrible strategy when the upside potential is abundant.  Making improvements is making improvements, human maturation, historically, has been a slow roll up a steep hill.  The same but better strategy starts to fall apart when the model it is being applied to is approaching max expression and the margin for improvement is minimal, or if the model has expired and needs replacing.  Sound familiar?

Resource Library Menu

Collective newsletter.

Keep up with the action!

It is a wild ride and we would like to share it with you as well as the rest of the community. What we have coming up, what has recently happened, or reports from around the community. We bring the best to you directly.

Journey strong!

Social Connect!

Paradigm shift, what it is, why it matters.

by Stuart DeJong | January 14, 2022 | Spiritual Awakening , Cultural Narrative | 0 Comments

How to Write a Descriptive Essay for a Cultural Narrative

Soheila battaglia.

Whether you write about another culture or your own, the key to writing an effective cultural narrative is to focus on a single aspect of the culture. Your descriptive essay should have a central idea that guides the content and provides description -- or specific details -- about the topic. The narrative should also include analysis and reflection in which you think about the content, draw connections and come to conclusions.

Explore this article

• Thesis Statement

The content of your essay can address various aspects of culture, including traditions, family, holidays, religious and spiritual practices, gender roles, art, music, methods of communication and oral history. If you're writing about a particular aspect of culture in the U.S., California State University in Fresno suggests writing about topics such as the civil rights movement, racism and discrimination, blues and gospel music or Mexican immigration. Once you have selected a topic, you can compose a thesis statement for your essay.

2 Thesis Statement

Even a personal narrative essay needs to have a main point. So while the essay presents a description of the topic, it should also be guided by a single, clear thesis statement. For example, the main idea of your cultural narrative can be, "The practice of orally passing history and traditions through generations has helped preserve aspects of African culture in American society today." Be as specific as possible in the diction and phrasing of the thesis statement to avoid making the scope of the topic too large to address successfully in a single essay.

According to Butte College, a descriptive essay shows the content rather than tells it. This involves proper organization and the ability to discern between relevant and irrelevant information. In the essay's body paragraphs, give plenty of specific examples to support your main idea. This evidence can come in the form of anecdotes, historical references, hypothetical examples or statistics. Providing details and examples allows the reader to visualize and understand the essay's conceptual claims in more concrete terms.

Since your essay has a main idea, to some degree you must prove that central idea to the reader. Through analysis and reflection you can show the reader how you identified relationships and drew conclusions about the topic. Questions to address while writing include why something happens, how it happens, why it matters, who it affects and what the long-term effects are. The analysis, like the examples, belong in the body paragraphs of your cultural narrative essay.

• 1 California State University, Fresno: Possible Culture Topics for Writing Essays and Papers
• 2 Butte College: Writing a Descriptive Essay
• 3 Palomar College: What is Culture?

About the Author

Soheila Battaglia is a published and award-winning author and filmmaker. She holds an MA in literary cultures from New York University and a BA in ethnic studies from UC Berkeley. She is a college professor of literature and composition.

Related Articles

How to Write an Ethnography

What Does Sociopolitical Mean?

How to Write a Reaction & Reflection Essay

What Is a Reflection Essay?

How to Write a Response to Literature Essay

Characteristics of Narrative Essays

Facts of Intercultural Dating

What Are Two Types of Research Methods in Sociology?

How to Create an Outline for a Reflection Paper

How to Write the Intro Paragraph of a Literary Elements...

How Do I Structure a Reflective Essay?

How to Do an Explanatory Paragraph

Paragraph Writing Skills for Beginners

What is a Topic Sentence?

How to Find Your IP Address for the Kindle Fire

What Do Geographers Study When They Look at a Region's...

Ideas for a Cultural Anthropology Research Paper

How Did the Harlem Renaissance Impact American Culture?

What is the Meaning of the Ankh Symbol?

How to Answer Open-Ended Essay Questions

Regardless of how old we are, we never stop learning. Classroom is the educational resource for people of all ages. Whether you’re studying times tables or applying to college, Classroom has the answers.

• Accessibility
• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• Copyright Policy
• Manage Preferences

© 2020 Leaf Group Ltd. / Leaf Group Media, All Rights Reserved. Based on the Word Net lexical database for the English Language. See disclaimer .

The Western Cultural Narratives Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

The concept of current western cultural narrative, fitting criteria, western cultural narrative misfits, works cited.

Cultural narratives are as diverse as people all around the world. Same ideas and inclinations can receive drastically different connotations. What in some societies may be seen as appropriate and expected, in others can be interpreted as completely alien and out of place. This is especially true of the Western cultural narratives, which do not hold universal appeal to everyone. Understanding the premises of Western societies is essential in ascertaining which people do not fit these narratives.

Before delving into the specifics of the common Western themes, it is important to understand what is meant by a cultural narrative in the first place. Initially, a narrative is a story told in a certain manner by an individual or a group of people (Sarkar and Kotler). Considering the effect storytelling has on people, it should be evident that they are easily influenced by collective ideas born within fiction. The more individuals are involved in the distribution of such stories, the larger societies they form. At some point, the combination of narratives and their conveyors creates a culture. Therefore, a cultural narrative is a set of beliefs, ideas, and stories, which constitute a particular society.

Contemporary cultural narratives of the Western world are well-known. For instance, the United States follows a set of ideas known as the American Dream. It is the central cultural narrative on which the foundation of the American society is built (Sarkar and Kotler). Generally, it means living a free life with extensive opportunities for success and prosperity. Recently, another narrative was propagated by Donald Trump, which is “Make America Great Again” (Sarkar and Kotler). It builds upon the American fear of being oppressed and losing power. Overall, the cultural narratives of Western societies attract people who value their freedom, status, and wealth.

When the matter of the Western culture is concerned, certain defining characteristics are usually addressed. A well-known classification by Hofstede distinguishes these societies as highly individualistic. Moreover, Lim argues that excessive emphasis on the interests of an individual leads to high emotional arousal, such as excitement, enthusiasm, delight, and other feelings, which cause a heightened state of senses (106). This is why American orators rely on emotions to connect with the audiences. Western people are drawn to stories of success about individuals with larger-than-life personalities and inhibited expression of feelings. Therefore, the more a person values emotional expression, the better they fit the Western societies.

Another important cultural trait is related to influence and control. While almost every society has domineering personalities at its center, people of the Western world are obsessed with them. Be it jealousy or the desire to match expectations, many Westerners attempt to repeat the success of their favorite historical and social figures (Lim 107). This is the reason why Western cultural narratives revolve around control and power. For example, companies promote themselves and their products as the best, the most efficient, and the most appropriate choice for customers (Sarkar and Kotler). The overarching desire to feel power is a characteristic of bearers of Western narratives.

Understanding who would not fit the context of the Western cultural narratives requires reversing the aforementioned tenets. The West and East are commonly juxtaposed as strikingly different societies. Many Eastern countries are collectivist, which manifests in a much more inhibited expression of emotions. Studies show that in such countries, the “conception of happiness [is] focused on being solemn and reserved” (Liam 107). People who exhibit low emotional arousal find it difficult to follow the eccentric and extroverted narratives of Western societies. Therefore, emotional expression is key to ascertaining whether Western narratives appeal to people.

Control is also viewed differently in the cultural narratives of collectivist societies. It should be noted that these people also have strong reverence for domineering personalities. However, they usually do not strive to control others. Lim writes that “in Eastern culture, adjusting and conforming to other people is considered desirable” (106). Naturally, any narrative that promotes the personal quest for status and power would seem off-putting to people, such as the Chinese. A Western mindset would view conformity as passivity and indecisiveness. As a result, the less a person is willing to control others, the less likely they are to fit Western cultural narratives.

Altogether, it should be evident that Western cultural narratives are highly individualistic, controlling, and emotional. They revolve around personal prosperity and influence. The emphasis on success predetermines high emotional arousal. At the same time, collectivist cultures are distinctively opposed to these inclinations. Their values lie in conformity, emotional control, and contemplation. The differences in societal ideals presuppose the uniqueness of cultures. Therefore, the more collectivist a person is, the less likely they are to fit the Western narrative.

Lim, Nangyeon. “Cultural Differences in Emotion: Differences in Emotional Arousal Level between the East and the West.” Integrative Medicine Research , vol. 5, no. 2, 2016, pp. 105-109.

Sarkar, Christian, and Kotler, Philip. ““Competing on Stories: Marketing and Cultural Narratives” – Christian Sarkar and Philip Kotler.” The Marketing Journal, 2019, Web.

• Italian and African-American Cultures Compared
• Limitations in Intercultural Communication
• Personality and Music Preferences
• Promoting the Importance of Healthy Living in Singapore Youth Community
• Youths’ Career Choices in Individualist and Collectivist Societies
• Cultural Issues in Differing Countries – Germany & China
• Culture and Conflict Reflection Essay
• Bodily Presentation and Rituals Across Different Cultures
• Korean Tradition and Culture: Lessons Learnt
• American vs. Chinese Society
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2022, October 15). The Western Cultural Narratives. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-western-cultural-narratives/

"The Western Cultural Narratives." IvyPanda , 15 Oct. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/the-western-cultural-narratives/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'The Western Cultural Narratives'. 15 October.

IvyPanda . 2022. "The Western Cultural Narratives." October 15, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-western-cultural-narratives/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Western Cultural Narratives." October 15, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-western-cultural-narratives/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Western Cultural Narratives." October 15, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-western-cultural-narratives/.

Have a language expert improve your writing

Run a free plagiarism check in 10 minutes, generate accurate citations for free.

• Knowledge Base
• How to write a narrative essay | Example & tips

How to Write a Narrative Essay | Example & Tips

Published on July 24, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on July 23, 2023.

A narrative essay tells a story. In most cases, this is a story about a personal experience you had. This type of essay , along with the descriptive essay , allows you to get personal and creative, unlike most academic writing .

Instantly correct all language mistakes in your text

Upload your document to correct all your mistakes in minutes

Table of contents

What is a narrative essay for, choosing a topic, interactive example of a narrative essay, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about narrative essays.

When assigned a narrative essay, you might find yourself wondering: Why does my teacher want to hear this story? Topics for narrative essays can range from the important to the trivial. Usually the point is not so much the story itself, but the way you tell it.

A narrative essay is a way of testing your ability to tell a story in a clear and interesting way. You’re expected to think about where your story begins and ends, and how to convey it with eye-catching language and a satisfying pace.

These skills are quite different from those needed for formal academic writing. For instance, in a narrative essay the use of the first person (“I”) is encouraged, as is the use of figurative language, dialogue, and suspense.

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

Narrative essay assignments vary widely in the amount of direction you’re given about your topic. You may be assigned quite a specific topic or choice of topics to work with.

• Write a story about your first day of school.
• Write a story about your favorite holiday destination.

You may also be given prompts that leave you a much wider choice of topic.

• Write about an experience where you learned something about yourself.
• Write about an achievement you are proud of. What did you accomplish, and how?

In these cases, you might have to think harder to decide what story you want to tell. The best kind of story for a narrative essay is one you can use to talk about a particular theme or lesson, or that takes a surprising turn somewhere along the way.

For example, a trip where everything went according to plan makes for a less interesting story than one where something unexpected happened that you then had to respond to. Choose an experience that might surprise the reader or teach them something.

Narrative essays in college applications

When applying for college , you might be asked to write a narrative essay that expresses something about your personal qualities.

For example, this application prompt from Common App requires you to respond with a narrative essay.

In this context, choose a story that is not only interesting but also expresses the qualities the prompt is looking for—here, resilience and the ability to learn from failure—and frame the story in a way that emphasizes these qualities.

An example of a short narrative essay, responding to the prompt “Write about an experience where you learned something about yourself,” is shown below.

Hover over different parts of the text to see how the structure works.

Since elementary school, I have always favored subjects like science and math over the humanities. My instinct was always to think of these subjects as more solid and serious than classes like English. If there was no right answer, I thought, why bother? But recently I had an experience that taught me my academic interests are more flexible than I had thought: I took my first philosophy class.

Before I entered the classroom, I was skeptical. I waited outside with the other students and wondered what exactly philosophy would involve—I really had no idea. I imagined something pretty abstract: long, stilted conversations pondering the meaning of life. But what I got was something quite different.

A young man in jeans, Mr. Jones—“but you can call me Rob”—was far from the white-haired, buttoned-up old man I had half-expected. And rather than pulling us into pedantic arguments about obscure philosophical points, Rob engaged us on our level. To talk free will, we looked at our own choices. To talk ethics, we looked at dilemmas we had faced ourselves. By the end of class, I’d discovered that questions with no right answer can turn out to be the most interesting ones.

The experience has taught me to look at things a little more “philosophically”—and not just because it was a philosophy class! I learned that if I let go of my preconceptions, I can actually get a lot out of subjects I was previously dismissive of. The class taught me—in more ways than one—to look at things with an open mind.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

• Ad hominem fallacy
• Post hoc fallacy
• Appeal to authority fallacy
• False cause fallacy
• Sunk cost fallacy

College essays

• Choosing Essay Topic
• Write a College Essay
• Write a Diversity Essay
• College Essay Format & Structure
• Comparing and Contrasting in an Essay

 (AI) Tools

• Grammar Checker
• Paraphrasing Tool
• Text Summarizer
• AI Detector
• Plagiarism Checker
• Citation Generator

Receive feedback on language, structure, and formatting

Professional editors proofread and edit your paper by focusing on:

• Academic style
• Vague sentences
• Style consistency

See an example

If you’re not given much guidance on what your narrative essay should be about, consider the context and scope of the assignment. What kind of story is relevant, interesting, and possible to tell within the word count?

The best kind of story for a narrative essay is one you can use to reflect on a particular theme or lesson, or that takes a surprising turn somewhere along the way.

Don’t worry too much if your topic seems unoriginal. The point of a narrative essay is how you tell the story and the point you make with it, not the subject of the story itself.

Narrative essays are usually assigned as writing exercises at high school or in university composition classes. They may also form part of a university application.

When you are prompted to tell a story about your own life or experiences, a narrative essay is usually the right response.

The key difference is that a narrative essay is designed to tell a complete story, while a descriptive essay is meant to convey an intense description of a particular place, object, or concept.

Narrative and descriptive essays both allow you to write more personally and creatively than other kinds of essays , and similar writing skills can apply to both.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

Caulfield, J. (2023, July 23). How to Write a Narrative Essay | Example & Tips. Scribbr. Retrieved September 9, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/narrative-essay/

Is this article helpful?

Jack Caulfield

Other students also liked, how to write an expository essay, how to write a descriptive essay | example & tips, how to write your personal statement | strategies & examples, what is your plagiarism score.

Cultural Narratives Essays

Title: the danger of a single story: exploring stereotypes and socialization, the evolution of photography: analyzing its technological advancements and societal impact, short essay on sunjata and black panther, popular essay topics.

• American Dream
• Artificial Intelligence
• Black Lives Matter
• Bullying Essay
• Career Goals Essay
• Causes of the Civil War
• Child Abusing
• Civil Rights Movement
• Community Service
• Cultural Identity
• Cyber Bullying
• Death Penalty
• Depression Essay
• Domestic Violence
• Freedom of Speech
• Global Warming
• Gun Control
• Human Trafficking
• I Believe Essay
• Immigration
• Importance of Education
• Israel and Palestine Conflict
• Leadership Essay
• Legalizing Marijuanas
• Mental Health
• National Honor Society
• Police Brutality
• Pollution Essay
• Racism Essay
• Romeo and Juliet
• Same Sex Marriages
• Social Media
• The Great Gatsby
• The Yellow Wallpaper
• Time Management
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• Violent Video Games
• What Makes You Unique
• Why I Want to Be a Nurse
• Send us an e-mail

Cultural Identity Essay: Writing Guidelines for an A+ Paper

• Icon Calendar 6 July 2024
• Icon Page 3947 words
• Icon Clock 18 min read

Writing a cultural identity essay is an exciting academic exercise that allows students to develop and utilize critical thinking, reflective, and analytical skills. Unlike a standard essay, this type of paper requires learners to use first-person language throughout. In essence, such a composition is about writers and what makes them identify with a particular societal orientation. Further on, they should choose a specific identity and focus on it throughout their texts. Moreover, authors should reflect and brainstorm, use the “show, not tell” method, utilize transitions to create a natural flow of ideas, and proofread their papers to eliminate mistakes and errors. Hence, students need to learn how to write a cultural identity essay correctly to provide high-quality papers to their readers.

General Aspects

Students undertake different writing exercises in their learning environments to develop their critical thinking, reflective, and analytical skills. Basically, one of these exercises is academic writing, and among different types of essays that students write is a cultural identity paper. In this case, it is a type of essay where authors write about their culture, which entails exploring and explaining a real significance of their ethnic roots. Moreover, there are numerous topics that instructors may require students to write about in such documents. In principle, some assignment prompts fall under different disciplines, such as religion, socio-economic status, family, education, ethnicity, and business. Besides, the main defining features of such a composition are what aspects make authors know that they are writing in this type of essay. In turn, these features include language, nationality, gender, history, upbringing, and religion, among many others.

What Is a Cultural Identity Essay and Its Purpose

According to its definition, a cultural identity essay is a reflective and analytical piece of writing that explores an individual’s unique ethnic background, experiences, and influences. The main purpose of writing a cultural identity essay is to explore and articulate various elements of culture that constitute one’s life, such as ethnicity, traditions, language, customs, and values (Greetham, 2023). Through this paper, writers engage in self-examination, present their ethnic narrative, and offer more insights into a uniqueness and complexity of their experiences. Moreover, such a composition promotes self-awareness and allows individuals to acknowledge and appreciate their roots while also recognizing a unique diversity of experiences within their social group. By sharing these experiences and reflections, both a particular writer and his or her readers to recognize various complexities and richness of ethnic identities, highlighting a real importance of cultural heritage in shaping who they are (Wallace, 2021). In terms of pages and words, the length of a cultural identity essay depends on academic levels, specific assignment requirements, academic standards, and a depth of analysis, while general guidelines are:

High School

• Length: 1-2 pages
• Word Count: 250-500 words

College (Undergraduate)

• Length: 3-5 pages
• Word Count: 750-1,250 words

University (Bachelor)

• Length: 5-7 pages
• Word Count: 1,250-1,750 words

Master’s

• Length: 8-12 pages
• Word Count: 2,000-3,000 words
• Length: 12-20+ pages
• Word Count: 3,000-5,000+ words

Note: Some sections of a cultural identity essay can be added, deleted, or combined with each other. In writing, people explain their cultural identity by describing a unique mix of traditions, values, language, and personal experiences that have shaped their beliefs and sense of self.

Generally, a cultural identity essay is similar to a standard academic paper regarding its structure and outline. However, a central point of difference is a specific topic to write about. In this case, a cultural identity essay is a reflective exploration of how people’s ethnicities, family traditions, languages, and personal experiences have shaped their beliefs, values, and sense of self (Spelic, 2019). While standard academic papers, such as argumentative, persuasive, and informative essays, require learners to use third-person language, such a composition requires them to use first-person language. As such, authors should use the word “I” throughout to show a target audience that they are writing from their perspective. Indeed, this aspect is a primary objective of such an essay – to give a writer’s perspective concerning his or her culture (Davies et al., 2019). Besides, another point of difference between such an essay and other papers is that the former does not require writers to utilize external sources but to write from a personal viewpoint.

Examples of Cultural Identity Prompts

Cultural Orientation and Socialization in a Learning Environment

Here, this prompt may require students to discuss an actual significance of culture in education, focusing on ethnic heritage and socialization. As such, this topic requires writers to reflect on how culture influences behavior in a learning environment.

The Impact of Culture Change on Family

Here, a writing assignment may require students to explore and discuss how culture impacts a family unit. Moreover, a central theme is a family, and a student’s mission would be to explain how culture in all its dynamics affects families in diverse settings.

The Role of Language in Building an Ethnic Identity

Here, instructions may require students to explore and explain a particular significance of language in ethnic heritage. Hence, writers should focus on explaining a specific place of culture in a sociology discipline, focusing on a direct connection between language and cultural orientation.

The Significance of Culture in a Globalized Economy

Here, such a prompt may require students to explore and discuss how culture affects individuals and businesses in today’s connected world. Besides, a student’s task would be to explain how culture, in all its dynamics, such as language, is essential in business for individuals and enterprises.

How Culture Influences Relations in the Workplace

Here, an essay prompt may require students to explore and explain how culture, in all its dynamics, affects or influences social relations at the workplace. In turn, a particular task of writers, for example, would be to focus on how human resource (HR) departments can use culture to enrich workplace relations.

The Place of Culture in Individuals’ Self-Concept

Here, an analysis of a theme may require students to reflect on how their ethnic orientation has affected their self-concept. Moreover, a student’s task would be to discuss how culture and its dynamics enable individuals to build a strong or weak understanding of themselves.

The Importance of Cultural Orientation in a Multicultural Environment

Here, assignment writing instructions may require students to explore and discuss how their ethnic orientation enables them to operate in a culturally diverse environment, such as a school or workplace. In this case, a student’s task would be to explain how identity characteristics, such as language and religion, facilitate or hamper social competency in a multicultural setting. 

How Global Conflicts Disturb Ethnic Identity for Refugees

Here, this prompt example may require students to explore and explain how conflicts in today’s world, such as civil unrest, affect a unique identity heritage of those who flee to foreign countries. As such, a student’s task would be to explain how one’s culture is affected in a new environment with totally different social dynamics.

The Challenges of Acculturation

Here, this kind of prompt may require students to explore and explain possible challenges that individuals face in identifying with a dominant culture. In particular, a student’s task would be to explain a specific significance of a dominant culture and what those from other cultures that try to identify with it must confront.

Host Country Culture and Multinational Enterprises

Here, this essay prompt sample may require students to explore and explain how a host country’s culture affects expatriates working for multinational corporations. Besides, a student’s task would be to show how one’s culture defines their behaviors and how that can be affected in a new environment with new social characteristics.

Compare and Contrast Native Culture and Dominant Culture in the United States

Here, such instructions require students to explain specific areas of similarity and difference between a Native culture and a dominant culture. In turn, a student’s task would be to define both a Native culture and a dominant culture and help a target audience to understand whether they mean the same thing. Hence, whether they do or do not, students should elaborate.

The Objective of Acculturation

Here, this prompt example requires students to explore and explain why people prefer to identify with a dominant culture. Moreover, a student’s task would be to note some advantages of a dominant culture over others and possible opportunities that one may access to identify with this dominant culture.

The Challenges That the LGBTQ Community Faces in the Modern World

Here, essay prompt instructions require students to explore and discuss potential challenges that lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people face in their normal day-to-day activities. In this case, a student’s task would be to explain an uniqueness of a LGBTQ community and how stereotyping makes their lives miserable in an environment where people are intolerant of different personalities and viewpoints.

Dangers of Cultural Intolerance in the Health Care System

Here, assignment instructions may require students to explore and discuss how nurses who are intolerant of social differences may jeopardize patients’ lives.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Acculturation

Here, such a prompt requires students to discuss some pros and cons of identifying with a dominant culture.

How to Know

Key defining features of a cultural identity essay give students a particular indication that they need to write this kind of paper. For example, cultural identity is important because it shapes people’s traditions, customs, languages, family practices, historical backgrounds, values, beliefs, personal experiences, and sense of belonging, fostering self-awareness and promoting a deeper understanding and appreciation of lifestyle diversity (Heersmink, 2021). Hence, when students read instructions regarding their essay topics they need to write about, they should identify one or several defining elements. In turn, these elements include language, nationality, religion, ethnicity, and gender.

Steps on How to Write a Cultural Identity Essay

To write a cultural identity essay, people reflect on and describe some significant aspects of their ethnic backgrounds, such as traditions, language, and experiences, and analyze how they have influenced their worldview. In turn, common steps for writing a good cultural identity essay are:

• Understand an Assignment: Read and comprehend an essay’s prompt to ensure you meet all requirements.
• Choose a Focus: Select specific aspects of your ethnic heritage to highlight in your essay.
• Conduct Research: Gather information about your ancestral background and its historical context.
• Brainstorm and Outline: Reflect on your cultural experiences and organize your thoughts into an outline.
• Write a Strong Introduction:   Write an engaging opening with a hook, background information, and a thesis statement.
• Develop Body Paragraphs: Discuss each aspect of your ethnic heritage with personal examples and reflections.
• Incorporate Cultural Influences: Explore an actual role of family, community, and society in shaping your social orientation.
• Address Challenges and Pride: Highlight any challenges faced and express pride in your actual roots.
• Write a Logical Conclusion: Summarize key points, restate a central thesis, and offer final thoughts on identity heritage.
• Revise and Edit: Review for coherence, clarity, and errors, and make revisions based on feedback.

As stated previously, a primary point of similarity between a cultural identity essay and standard papers is its writing structure and outline. In this case, to start a cultural identity essay, people begin with an engaging hook, provide background context on their ethnic heritage, and present a clear thesis statement that outlines main aspects of their roots they will explore further (Spelic, 2019). Basically, this structure and outline comprise three main sections: introduction, body, and conclusion. Like in all other papers, writing such a composition requires students to address specific issues, which are, in essence, a defining characteristics of an essay’s structure and outline. In turn, some examples of sentence starters for beginning a cultural identity essay include:

• Growing up in a household where [specific cultural practices] were a daily routine, my ethnic heritage was shaped by specific traditions and values of my [ethnicity/nationality] heritage.
• A rich picture of my lifestyle is woven from diverse threads of my family’s history, which includes [briefly mention key ethnic elements].
• From a young age, I was impressed by unique customs of my [specific social group], where celebrations and rituals played a crucial role in shaping my sense of self.
• My journey to understanding my cultural roots began with shared stories that my grandparents told me about their experiences in [country/region], which instilled in me a deep appreciation for our heritage.
• A direct connection between [ethnicity] and [ethnicity] cultures in my upbringing provided me with a unique perspective on life and allowed me to embrace my complex heritage.
• Living in a multicultural community, I was constantly surrounded by different traditions and practices, which enriched my understanding of my own ethnic identity.
• Reflecting on my childhood, I realized that cultural festivals and family gatherings we celebrated were essential in fostering a strong connection to my [specific culture] roots.
• A particular influence of my ancestral background on my personal values and beliefs is profound, as it has shaped my worldview and interactions with others in significant ways.
• As a child of immigrants, my life was shaped by blending my parents’ homeland traditions with new cultural norms of our adopted country.
• Understanding and embracing my ethnic roots has been a continuous journey, marked by moments of both pride and challenge, as I strive to honor my heritage while finding my place in a current world.

Introduction and Its Defining Characteristics

An introduction is the first paragraph of a cultural identity essay. Here, students introduce themselves to a target audience, giving a brief background of their ethnic heritage. Moreover, rules of academic writing dictate that this part should not exceed 10 percent of a whole word count of an entire paper (Greetham, 2023). In this case, writers should be brief and concise. Then, the most prominent component of this section is a thesis, a statement that appears at the end of an introduction paragraph and whose objective is to indicate a writer’s mission. In summary, the introduction part’s defining features are a writer’s background and thesis statement. In turn, the former gives a hint about a writer, and the latter provides a target audience with insight into a author’s objective in writing a cultural identity essay.

Body Paragraphs

A body element of a cultural identity essay is the most significant section of a paper and takes the largest part. Generally, writers use several paragraphs to advance different arguments on their ethnic heritage to explain specific concepts (Karjalainen, 2020). In writing a cultural identity essay, authors can use different paragraphs to explain important aspects of their ethnic heritage. Nonetheless, what determines the number of paragraphs and the content of each is a paper topic (Greetham, 2023). Besides, the most prominent defining features of a essay’s body are paragraphs, with each advancing a unique concept about a writer’s ethnic heritage. In turn, paragraphs are where writers provide real-life experiences and other personal anecdotes or examples that help a target audience to develop a deeper understanding of authors from a cultural perspective.

A conclusion part is the last section of a cultural identity essay. In particular, writers restate a thesis statement and summarize main points from body paragraphs (Greetham, 2023). Moreover, authors provide concluding remarks about a topic, which is mostly an objective personal opinion. In summary, the conclusion part’s defining features are a restatement of a thesis, a summary of main points, and writer’s final thoughts about a topic.

Outline Template

I. Introduction

A. Hook statement/sentence. B. Background information. C. A thesis statement that covers main ideas from 1 to X in one sentence.

II. Body Paragraphs

A. Idea 1 B. Idea 2 … X. Idea X

III. Conclusion

A. Restating a thesis statement. B. Summary of the main points from A to X. C. Final thoughts.

An Example of a Cultural Identity Essay

Topic: Identifying as a Naturalist

Introduction Sample

The period of birth marks the beginning of one’s identity, with culture playing a significant role. However, from the stage of adolescence going forward, individuals begin to recognize and understand their cultural makeup. In my case, I have come to discover my love for nature, an aspect that I believe has made me a naturalist both in belief and action.

Examples of Body Paragraphs

Idea 1: Parents

Parents play a critical role in shaping a cultural and personal identity of their children. In my case, it is my mother who has instilled in me a love for nature. Although I may not say exactly when this love started, I can only reason that since it was ingrained in me since childhood, it has developed gradually.

Idea 2: Naturalism

Today, naturalism defines my interactions with people and the environment. In short, I can say it shapes my worldview. As a lover of nature herself, my mother had this habit of taking me outdoors when I was a toddler. I have seen family photographs of my mother walking through parks and forests holding my hand. What is noticeable in these pictures besides my mother and me is the tree cover that gives the setting such a lovely sight. Moreover, I can now understand why I seem more conversant with the names and species of flowers, trees, and birds than my siblings- my mother was the influence. In turn, my siblings and friends make a joke that I have developed a strong love for nature to the point of identifying myself with the environment. Hence, the basis for this argument is my love for the green color, where even my clothes and toys are mostly green.

Conclusion Sample

Naturally, human beings behave in line with their cultural background and orientation. Basically, this behavior is what determines or reflects their ethnic identity. In turn, my intense love for nature underscores my naturalist identity. While I may not tell the stage in life when I assumed this identity, I know my mother has played a significant role in shaping it, and this is since childhood.

What to Include

Common Mistakes

• Lack of Focus: Failing to narrow down an essay to specific aspects of cultural identity, leading to an unclear narrative.
• Vague Thesis Statement: Providing a weak or unclear thesis statement, which makes it difficult for readers to understand an essay’s main argument.
• Insufficient Personal Reflection: Neglecting to include personal examples and reflections, which are crucial for illustrating an actual impact of ethnic heritage.
• Overgeneralization: Making broad and unsupported statements about specific groups rather than focusing on personal and specific experiences.
• Ignoring Historical Context: Failing to provide historical or ethnic background that can help readers to understand a real significance of certain traditions or practices.
• Poor Organization: Structuring an essay poorly, resulting in an illogical and difficult-to-follow narrative.
• Lack of Depth: Addressing ethnic heritage without explaining how it shapes beliefs, values, and behaviors.
• Cultural Stereotyping: Relying on stereotypes or clichés rather than presenting a personal perspective on ethnic roots.
• Inadequate Conclusion: Providing a weak conclusion that does not effectively summarize main points or reflect on a real significance of a particular ethnic heritage.
• Ignoring Feedback and Revision: Failing to seek feedback from others or revise a cultural identity essay, which can leave writing errors and unclear sections unaddressed.

Like any standard paper, writing a cultural identity essay allows students to build essential skills, such as critical thinking, reflective, and analytical skills. In this case, a real essence of such a paper is to provide a writer’s cultural identity, background, or orientation. As such, in order to learn how to write a good cultural identity essay, students should master following tips:

• Decide where to focus. Culture is a broad topic, and deciding what to focus on is essential in producing such an essay. Basically, one may have several ethnic identities, and addressing all may lead to inconclusive explanations.
• Reflect and brainstorm. Given a close link between one’s cultural orientation and personal experiences, learners need to reflect on experiences that would provide a target audience with an accurate picture of their ethnic heritage.
• Adopt a “Show, not tell” approach by providing vivid details about one’s experiences. Using personal anecdotes may be effective in accomplishing this objective.
• Use transitions , such as “therefore,” “thus,” ” additionally,” and “furthermore,” to enhance a natural and logical flow throughout an essay.
• Stay personal by using first-person language to describe one’s background and experiences.
• Proofread a final document to eliminate spelling and grammatical mistakes and other notable errors, such as an inconsistent life storyline.

Davies, S. R., Halpern, M., Horst, M., Kirby, D., & Lewenstein, B. (2019). Science stories as culture: Experience, identity, narrative and emotion in public communication of science. Journal of Science Communication , 18 (05), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.22323/2.18050201

Greetham, B. (2023). How to write better essays . Bloomsbury Academic.

Heersmink, R. (2021). Materialised identities: Cultural identity, collective memory, and artifacts. Review of Philosophy and Psychology , 14 (1), 249–265. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-021-00570-5

Karjalainen, H. (2020). Cultural identity and its impact on today’s multicultural organizations. International Journal of Cross Cultural Management , 20 (2), 249–262. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470595820944207

Spelic, S. (2019). Care at the core conversational essays on identity, education and power . Tredition.

Wallace, K. (2021). Network self: Relation, process, and personal identity . Routlage.

To Learn More, Read Relevant Articles

How to Cite a DSM-5-TR in APA 7 and 6

• Icon Calendar 7 October 2020
• Icon Page 4081 words

How to Cite an Encyclopedia in MLA 9: The Main Rules With Examples

• Icon Calendar 5 October 2020
• Icon Page 1361 words

Cross-Cultural Narratives: Stories and Experiences of International Students

• Publisher: STAR Scholars
• Editor: Ravichandran Ammigan
• ISBN: 978-1-7364699-0-3

• University of Delaware

Discover the world's research

• 25+ million members
• 160+ million publication pages
• 2.3+ billion citations

• Carolina Gomez
• Recruit researchers
• Join for free
• Login Email Tip: Most researchers use their institutional email address as their ResearchGate login Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in Log in or Continue with Google Welcome back! Please log in. Email · Hint Tip: Most researchers use their institutional email address as their ResearchGate login Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in Log in or Continue with Google No account? Sign up

• How to Order

Narrative Essay

Narrative Essay Examples

10+ Interesting Narrative Essay Examples Plus Writing Tips!

People also read

Narrative Essay - A Complete Writing Guide with Examples

Writing a Personal Narrative Essay: Everything You Need to Know

Best Narrative Essay Topics 2024 for Students

Crafting a Winning Narrative Essay Outline: A Step-by-Step Guide

Many students struggle with crafting engaging and impactful narrative essays. They often find it challenging to weave their personal experiences into coherent and compelling stories.

If you’re having a hard time, don't worry! 

We’ve compiled a range of narrative essay examples that will serve as helpful tools for you to get started. These examples will provide a clear path for crafting engaging and powerful narrative essays.

So, keep reading and find our expertly written examples!

• 1. Narrative Essay Definition
• 2. Narrative Essay Examples
• 3. Narrative Essay Examples for Students
• 4. Narrative Essay Topics
• 5. Narrative Essay Writing Tips

Narrative Essay Definition

Writing a narrative essay is a unique form of storytelling that revolves around personal experiences, aiming to immerse the reader in the author's world. It's a piece of writing that delves into the depths of thoughts and feelings. 

In a narrative essay, life experiences take center stage, serving as the main substance of the story. It's a powerful tool for writers to convey a personal journey, turning experiences into a captivating tale. This form of storytelling is an artful display of emotions intended to engage readers, leaving the reader feeling like they are a part of the story.

By focusing on a specific theme, event, emotions, and reflections, a narrative essay weaves a storyline that leads the reader through the author's experiences. 

The Essentials of Narrative Essays

Let's start with the basics. The four types of essays are argumentative essays , descriptive essays , expository essays , and narrative essays.

The goal of a narrative essay is to tell a compelling tale from one person's perspective. A narrative essay uses all components you’d find in a typical story, such as a beginning, middle, and conclusion, as well as plot, characters, setting, and climax.

The narrative essay's goal is the plot, which should be detailed enough to reach a climax. Here's how it works:

• It's usually presented in chronological order.
• It has a function. This is typically evident in the thesis statement's opening paragraph.
• It may include speech.
• It's told with sensory details and vivid language, drawing the reader in. All of these elements are connected to the writer's major argument in some way.

Before writing your essay, make sure you go through a sufficient number of narrative essay examples. These examples will help you in knowing the dos and don’ts of a good narrative essay.

It is always a better option to have some sense of direction before you start anything. Below, you can find important details and a bunch of narrative essay examples. These examples will also help you build your content according to the format. 

Here is a how to start a narrative essay example:

Sample Narrative Essay

The examples inform the readers about the writing style and structure of the narration. The essay below will help you understand how to create a story and build this type of essay in no time.

Here is another narrative essay examples 500 words:

Narrative Essay Examples for Students

Narrative essays offer students a platform to express their experiences and creativity. These examples show how to effectively structure and present personal stories for education.

Here are some helpful narrative essay examples:

Narrative Essay Examples Middle School

Narrative Essay Examples for Grade 7

Narrative Essay Examples for Grade 8

Grade 11 Narrative Essay Examples

Narrative Essay Example For High School

Narrative Essay Example For College

Personal Narrative Essay Example

Descriptive Narrative Essay Example

3rd Person Narrative Essay Example

Narrative Essay Topics

Here are some narrative essay topics to help you get started with your narrative essay writing.

• When I got my first bunny
• When I moved to Canada
• I haven’t experienced this freezing temperature ever before
• The moment I won the basketball finale
• A memorable day at the museum
• How I talk to my parrot
• The day I saw the death
• When I finally rebelled against my professor

Need more topics? Check out these extensive narrative essay topics to get creative ideas!

Narrative Essay Writing Tips

Narrative essays give you the freedom to be creative, but it can be tough to make yours special. Use these tips to make your story interesting:

• Share your story from a personal viewpoint, engaging the reader with your experiences.
• Use vivid descriptions to paint a clear picture of the setting, characters, and emotions involved.
• Organize events in chronological order for a smooth and understandable narrative.
• Bring characters to life through their actions, dialogue, and personalities.
• Employ dialogue sparingly to add realism and progression to the narrative.
• Engage readers by evoking emotions through your storytelling.
• End with reflection or a lesson learned from the experience, providing insight.

Now you have essay examples and tips to help you get started, you have a solid starting point for crafting compelling narrative essays.

However, if storytelling isn't your forte, you can always turn to our essay service for help.

Our writers are specialists who can tackle any type of essay with great skill. With their experience, you get a top-quality, 100% plagiarism-free essay everytime.

So, let our narrative essay writing service make sure your narrative essay stands out. Order now!

Write Essay Within 60 Seconds!

Caleb S. has been providing writing services for over five years and has a Masters degree from Oxford University. He is an expert in his craft and takes great pride in helping students achieve their academic goals. Caleb is a dedicated professional who always puts his clients first.

Paper Due? Why Suffer? That’s our Job!

Keep reading

Metanarrative Autofiction: Critical Engagement with Cultural Narrative Models

• Open Access
• First Online: 03 January 2022

Cite this chapter

You have full access to this open access chapter

• Hanna Meretoja 4  

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Life Writing ((PSLW))

5869 Accesses

9 Citations

This chapter examines a new form of autofiction that has emerged in the twenty-first century, which the chapter proposes to call metanarrative autofiction . Such writing displays awareness of how our ways of narrating our lives are socially, culturally, and historically conditioned. The chapter conceptualizes metanarrativity in this context as a form of self-reflexive storytelling that makes narrative its theme, reflecting not only on the process of its own narration but also on the roles of cultural narrative models in making sense of our lives. The chapter discusses affordances of metanarrative autofiction in Annie Ernaux’s Les Années ( The Years ) ( 2008 ), Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Min kamp ( My Struggle ) (2009–2011), and the Finnish singer-songwriter Astrid Swan’s Viimeinen kirjani (2019, My Last Book ).

You have full access to this open access chapter,  Download chapter PDF

Similar content being viewed by others

Narrative theory across borders

Hermeneutics

The Question of Genre in Holocaust Narrative: The Case of Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder

• Metanarrative autofiction
• Narrative agency
• Cultural narrative models
• Annie Ernaux
• Karl Ove Knausgaard
• Astrid Swan

While the view that narrative is integral to humans’ mode of making sense of the world has shaped the “narrative turn” in the humanities and social sciences since the 1980s (Ricœur 1983 ; Hyvärinen 2008 ; Meretoja 2014 ), in the twenty-first century society more broadly has become obsessed with narratives (see Polletta 2006 ; Salmon 2010 ; Fernandes 2017 ; Mäkelä & Meretoja 2022 ). The notion of finding one’s own narrative has pervaded culture at large, and it has been put to extensive commercial use. Contemporary fiction is increasingly responding to this trend by critically reflecting on how cultural narrative models shape our lives. While metafiction (Hutcheon 1980 ; Waugh 1984 ; Currie 2014 ) was a key characteristic of postmodernist literature and art, an important form of self-reflexivity in contemporary literary fiction is “metanarrativity”—self-aware reflection not only on the narratives’ own narrativity but also on cultural processes of narrative sense-making and on the roles that narrative practices play in our lives. This is particularly salient in autofictional writing, which centers on the relationship between the real and the imaginary, life and its narrativization. Footnote 1

To date, metanarratives have been studied from two different perspectives. First, the term “metanarrative” is used in critical theory, particularly in connection to postmodernism, predominantly with reference to what Jean-François Lyotard ( 1979 ) called “grand narratives” ( grands récits )—master narratives that seek to offer legitimation through the anticipated completion of a master idea (such as narratives of Marxism and the Enlightenment). It is misleading, however, to call Lyotardian master narratives “metanarratives” because the prefix “meta-” suggests that they are narratives about narratives. Master narratives, in contrast, mask their own narrativity. Second, metanarrativity (or metanarrative commentary) is a narratological term for self-reflexive narration in which the narrators reflect on their own process of narration (see, e.g., Fludernik 1996 , 2003 ; Neumann and Nünning 2014 ; Macrae 2019 ).

These approaches leave out two central dimensions of self-reflexive storytelling: metanarrative fiction is characterized by critical reflection on, first, the significance of cultural narratives for individuals and communities and, second, the functions of narratives in our lives. In this chapter, I explore how what I call “metanarrative autofiction” makes narrative its theme through critical engagement with cultural narrative models of sense-making. While metafictional autofiction focuses on issues of fictionality in narrating lives, metanarrative autofiction, as I define it, reflects on the role of narratives (both fictional and nonfictional) in the processes in which we make sense of our lives. My notion is thus also different from what one might call metanarrative autobiography—a term that Bianca Theisen uses for autobiographical texts that highlight the “codes that have governed the writing of autobiographies” ( 2003 , 11), and which could logically also be used to designate autobiographical texts reflecting on the act of narration in general, as well as those reflecting on cultural narrative templates. Metanarrative autofiction, in distinction from metanarrative autobiography, focuses in addition on the relation between the real and the imaginary, as is characteristic of autofiction in general, and often employs experimental narrative strategies in the process. In particular, I analyze the affordances of metanarrative autofiction by focusing on how it deals with the nature and conditions of narrative agency.

The notion of narrative agency has been used to foreground the role of narrative self-interpretation in bringing about the “integration of the self over time”—a process that is “dynamic, provisional and open to change and revision” (Mackenzie 2008 , 11–12). However, I have argued (Meretoja 2018 , 11–12) that the narrative dimension of agency is not merely at play in processes of self-interpretation, but forms, more broadly, a constitutive aspect of our agency as we participate, through our actions and inactions, in narrative practices that perpetuate and challenge social structures. The concept of narrative agency signals that culturally mediated narrative interpretations play an important role in constituting us as subjects capable of action, while simultaneously alerting us to how narrative agency is socially conditioned. Our narrative agency means our ability to navigate our narrative environments: use and engage with narratives that are culturally available to us, to analyze and challenge them, and to practice agential choice over which narratives we use and how we narratively interpret our lives and the world around us. Narrative agency can be amplified or diminished, and agentic power is unevenly distributed both within societies and across the globe. Amplified narrative agency can manifest itself, for example, as enhanced awareness of one’s possibilities of action, affect, and thought in relation to one’s narrative environments and as the ability to imagine different modes of living a fulfilling life.

I take narrative agency to include three central dimensions. First, it involves narrative awareness : awareness of different narrative perspectives and of the cultural repertoire of narratives that circulate in our cultural environments and provide us with models of sense-making. Second, it includes narrative imagination : the capacity to imagine beyond what appears to be self-evident in the present (see Andrews 2014 ; Brockmeier 2015 ) and to engage with the culturally available repertoire of narratives critically and creatively in ways that expand one’s “sense of the possible” (Meretoja 2018 , 20, 90–97). Its third aspect is narrative dialogicality : the capacity to enter into relationships and be part of communities that have their own shared “narrative in-betweens” (Meretoja 2018 , 117–125), that is, intersubjective mythologies and narrative sense-making systems, and to participate in their renewal, challenging, and transformation.

An important strand of contemporary autofiction problematizes the pressure to create a single, coherent life story, articulating how the self is constituted in relation to narratives that are only partly our own, unearthing the normative aspects of the cultural narrative models that are imposed on us, and exploring alternatives to dominant models of how to live and narrate a fulfilling life. In this chapter, I will analyze three examples of such contemporary metanarrative autofiction, showing how the respective texts display and work through the three dimensions of narrative agency. I propose that in so doing they contribute to shaping narrative agency in our culture at large.

Narrative, Memory, and Imagination in Ernaux’s Les Années

The form of Annie Ernaux’s Les Années is highly experimental. It avoids the first-person singular pronoun and, instead, oscillates between the third-person singular ( elle /she) and the first-person plural ( nous /we). “Ernaux” the narrator refers to herself/the protagonist as “she” ( elle ) and to her generation or peer-group as “we” ( nous ). Footnote 2 This impersonal autobiography charts the change of times through the itinerary of her own life, linking the unfolding of an individual life to historical events and change of fashions and mentalities. It compellingly entwines the personal and the collective by showing how the most personal experience takes place in a space shaped by collective forces and how major historical events are experienced differently by each individual. I will focus here on how Les Années thematizes the narrative aspect of memory and imagination.

Ernaux’s autobiographical impulse seems to arise from a sense of the past disappearing. Aging and serious illness (breast cancer) prompt her to narrate her life and seek a fitting form for such an endeavor. Footnote 3 The narrator feels that there is “something too permanent about ‘I,’ something shrunken and stifling, whereas ‘she’ is too exterior and remote” ( 2017 , 169–170/ 2008 , 187–188). Footnote 4 Illness and aging produce a sense of transience and a felt need to leave a trace. Writing is about constructing and preserving a past in order to have a sense of the multitude of who one has been and who one is now and to see that process in relation to other people:

She doesn’t know what she wants from these inventories, except maybe through the accumulation of memories of objects, to again become the person she was at such and such a time. She would like to assemble these multiple images of herself, separate and discordant, thread them together with the story of her existence, starting with her birth during World War II up until the present day. Therefore, an existence that is singular but also merged with the movements of a generation. (169/187)

“Ernaux” wants to remember, to take stock of her life, but with a keen awareness of how her personal memory is entwined with collective imagination. Even highly subjective bodily experience is mediated by cultural narrative models of sense-making:

She has mined her intuition of what her book’s form will be from another sensation, the one that engulfs her when, starting with a frozen memory-image of herself with other kids on a hospital bed after tonsil surgery, after the war, or crossing Paris on a bus in July of 1968, she seems to melt into an indistinct whole whose parts she manages to pull free, one at a time, through an effort of critical consciousness: elements of herself, customs, gestures, words, etc. […] Then, in a state of profound, almost dazzling satisfaction, she finds something that the image from personal memory doesn’t give her on its own: a kind of vast collective sensation that takes her consciousness, her entire being, into itself. (223–224/250)

Falling ill is an intensely personal experience, but Ernaux shows that it also has a collective dimension and is affected by cultural narratives of illness. How we think about cancer as disease, for example, is shaped by narratives of restitution and recovery that dominate the media. “Ernaux” mentions the illness almost in passing as a trivial thing that seems to affect all women of her generation:

a tumour of the kind that seems to burgeon in the breasts of all women her age, and appeared to her a normal occurrence, almost, because the things we most fear happen. At the same time she received the news that a baby was growing in the womb of her eldest son’s partner—the ultrasound revealed a girl, and meanwhile she’d lost all her hair as a result of chemotherapy. This replacement of herself in the world, without delay, profoundly disturbed her. (220/246)

First, in terms of the three aspects of narrative agency, Les Années is permeated with narrative awareness. Each memory is recounted so that the personal and the collective intersect. Personal experiences are shown to take shape in a cultural context that functions as a “space of experience” (Koselleck 2004 ) that allows certain experiences and disallows others. Ernaux uses this Koselleckian concept when she speaks of “[t]he space of experience” that “lost its familiar contours” ( 2017 , 170/ 2008 , 188). The narrator acknowledges that we not only share experience of great historical events (“our landmarks, 1968 and 1981” [170/188]) but “a great deal of shared experience that left no conscious trace” (180/200) and is linked to shared habits and assumptions. By articulating cultural narratives underlying such shared assumptions, Les Années brings elements of the narrative unconscious to the level of narrative awareness (see also Meretoja 2018 , 18–21; Freeman 2010 , 105, 120).

Narrative awareness also involves awareness of how people search for “models of existence in space and time” (108/118). Les Années depicts how people create their “personal Pantheon” (119/130), their personal mythology of figures they adore and from whom they seek guidance and inspiration. Literature and other arts as well as advertising provide narrative “models for how to live, behave, and furnish the home. It was society’s cultural educator” (111/122). Ernaux disenchants the Pantheon of narrative models by showing how not only intellectual heroes but also mundane advertising plays a crucial role in providing us with models to live by. The text emphasizes how the most personal mythology often turns out to be anything but personal: it is entangled with the story economy of the times and its commercial interests.

Second, an equally important aspect of Ernaux’s metanarrative autofictional mode of writing is the way it charts changes in collective narrative imagination. The narrator repeatedly refers explicitly to imagination (to “teenage imagination” [146/161], for example, or to the way in which “[t]he banlieues loomed large in the popular imagination” [141/155]). In a sense, her text is a cultural history of the transformations of public imagination. It also acknowledges that collective imagination is heterogeneous and plural. The immigrants, for example, have their own “imagination, which annoyed us insofar as it was focused elsewhere, on Algeria and Palestine” (173/192).

The narrative is permeated by reflection on how personal and collective narrative imagination constantly intersect and how individual memory is conditioned by cultural memory embedded in a specific social context. It is an organizing principle of Ernaux’s autofictional writing that her life is told with an emphasis on what she remembered and what she imagined at the time. Who “Ernaux” is at a given point in her life is defined by what she remembers and dreams of at that time. At one point, she tells us, “[s]he has started to imagine herself outside of conjugal and family life” (115/126), for instance, and at another “[s]he no longer imagines herself lying on the beach or as a writer publishing her first book” (96/104). The narrator also acknowledges that she has to imagine the book, the impersonal autobiography, before she can write it. Then, however, this project is presented as only one aspect of her everyday life and of her narrative imagination that orients her to her future: “Even more than this book the future is the next man who will make her dream, buy new clothes, and wait: for a letter, a phone call, a message on the answering machine” (170/188). Ernaux emphasizes that our dreams and memories (perceived as highly personal and unique) are ultimately dominated by quite banal everyday fantasies and anxieties that are largely shaped by cultural narrative models.

Third, Ernaux’s autofictional writing is fundamentally relational. It acknowledges how individual life takes place within a social world in which it is part of the life of a whole generation. Much of her writing explores relationships, such as her intense love affair with a younger man while she undergoes breast cancer treatments. Ernaux’s L’Usage de la photo ( 2005 ) documents this love affair through photos taken of their discarded clothes after they have had sex. In Les Années , the man “attracted her with his gentleness and his penchant for everything that makes one dream, books, music, films. This miraculous coincidence gave her a chance to triumph over death through love and eroticism” (220–221/246). Ernaux thematizes the narratively shaped intersubjective space between people, the narrative in-between that allows us to talk about certain experiences but not others. The narrator repeatedly reflects on what can be said and thought in a particular social and cultural world, experiencing as tormenting the inability to express one’s thoughts and feelings:

At every moment in time, next to the things it seems natural to do and say, and next to the ones we’re told to think—no less by books or ads in the Métro than by funny stories—are other things that society hushes up without knowing it is doing so. Thus it condemns to lonely suffering all the people who feel but cannot name these things. Then the silence breaks […] and words burst forth, recognized at last, while underneath other silences start to form. (97/105)

In Les Années , illness, death, and aging are surrounded by silence. Through writing, Ernaux creates an intersubjective space of memory and imagination that makes it possible to fill in one of these silences through the anticipation of one’s own death: “The future is replaced by a sense of urgency that torments her. She is afraid that as she ages her memory will become cloudy and silent, as it was in her first years of life, which she won’t remember anymore. […] Now’s the time to give form to her futureabsence through writing” (222/248–249). In connection to this intertwinement of presence and absence, she writes about “palimpsest time” (223/249). Footnote 5 This is a layered time in which the past is overwritten by the present and future: “What matters to her, on the contrary, is to seize this time that comprises her life on Earth at a given period, the time that has coursed through her, the world she has recorded merely by living” (223/250). Such an acute sense of temporality and finitude marks her whole process of life writing.

Overall, a key affordance of Ernaux’s experimental metanarrative autofictional writing is that it allows her to acknowledge how much of our existence is not a matter of action but of being acted upon. We are as much a product of what happens to us as we are centers of action and meaning that give sense and direction to our own lives. Les Années highlights the continuous dialogue between these two sides of our existence. We are socially conditioned, but we learn to become narrators of our lives who act as if we could simply choose a certain direction for our own lives and life-narrations. Yet, Les Années shows how deeply entrenched this narrative agency is in narratively constituted webs of relationships that shape what the individual, as a member of a generation, remembers and imagines.

Knausgaard’s Essayistic Storytelling: The Search for Authenticity

An important theme in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ( 2009–2011 ) six-volume autofictionalseries Min kamp is the search for an authentic mode of being through a process of writing one’s life. Integral to this is a search for authentic storytelling, which involves a struggle with culturally dominant narrative models he finds limiting. Telling the story of one’s own life, an act of practicing narrative agency, opens up the possibility to turn from being a victim to an agent. At the same time, Knausgaard’s autofictional series is shot through with a critical attitude toward narrativizing life. On the one hand, life is for him a flow of experiences, and narrative is deeply problematic insofar as it tries to stop the flow and appropriate life into a closed form. On the other hand, narrative is shown to be indispensable to being human. I argue that Knausgaard strives to find a form of fragmentary, essayistic, open-ended storytelling that deliberately avoids appropriation and closure.

The two primary ways in which Knausgaard’s autofictional series contributes to narrative awareness are, first, by reflecting on the tension between life and narrative, and second, by drawing attention to, and critically reflecting on, cultural narratives that steer our lives, as the narrator observes in the sixth volume of the series: “We need to be alert whenever events shape themselves into narratives, for narratives belong to literature and not to life, and occurrences of the past seep into and absorb expectations of the future” ( 2018 , 534/517). Occurrences pass quickly, but newspapers tell stories that give them a fixedness:

The event is lifted out of its physical environment and its particular moment and goes from being without continuity to becoming a part of an ongoing, so-called news. Anything that cannot be explained, any unexpected accident or catastrophe, any instance of sudden death or incomprehensible malice is gathered here in the form of small narratives, and the mere fact of their being told is sufficient to put us at ease, to assure us that order exists. ( 2018 , 651/627)

Min kamp suggests that narratives provide reassurance and a sense of control, but we should be aware of the flux of events that lies underneath the neat narratives that create a false illusion of order. An important way in which reality is ordered is through cultural narrative models.

Min kamp particularly reflects on cultural narrative models of masculinity, including models of being a father, husband, and artist. “Knausgaard” struggles with these models in trying to find his own path, which entails both a style of existence and a style of writing that he can consider authentic. He asks how he might turn his “almost inexhaustible” recollections “into a coherent narrative? And how to do so in such a way as to remain faithful to what was mine about them?” ( 2018 , 66/68). He is largely aware of his debt to the tradition of Romanticism, which emphasizes that which is unique to each individual, but he also critically engages with this tradition by foregrounding our fundamental connectedness to other people. Footnote 6 He does not want to repeat the mistakes of his father; instead, he wants to be a committed, loving parent, whose children “shouldn’t be afraid of their own father” ( 2014c , 248/246). I agree with Christian Refsum that, despite being criticized for individualism and egoism, “Knausgaard” strives “to find and maintain attachment, belonging, and love” ( 2020 , 370). A deep commitment to his nuclear family is crucial to his sense of self; both love and writing are for him modes of renewal through which he searches for self-fulfillment and self-transformation. When caught between trying to be a good father/husband and a good writer, however, he ultimately privileges his ambitions as a writer in his struggle for authenticity.

It is first and foremost the conventionality of everyday routines and habits that oppresses him:

perhaps it was the prefabricated nature of the days in this world I was reacting to, the rails of routine we followed, which made everything so predictable that we had to invest in entertainment to feel any hint of intensity? Every time I went out of the door I knew what was going to happen, what I was going to do. This was how it was on the micro level, I go to the supermarket and do the shopping, I go and sit down at a café with a newspaper, I fetch my children from the nursery, and this is how it was on the macro level, from the initial entry into society, the nursery, to the final exit, the old folks’ home. ( 2014b , 75–76/67–68)

Crucial to Knausgaard’s ethos—to the overall guiding beliefs and ideals that shape the narrative—is a search for authenticity characterized by the struggle of each individual to become who they are, against such obstacles as conventions, norms, and dominant narrative models. In particular, the narrator repeatedly places the singularity of what is happening to him against the generality of narrative models: “For a moment, it was as if I was entering a larger story than my own. The sons leaving home to bury their father, this was the story I suddenly found myself in” ( 2014a , 296/265). After a while, however, the “sensation of the great story had gone. We were not two sons, we were Yngve and Karl Ove; we were not going home but to Kristiansand; this was not a father we were burying, it was dad” ( 2014a , 297/266). He feels that taking up the Scandinavian model of a father who stays at home with the children takes something away from him: “When I pushed the buggy all over town and spent my days taking care of my child it was not the case that I was adding something to my life, that it became richer as a result; on the contrary, something was removed from it, part of myself, the bit relating to masculinity. […] I squeezed myself into a mould that was so small and so constricted that I could no longer move” ( 2014b , 99/87). Ultimately, “Knausgaard” resists one model—a distant, authoritative father-figure like his own—only to find himself diminished by the alternative model—the modern Scandinavian father-figure, which may be conceived as more in line with a traditionally female model. Awareness of these models allows him to gain critical distance from them, but being caught between them remains a struggle.

Knausgaard’s contribution to narrative imagination is linked to his explicit interest in exploring “what is possible and what is not possible to say and do in a given day and age” ( 2018 , 762/732). The sixth volume, for example, discusses the historical context that allowed Hitler to gain power and draws a parallel to the Utøya massacre in contemporary Norway. Footnote 7 In 1910, it would not have been possible for Hitler to become a political leader, the narrator muses ( 2018 , 765/734), but in the 1930s a world emerged in which ordinary people, “we,” became supporters of the Nazi regime. He analyzes how this launched a tradition that has enabled the rise of far-right extremism across contemporary Europe. He suggests that we cannot understand the rise of Nazism unless we acknowledge what he calls the “power of the we” (828/792), which implies that we ourselves could have been Nazis had we been born in a different time and place (see also Meretoja 2018 , 217–254).

In Min kamp , narrative imagination also concerns the question of how to expand one’s sense of the possible. What liberates “Knausgaard” and expands his sense of the possible is primarily art. He is trying to get hold of the singularity of who he is, under the pressure of narrative models, norms, and life trajectories forced on individuals. Linear narrative form represents conventionality for Knausgaard, which is why he struggles to give expression to what evades narrativization, and in this effort he turns to the fragmentary, essayistic form that he develops throughout his series. His search for authenticity combines an aesthetic of transiency and unfinishedness with an ethics and aesthetics of brutal honesty. Knausgaard attempts to create a narrative style that is as true to reality as possible. Tired of fiction, he wants to develop an aesthetics of truth that is animated by a hunger for reality: “The idea was to get as close as possible to my life” ( 2014b , 654/554). Footnote 8 For him, the search for authenticity is inextricably linked to the project of writing in which he displays the secrets of his soul as scrupulously and completely as possible. He seems to think that a brutally honest narrative that reveals his life in all its contradictory, messy complexity is key to integrity and authenticity.

Knausgaard contributes to narrative imagination by developing an aesthetics of brutal honesty that lays bare the destructiveness of the grind of everyday routines and narratives with which we structure them—an aesthetic he calls the “banality of the everyday” ( 2012 ). In a way, this is for Knausgaard not only an aesthetic but also an ethos used to justify placing art above the ethical commitments of family life and community life. Ultimately, only art is sacred for him. He pushes the limits of what can be said and done in literature in order to turn the tedious everyday life into something meaningful that makes life worth living: “Everyday life, with its duties and routines, was something I endured, not a thing I enjoyed, nor something that was meaningful or made me happy. […] I always longed to be away from it, and always had done. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined all my efforts” ( 2014b , 75/67). Out of this failure grows the Knausgaardian narrative imaginary characterized by an oscillation between commitments to others and a search for authenticity.

In terms of dialogicality, Min kamp presents narrative as not only a matter of conventional cultural models that convey norms and stereotypical roles but also as a possibility of establishing connections with others. Narrative is for the narrator “a matter of communication, establishing community out of what was one’s own” ( 2018 , 65/67). Narrative is a process of giving meaning to the world, which is for him “not only our responsibility but also our obligation” ( 2018 , 373/366), but this process only makes sense if we understand that language is the medium through which we enter into a dialogical relationship with others: “In the language I exist, but only if there is also a you to which the I of the speech act can relate, because if not how then should the I separate itself and find form?” ( 2018 , 465/454). Hence, despite Knausgaard’s attachment to the idea of a romantic genius searching for authenticity, he also recognizes that he is fundamentally dependent on and connected to others. One of the crucial tasks his narrator sets for himself is to explore these connections: “meaning arises out of cohesion, in the way we are connected to one another and our surroundings. This is the reason I write, trying to explore the connections of which I am a part” (630/606). At the same time, however, he says he wrote the series in an effort to free himself “from everything that ties” ( 2018 , 982/942). Throughout the series, Knausgaard explores this fraught relationship with our fundamental relationality. Although relationality is often seen to be characteristic of women’s autobiographical writing, Knausgaard shows that it can be a key issue for male writers too.

Narrative dialogicality involves awareness of how each narrative can be told from multiple perspectives and how our individual narratives enter into dialogue with those of others. Despite Knausgaard’s commitment to truth, it is evident that his narrative is an interpretation, a selection: some things are left out, others told with excruciating detail. In making such choices, he practices his power of narrative agency. Narratives always represent a certain perspective, and the narrator of Min kamp makes clear that the series is primarily about his perspective, his truth, his shame, and anguish. It is a largely monological project, which can be considered ethically problematic, but “Knausgaard” also metanarratively foregrounds his own status as a narrator who selects what to tell and how to tell it. In fact, the self-reflexive dimension of the series entails that Knausgaard never pretends to tell the whole truth or the only truth. He aspires to tell his truth and to acknowledge how it necessarily takes shape in dialogical relationships, and often in tension with the truths of other people.

Nevertheless, as his life is entangled with those of others, he also has to consider the cost. Brutal honesty comes at the expense of those close to him, whom he turns into material for his art. Footnote 9 Hence, the series is ultimately permeated with a tension between an individualist search for authenticity and a relational sense of connectedness. Its narrative dialogicality contributes to a narrative in-between that makes it possible to verbalize shame, insecurity, and selfishness, a space that enables Knausgaard to become visible as an incomplete and imperfect person and writer in search of his own truth. He does this through essayistic, fragmentary storytelling that deliberately eschews narrative mastery and definitive answers to fundamental existential and ethical questions. His metanarrative reflections are grounded in a poetics of essayistic, explorative, fluid, and open-ended autofiction.

Swan’s Autofictional Cancer (Counter-)Narrative

Astrid Swan’s Viimeinen kirjani ( My Last Book ) is a genre-defying book about the author’s journey tobecome a singer-songwriter, mother, and writer, while learning that she has incurable metastatic breast cancer. Swan’s experimental narrative challenges linear narrativity and plays with the permeable border between fictionality and nonfictionality. It starts off like a fairytale: “Once upon a time there was a woman, who breast-fed her almost two-year-old, speaking child” ( 2019 , 9). Footnote 10 Swan’s way of dealing explicitly with her own experience of illness makes her book a memoir. While memoir, however, is traditionally seen as a nonfiction genre, Swan employs aesthetic strategies that draw attention to the process of experimental writing and give the text a quality of literariness. For example, the chapters are numbered in an irregular fashion—5, 30, 7, 24, 5, indicating her age at the time of the narrated events—which emphasizes the way she writes from the middle of events that refuse to settle into a linear, coherent narrative. Diary excerpts are interspersed with interior monologue, reflections on the past, snapshots of the present, and anticipation of the future into a collage-like assemblage. Throughout her book, “Swan” comments on her own process of narration and on cultural models for illness narratives. As she struggles with culturally dominant narratives of fighting breast cancer, she reflects on how lives are entangled with one another through shared narrative imagination and processes of co-telling in which lives are narrated collaboratively.

In terms of the three dimensions of narrative agency, Swan’s book contributes to narrative awareness particularly through its critical engagement with cultural narrative models linked to narrating illness. She looks for stories in which she would recognize herself, but finds that the available repertoire of cancer narratives is limited: “It has been difficult to find narratives that reflect me back to myself” (138). The dominant cancer narratives emphasize battle and recovery. The metaphor ofwar, which portrays cancer patients as fighters, has been criticized since Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor ( 1978 ) but continues to dominate the culturally mediated narrative imagination concerning cancer (see also Ehrenreich 2001 ; Bleakley 2017 ). The battle narrative is problematic because it turns cancer patients into either winners or losers, the implication being that those who die did not fight hard enough (see Meretoja 2021 , 38).

It is significant that Swan’s narrator has problems not only with the dominant narrative of fighting cancer but also with such a counter-narrative as the feminist activist Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals ( 1980 ), which is meant to be an empowering narrative that encourages breast cancer survivors to be proudly one-breasted: “I am not, after all, a valiant one-breasted warrior who carries her scars without shame. I want to camouflage” (Swan 2019 , 243). She also finds problematic the normative pressure to be positive that is integral to culturally dominant narratives of illness: “Those who suggest I should look at everything a little more positively cannot fathom the form my life has taken” (254). Swan draws attention to the strong normative element of obligatory optimism. As Emilia Nielsen ( 2019 ) observes, in the culturally preferred cancer narrative one wages war on cancer with courage and optimism, as if recovery depended simply on the right attitude and enough willpower. Nielsen analyzes alternative stories, counter-narratives, that she calls disruptive breast cancer stories, and shows how they make room for a wider range of emotions in the experience of cancer. However, people rarely want to hear stories of anger or grief. Swan contributes to such disruptive counter-narratives by exploring complex, dark affects linked to the experience of facing terminal illness and the inevitably approaching death.

Swan’s autofictional writing compellingly verbalizes aspects of both personal and collective narrative imagination. She frequently speculates on what could have been—on life trajectories that did not actualize. For example, as an exchange student in the US, she “receives a whole fast-forward of what-if-life”: “What if I had been born elsewhere? What if my parents had been entirely different people? What if everything that happened had happened but in a different setting?” ( 2019 , 81). Narratives are a vehicle of imagination, of imagining an elsewhere, which can be either a past elsewhere or a not-yet that could unfold one day. “Swan” tries to imagine her forebears, including her lost grandfather, an Ashkenazi Jew who had a nomadic lifestyle, but she also reflects on how weaving her family history into an imaginative narrative may grow into “a dangerous story inside of me” (52). Narratives are also a mode of reaching to the future, even beyond death. She refers to her “insatiable hunger of stories” (142), which is linked to a “fear of disappearing” (47), and suggests that stories are for her a mode of survival: “I live by stories” (46). This connects her to a literary tradition going all the way back to One Thousand and One Nights (see Meretoja 2018 , 168). Survival through storytelling is connected to the need to imagine both where she comes from and where she is going.

My Last Book shows how we live at the intersection of a multitude of narratives and must deal with their tensions and contradictions: “for me both narratives are necessary and true” (68). Narrative imagination involves the ability to imagine the messiness of the narrative webs in which we are entangled. Although it is in the power of narrators to decide which versions of particular stories to tell and “what they emphasize” (60), she also acknowledges that life stories ultimately take shape through shared narrative imagination and processes of co-telling. This brings us to narrative dialogicality, which is a key aspect of My Last Book . The way Swan tells her life story emphasizes the profound relationality of our existence and the inextricable entanglement of our stories with the stories of others: “We are a million different shards in other people’s stories.” (147) No individual is separate from the lives of others and this entanglement of lives makes them messy and layered: “It is not a tidy operation. It’s a messy chaos. My life does not dislodge from the lives of others. Neither do experiences. Everything is sedimented. We share habits, memories, trauma, genes, recipes, plans, daydreams, fears…” (30). “Swan” repeatedly foregrounds the connections between her stories and those of others: “Invisible filaments connect me to others, their stories and cultures” (53).

As she prepares for her own death, “Swan” works through the idea of letting go of being the protagonist of her own story and becoming, instead, a character in other people’s, when she no longer exists, but lives on in the stories of those who knew her or listen to her music: “I become story. A metaphor and an evaporation. I become a character inhabiting the memories, material items and behaviors of these people, even in surprising situations. Strange entanglements—moments of presence after all” (284). Coming to terms with her own death is in many ways a process of letting go—first and foremost of control because we cannot govern our death and what happens to our loved ones afterward. This involves letting go of narrative mastery, which opens up the ability to enjoy the moment and its transience: “I take pleasure in the presence of the unknown. I deliberately enjoy that which is not in my control, of which I am not aware and cannot anticipate. This is my reason for loving the moment of waking up in the morning” (285). The process of creating a narrative in-between in which the end of her life is given meaning emerges as a process of collaborative storytelling in which she participates and which those close to her will uphold, reinterpret, and transform when she is gone.

Swan’s book contributes to a narrative in-between in which it is possible to share experiences of fundamental vulnerability without being paralyzed by shame and feelings of inadequacy. It questions the dichotomy between health and illness, showing how much wellbeing and agency there can be in times of serious illness. Her metanarrative autofictional writing is thereby a contribution to the discussion on “health within illness” (Carel 2008 ). The concept of narrative agency provides an important new perspective in this discussion. While illness is commonly seen in terms of a radical impairment of agency, acknowledging how agency is mediated through cultural narratives allows us to appreciate both our limitations at times of good health and the agency that persists in times of illness. This approach invites us to explore how agency can be strengthened through narrative practices that cultivate narrative awareness, imagination, anddialogicalrelationality.

This chapter has delineated the emerging phenomenon of metanarrative autofiction that self-reflexively draws our attention to the complexities of having to navigate contemporary narrative environments, including critical engagement with the current storytelling boom. Through the examples linked to memory and imagination, authenticity, and illness, I have unearthed key affordances of metanarrative autofiction—particularly ways in which it reflects on culturally dominant narrative models and enriches the culturally available repertoire of narratives that can help us verbalize our experiences and imagine different life trajectories. Such autofiction explores entanglements between one’s own narrative agency and narratives culturally imposed on us, and it provides critical perspectives on the ways in which cultural narrative models affect the space of possibility in which we narrate our lives and become who we are. Metanarrative autofiction is an important strand of contemporary literature globally, and it remains for future research to analyze this phenomenon through a wider selection of texts from various cultural contexts. The case studies analyzed in this chapter have shown that a focus on metanarrative autofiction as a distinct form of autofiction with specific affordances provides a new perspective on both agency and its narrative mediation. This approach has allowed us to see how contemporary metanarrative autofiction articulates the complex ways in which the cultural and social forces around us affect the narrative models through which we make sense of our own experiences and those of others, and how it can expand our sense of the possible. Footnote 11

Metanarrative autofiction can be seen as a subcategory of autofiction, but I also see it as a subcategory of metanarrative fiction more broadly (fiction characterized by metanarrativity). I embrace the view outlined in the Introduction of this volume according to which the autofictional is not only a genre-descriptor but also “a mode, moment, and strategy.” In this chapter, I focus on some of the key affordances of metanarrative autofictional modes of writing.

I will refer to the narrator-protagonist of her autofictional writing as “Ernaux” (the version of Ernaux that emerges from the text) and will similarly use “Knausgaard” and “Swan.”

Aging engenders, in Les Années , a voice “marked by authority, but also by a new fragility, anxiety and fear” (Jordan 2011 , 138).

Quotations are from the English translation (Ernaux 2017 ). In-text citations include references to both the translation and the original (separated by a slash). The same principle is applied in Knausgaard’s case.

On palimpsest memory, see Silverman 2013 .

On the Romantic roots of the idea of authenticity, see Taylor 1991 .

The Utøya massacre refers to the July 22, 2011, attack in which Anders Breivik, a 32-year-old Norwegian right-wing extremist, shot dead 69 people attending the summer camp of the Workers Youth League on Utøya Island.

My Struggle can be seen as part of the phenomenon that Shields ( 2010 ) dubbed “reality hunger.”

In an interview ( 2012 ), Knausgaard says that in this project he “gave away” his soul and he feels “a measure of guilt” for the hurt he has caused.

The translations are Swan’s own, based on an unfinished English translation. I am grateful to Swan for providing me with these translations.

Work on this chapter has been funded by the Academy of Finland project Instrumental Narratives: The Limits of Storytelling and New Story-Critical Narrative Theory (project number 314769).

Works Cited

Andrews, Molly. 2014. Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Book   Google Scholar  

Bleakley, Alan. 2017. Thinking with Metaphors in Medicine: The State of the Art . London: Routledge.

Brockmeier, Jens. 2015. Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process . New York: Oxford University Press.

Carel, Havi. 2008. Illness . London: Routledge.

Currie, Mark. 2014. Metafiction . London: Routledge.

Ehrenreich, Barbara. 2001. Welcome to Cancerland. Harper’s Magazine , November, 43–53.

Google Scholar  

Ernaux, Annie. 2005. L’Usage de la photo . Paris: Gallimard.

———. 2008. Les Années . Paris: Gallimard.

———. 2017. The Years . Translated by Alison L. Strayer. London: Fitzcarraldo.

Fernandes, Sujatha. 2017. Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fludernik, Monika. 1996. Towards a “Natural” Narratology . London: Routledge.

———. 2003. Metanarrative and Metafictional Commentary: From Metadiscursivity to Metanarration and Metafiction. Poetica 35: 1–39.

Article   Google Scholar  

Freeman, Mark. 2010. Hindsight: The Promise and Peril of Looking Backward . New York: Oxford University Press.

Hutcheon, Linda. 1980. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox . Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Hyvärinen, Matti. 2008. Revisiting the Narrative Turns. Life Writing 7 (1): 69–82.

Jordan, Shirley. 2011. Writing Age: Annie Ernaux’s Les Années . Forum for Modern Language Studies 47 (2): 138–149. https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqq080 .

Knausgaard, Karl Ove. 2009–2011. Min kamp 1–6 . Oslo: Oktober.

———. 2012. “I Have Given Away My Soul.” Interview by Jon Henley. The Guardian , March 9, 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/mar/09/karl-ove-knausgaard-memoir-family . Accessed Apr 6, 2021.

———. 2014a. A Death in the Family: My Struggle 1 . London: Vintage Books.

———. 2014b. A Man in Love: My Struggle 2 . London: Vintage Books.

———. 2014c. Boyhood Island: My Struggle 3 . London: Vintage Books.

———. 2018. The End: My Struggle 6 . London: Harvill Secker.

Koselleck, Reinhart. 2004. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time . Translated by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press.

Lorde, Audre. 1980. The Cancer Journals . Argyle: Spinsters Ink.

Lyotard, Jean-François. 1979. La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur la savoir . Paris: Minuit.

Mackenzie, Catriona. 2008. Introduction: Practical Identity and Narrative Agency. In Practical Identity and Narrative Agency , ed. Kim Atkins and Catriona Mackenzie, 1–28. London: Routledge.

Macrae, Andrea. 2019. Discourse Deixis in Metafiction: The Language of Metanarration, Metalepsis and Disnarration . New York: Routledge.

Mäkelä, Maria, and Hanna Meretoja. 2022. Critical Approaches to the Storytelling Boom. Poetics Today 43 (2) Do you want to remove “forthcoming”? The issue comes out in June 2022 and the issue number is 43 (2), so at this moment it is forthcoming, but if you prefer just 43 (2), that’s also fine by me .

Meretoja, Hanna. 2014. The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

———. 2018. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

———. 2021. A Dialogics of Counter-Narratives. In The Routledge Handbook of Counter-Narratives , ed. Klarissa Lueg and Marianne Wolff Lundholt, 30–42. London: Routledge.

Neumann, Birgit, and Ansgar Nünning. 2014. Metanarration and Metafiction. In The Living Handbook of Narratology , ed. Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid. Hamburg: Hamburg University Press. https://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/50.html . Accessed Apr 6, 2021.

Nielsen, Emilia. 2019. Disrupting Breast Cancer Narratives: Stories of Rage and Repair . Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Polletta, Francesca. 2006. It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics . London: University of Chicago Press.

Refsum, Christian. 2020. ‘A Love Relationship Is Not a Place for Refuge, It Is The Place To Be’: The Theme of Love in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Min kamp . Scandinavian Studies 92 (3): 369–389.

Ricœur, Paul. 1983. Temps et récit 1 . Paris: Seuil.

Salmon, Christian. 2010. Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind . London: Verso.

Shields, David. 2010. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto . New York: Vintage.

Silverman, Max. 2013. Palimpsest Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film . New York & Oxford: Berghahn.

Sontag, Susan. 1978. Illness as Metaphor . New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Swan, Astrid. 2019. Viimeinen kirjani . Helsinki: Nemo.

Taylor, Charles. 1991. The Ethics of Authenticity . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Theisen, Bianca. 2003. Silenced Facts: Media Montages in Contemporary Austrian Literature . Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Waugh, Patricia. 1984. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction . London: Methuen.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

University of Turku, Turku, Finland

Hanna Meretoja

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hanna Meretoja .

Editor information

Editors and affiliations.

University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

Alexandra Effe

University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Hannie Lawlor

Rights and permissions

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Meretoja, H. (2022). Metanarrative Autofiction: Critical Engagement with Cultural Narrative Models. In: Effe, A., Lawlor, H. (eds) The Autofictional. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78440-9_7

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78440-9_7

Published : 03 January 2022

Publisher Name : Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-030-78439-3

Online ISBN : 978-3-030-78440-9

eBook Packages : Literature, Cultural and Media Studies Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

• Architecture and Design
• Asian and Pacific Studies
• Business and Economics
• Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
• Computer Sciences
• Cultural Studies
• Engineering
• General Interest
• Geosciences
• Industrial Chemistry
• Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies
• Jewish Studies
• Library and Information Science, Book Studies
• Life Sciences
• Linguistics and Semiotics
• Literary Studies
• Materials Sciences
• Mathematics
• Social Sciences
• Sports and Recreation
• Theology and Religion
• Publish your article
• The role of authors
• Promoting your article
• Abstracting & indexing
• Publishing Ethics
• Why publish with De Gruyter
• How to publish with De Gruyter
• Our book series
• Our subject areas
• Your digital product at De Gruyter
• Contribute to our reference works
• Product information
• Tools & resources
• Product Information
• Promotional Materials
• Orders and Inquiries
• FAQ for Library Suppliers and Book Sellers
• Repository Policy
• Free access policy
• Open Access agreements
• Database portals
• For Authors
• Customer service
• People + Culture
• Journal Management
• How to join us
• Working at De Gruyter
• Mission & Vision
• De Gruyter Foundation
• De Gruyter Ebound
• Our Responsibility
• Partner publishers

Your purchase has been completed. Your documents are now available to view.

Mind the Narratives: Towards a Cultural Narratology of Attention

From the book narrative in culture.

• Sibylle Baumbach

Taking its cue from current discourses on anxieties of (in)attention, and from the connections between attention, culture, and narrative, this essay introduces the conceptual and methodological framework for a cultural narratology of attention. As I argue, selective attention is not only a biological necessity: it also guides the production and reception of literary texts, influences the cultural narratives we live by, drives the development of (new) genres, and gives rise to what I call ‘attention narratives’. Focusing on Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, this essay shows how these ‘attention narratives’ connect with cultural anxieties of attention and distraction, driven mainly by technological advancements, while challenging readers’ attentional capacities. They do so by creating moments of ‘inattentional blindness’, which help increase readers’ awareness of the mechanisms of attention, while exposing cultural attention narratives that have shaped and continue to shape our perception. Given the central role of attention in cultures and narratives, there is a strong need for a cultural narratology of attention that bridges cognitive psychology, cultural studies, and literary studies. This essay offers the foundation for such an approach.

• X / Twitter

Supplementary Materials

Please login or register with De Gruyter to order this product.

Chapters in this book (19)

Narrative Essay Topics: TOP 200 Choices for Students

Imagine yourself facing a blank page, ready to fill it with your memories and imagination. What story will you tell today?

As students, you often have to write narratives that capture people's attention. But with so many stories to choose from, where do you start? How do you find the perfect topic that will grab our readers' interest and make them think?

Join our essay service experts as we explore 200 topics for college where stories are waiting to be told, and experiences are ready to be shared. From everyday events to unforgettable moments, each topic is a chance to connect with your readers and make them feel something.

Do You Need Professional Help with Your Hometask?

Ideas for Narrative Essay Topics

After exploring how students write narrative paragraphs, we've put together a list of narrative essay topics designed specifically for college and school students. This list covers a wide range of subjects, so pick one that speaks to you!

Literacy Narrative Essay Topics for College Students

How about delving into captivating literacy narrative essay topics designed specifically for college-level writing? Exciting, isn't it?

• How did a childhood book shape your view of the world?
• What challenges did you face when learning to read in a second language?
• How has storytelling within your family influenced your literacy journey?
• Can you recall a pivotal moment that ignited your love for reading?
• How did a specific teacher inspire your passion for literature?
• Have you ever encountered a character in a book who profoundly impacted your perspective on life?
• What role did writing play in helping you navigate a difficult period in your life?
• How has your relationship with technology affected your reading habits?
• What cultural or historical event sparked your interest in a particular genre of literature?
• How has poetry shaped your understanding of language and emotion?
• Have you ever experienced a breakthrough moment in your writing process?
• How has reading aloud impacted your comprehension and enjoyment of literature?
• Can you recall a time when a book challenged your beliefs or worldview?
• How has participating in a book club enriched your reading experience?
• What strategies have you developed to overcome reading difficulties or distractions?

Personal Narrative Essay Topics on Relationships

Take a moment to reflect on your past experiences and craft compelling personal narratives with these essay ideas.

• How did a specific friendship shape who you are today?
• Can you recount a moment that strengthened your bond with a family member?
• What challenges have you faced in maintaining a long-distance relationship?
• How has a mentor influenced your personal and professional development?
• Have you experienced a betrayal in a relationship? How did it impact you?
• Can you describe a memorable conflict resolution process within a relationship?
• How has your relationship with a pet affected your emotional well-being?
• What lessons have you learned from navigating a romantic relationship?
• How has your relationship with a sibling evolved over time?
• Can you recall a time when you had to set boundaries in a friendship?
• How has volunteering or community involvement enriched your relationships?
• What cultural differences have influenced your relationships with others?
• Can you share a moment when you felt truly understood by someone?
• How has technology affected the dynamics of your relationships?
• Have you ever experienced a reconciliation that transformed a strained relationship?

Best Narrative Essay Topics on Education and Learning

Consider the beauty of sharing your personal experiences and emotions in a captivating manner through these ideas for personal narrative essays.

• What was the most valuable lesson you learned outside of the classroom?
• Can you recount a moment when a teacher's unconventional method transformed your understanding of a subject?
• How has a field trip or experiential learning opportunity impacted your education?
• What challenges have you faced in balancing extracurricular activities with academics?
• Have you ever had a "Eureka!" moment while studying? Describe it.
• How has learning a new skill outside of school influenced your academic performance?
• Can you recall a time when a peer's perspective challenged your own understanding of a topic?
• How has technology enhanced or hindered your learning experience?
• What role does creativity play in your approach to learning?
• Have you ever experienced a setback that ultimately propelled you forward academically?
• How has your cultural background influenced your learning style?
• Can you describe a time when you had to advocate for yourself within an educational setting?
• How has mentorship shaped your educational journey?
• What strategies have you employed to overcome academic challenges or obstacles?
• Can you reflect on a time when failure taught you a valuable lesson about learning?

At this point, we think you might've already been interested in our term paper writing service that helps busy students succeed in college. 

Personal Narrative Essay Ideas on Reflection on Life

Why not ignite your creativity with a range of narrative essay topics, from extraordinary moments to everyday experiences?

• How has a moment of failure ultimately led to personal growth and resilience?
• Can you recount a pivotal decision that significantly altered the course of your life?
• What lessons have you learned from navigating a crossroads or major life transition?
• How has your perspective on success evolved over time?
• Can you reflect on a time when you had to confront and overcome a deeply held fear?
• What role has gratitude played in shaping your outlook on life?
• How have your values and beliefs been influenced by significant life experiences?
• Can you describe a moment when you found clarity and purpose amidst chaos or uncertainty?
• What impact has traveling to a new place had on your understanding of the world and yourself?
• How has adversity strengthened your character and determination?
• Can you recall a time when a random act of kindness profoundly impacted your life?
• What lessons have you learned from embracing vulnerability and authenticity in relationships?
• How has practicing mindfulness or self-reflection enhanced your well-being and happiness?
• Can you reflect on a period of personal transformation or self-discovery?
• How have you found meaning and fulfillment in pursuing your passions and interests?

Ideas for a Narrative Essay on Culture and Society

Engaging your readers with narrative essays on culture and society is a great way to spark interest, offering captivating ideas for exploration.

• How has your family's unique culinary heritage influenced your cultural identity?
• Can you reflect on a specific cultural artifact or heirloom that holds deep significance for your family?
• What challenges have you faced in preserving traditional customs while adapting to modern societal expectations?
• How has a local festival or celebration revealed the intricacies of your community's cultural tapestry?
• Can you recount a moment when you navigated a cultural clash between your upbringing and the dominant culture?
• How has your experience as a first-generation immigrant shaped your understanding of cultural assimilation?
• What lessons have you learned from participating in intercultural exchange programs or initiatives?
• Can you describe a unique cultural practice or tradition within your community that outsiders might find intriguing or misunderstood?
• How has the revitalization of indigenous languages contributed to the preservation of cultural heritage in your region?
• Can you reflect on a personal journey of reconnecting with your cultural roots after a period of assimilation or disconnection?
• What role does storytelling play in passing down cultural wisdom and values within your family or community?
• How has the portrayal of your culture in mainstream media affected your sense of belonging and self-perception?
• Can you recount a moment when you challenged cultural stereotypes through creative expression or advocacy?
• How has the migration of a specific cultural group enriched the social fabric and economic landscape of your community?
• What initiatives or grassroots movements are currently underway to promote cross-cultural understanding and cooperation in your society?

Since you're working on essays, we think it's suitable to suggest you learn more about the case study format , which is another common college assignment.

Narrative Writing Topics on Hobbies and Interests

Wow your readers by turning your passions and hobbies into compelling narrative essay topics that will get them thinking.

• How has your passion for urban gardening transformed neglected spaces in your community?
• Can you recount a thrilling adventure from your hobby of urban exploration?
• What lessons have you learned from restoring vintage motorcycles in your spare time?
• How has your fascination with birdwatching deepened your connection to nature and conservation efforts?
• Can you describe a memorable moment from your hobby of foraging wild edibles in the wilderness?
• What unique skills have you developed through your hobby of beekeeping, and how have they impacted your daily life?
• How has your interest in historical reenactment brought the past to life in unexpected ways?
• Can you reflect on a transformative experience from your hobby of landscape photography?
• What insights have you gained from practicing the art of bonsai cultivation and nurturing miniature ecosystems?
• How has your passion for stargazing inspired awe and wonder in the vastness of the universe?
• Can you recount a challenging project from your hobby of woodworking and the satisfaction it brought upon completion?
• What cultural connections have you discovered through your hobby of traditional folk dancing?
• How has your interest in sustainable fashion influenced your consumer habits and environmental awareness?
• Can you describe a moment of serenity and mindfulness experienced while practicing the art of tea ceremony?
• How has your hobby of letterpress printing preserved the tactile beauty of handmade craftsmanship in a digital age?

Narrative Essay Titles on Life-Changing Moments

Life is full of unexpected twists that can lead to life-changing moments. Take a look at these narrative essay titles for stories that have had a lasting impact on your life.

• How did surviving a natural disaster reshape your perspective on life?
• Can you recall a single conversation that drastically altered the course of your life?
• What was the pivotal moment that inspired you to pursue your dreams against all odds?
• How did a chance encounter lead to a life-changing friendship or partnership?
• Can you reflect on the decision that transformed your career trajectory?
• What profound lesson did you learn from facing a life-threatening illness or injury?
• How did traveling to a new country open your eyes to new possibilities and opportunities?
• Can you recount the moment when you discovered your true passion or calling in life?
• What was the turning point that allowed you to break free from a toxic relationship or environment?
• How did experiencing failure or rejection ultimately lead to personal growth and resilience?
• Can you describe the moment when you found the strength to overcome a deep-seated fear or insecurity?
• What life-changing realization did you have while experiencing a period of solitude or introspection?
• How did a profound act of kindness from a stranger restore your faith in humanity?
• Can you reflect on the moment when you forgave someone who had deeply hurt you, and how it changed your perspective on forgiveness?
• What pivotal decision did you make that allowed you to reclaim control over your own happiness and destiny?

Have you ever wondered about the challenges of essay writing? What happens when you're assigned a larger paper, like coursework? Make a preemptive strike by exploring coursework writing service right now!

Good Narrative Topics on Travel and Adventure

Consider creating intriguing titles for your narrative essay ideas by exploring thrilling travel adventures.

• Can you recount a memorable encounter with wildlife during your solo hiking adventure?
• How did a spontaneous decision to explore an unfamiliar city lead to unexpected discoveries?
• What lessons did you learn from navigating a foreign country with only a map and your instincts?
• Can you describe the exhilaration of conquering a challenging mountain peak for the first time?
• How did immersing yourself in a local culture during your travels broaden your perspective on the world?
• What unexpected obstacles did you encounter while embarking on a backpacking journey through rugged terrain?
• Can you reflect on the transformative experience of volunteering abroad in a community-driven project?
• How did getting lost in a labyrinthine city alleyway lead to serendipitous encounters and newfound friendships?
• What was the most memorable meal you had while sampling street food in a bustling market abroad?
• Can you recount the adrenaline rush of participating in an extreme sports activity in a foreign land?
• How did witnessing a breathtaking natural phenomenon during your travels leave a lasting impression on you?
• What cultural traditions or rituals did you participate in during a homestay experience with a local family?
• Can you describe the sense of wonder and awe you felt while exploring ancient ruins or historical sites?
• How did navigating a language barrier challenge and ultimately enrich your travel experience?
• What valuable life lessons did you learn from the mishaps and misadventures encountered during your journey off the beaten path?

Narrative Essay Topic Ideas on Career and Work Experience

College students can uncover captivating narrative essay ideas by exploring potential career paths or reminiscing about past job experiences.

• How did a challenging project at work showcase your problem-solving skills and resilience?
• Can you reflect on a pivotal mentorship experience that guided your career trajectory?
• What valuable lessons did you learn from a career setback or failure, and how did it shape your future success?
• How did a workplace conflict lead to personal growth and improved communication skills?
• Can you recount a moment when taking a professional risk paid off in unexpected ways?
• What insights did you gain from transitioning to a new industry or career path?
• How did participating in a cross-functional team project enhance your collaboration and leadership abilities?
• Can you describe the satisfaction of achieving a long-term career goal after years of hard work and perseverance?
• What impact did a meaningful recognition or award have on your motivation and sense of accomplishment?
• How did volunteering or pro bono work contribute to your professional development and sense of purpose?
• Can you reflect on the decision to leave a stable job in pursuit of passion or fulfillment?
• What strategies did you employ to navigate a toxic work environment and maintain your well-being?
• How did a career setback lead to unexpected opportunities for personal and professional growth?
• Can you describe a moment when mentorship or sponsorship played a crucial role in advancing your career?
• What lessons did you learn from a challenging client or customer interaction, and how did it shape your approach to customer service and relationship-building?

Interesting Narrative Essay Topics about Challenges and Obstacles

If you're not sure what to write about for your narrative essay, think back to the tough times you've had and how you managed to get through them.

• How did you conquer a once-paralyzing fear to chase your dreams?
• What new strengths did you discover while adapting to a physical challenge?
• Can you recall a creative solution you used during a tough financial period?
• When did you bravely stand against injustice, despite opposition?
• How did overcoming a language barrier broaden your horizons?
• What key lessons did you learn from a major setback in your life?
• How did you manage overwhelming stress and responsibilities?
• What inner reserves of resilience did you draw upon after personal loss?
• Describe a time when you defied societal norms to pursue your goals.
• Reflect on a moment when failure fueled your determination for success.
• When did you find the courage to leave your comfort zone behind?
• How did community support bolster you through a challenging time?
• Share a time when self-doubt led to newfound confidence.
• Can you recount a tragedy that spurred your personal growth?
• What insights did overcoming a monumental obstacle reveal about life?

Best Narrative Essay Topics: How to Choose the One That Resonates 

A narrative essay is a type of writing that tells a personal story, including characters, plot, setting, and the order of events. Its main goal is to connect with readers emotionally and share a specific message or insight through the retelling of a meaningful experience.

Students write narrative essays as part of their studies for several reasons. Firstly, it allows them to express themselves creatively by sharing their unique experiences, thoughts, and feelings. Secondly, it helps them develop important writing skills like organizing ideas and thoughts effectively.

Choosing good narrative essay ideas involves looking at personal experiences, interests, and the potential for engaging storytelling. Here's a simple guide to help you pick the right topic:

• Think about significant moments in your life that had a lasting impact, such as personal growth or overcoming challenges.
• Choose topics related to your hobbies, interests, or areas of expertise to make your story more engaging.
• Consider what your audience would be interested in and choose topics that resonate with them.
• Focus on a specific event or detail to make your narrative more focused and impactful.
• Look for universal themes like love or personal transformation that connect with readers on a deeper level.
• Brainstorm ideas and write freely to uncover compelling topics.
• Decide on storytelling techniques like flashbacks or foreshadowing and choose a topic that fits.
• Get feedback from friends, peers, or instructors to see if your topics are interesting and impactful.
• Choose topics that evoke strong emotions for a more compelling narrative.
• Select a topic that you personally connect with to make your story authentic.

Once you've chosen a topic, brainstorm ideas and create an outline for your essay. Follow your professor's instructions carefully and consider seeking help from our narrative essay writing service if needed.

Bring your stories to life with EssayPro. Select from a vast array of narrative essay topics and let our professionals help you weave your tales into captivating essays. Whether it's adventure, reflection, or imagination, we're here to assist.

Final Remarks

As we wrap up, our list of 200 narrative essay topics is here to fuel your creativity for your next writing project! Whether you're sharing a memorable event, reliving a childhood memory, or expressing a profound insight, crafting a narrative essay can be an uplifting experience that resonates deeply with readers.

And if you're gearing up for college admissions, why not check out our admission essay writing service ? We've already assisted countless students in securing their spots at their dream colleges, and we'd love to help you, too!

Give Us Your Task

We provide assistance as well as editing and proofreading. Every paper we deal with is written and triple-checked by a team of experts—which means that you are guaranteed to get top-quality work from our term paper writing service . Order now!

Daniel Parker

is a seasoned educational writer focusing on scholarship guidance, research papers, and various forms of academic essays including reflective and narrative essays. His expertise also extends to detailed case studies. A scholar with a background in English Literature and Education, Daniel’s work on EssayPro blog aims to support students in achieving academic excellence and securing scholarships. His hobbies include reading classic literature and participating in academic forums.

is an expert in nursing and healthcare, with a strong background in history, law, and literature. Holding advanced degrees in nursing and public health, his analytical approach and comprehensive knowledge help students navigate complex topics. On EssayPro blog, Adam provides insightful articles on everything from historical analysis to the intricacies of healthcare policies. In his downtime, he enjoys historical documentaries and volunteering at local clinics.

Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Race and Ethnicity — Cultural Identity

Essays on Cultural Identity

What makes a good cultural identity essay topics.

When it comes to writing a cultural identity essay, choosing the right topic is crucial. A good essay topic should be thought-provoking, unique, and relevant to today's society. It should also allow for in-depth exploration and analysis. In this section, we will discuss What Makes a Good cultural identity essay topic and provide recommendations on how to brainstorm and choose an essay topic.

When brainstorming essay topics, it's important to consider your own interests and experiences. Reflect on your own cultural background and think about topics that resonate with you personally. Additionally, consider current events and societal issues that are relevant to cultural identity. This can help you choose a topic that is both timely and impactful.

Another important factor to consider when choosing a cultural identity essay topic is the level of complexity and depth it offers. A good essay topic should allow for meaningful exploration and analysis, rather than just surface-level discussion. Look for topics that are multi-dimensional and can be approached from various angles.

In addition, consider the potential impact of the topic. A good cultural identity essay topic should have significance and relevance beyond just the individual writer. It should be able to engage readers and provoke thoughtful discussion.

Overall, a good cultural identity essay topic should be personal, relevant, complex, and impactful. It should allow for in-depth exploration and analysis, and resonate with both the writer and the reader.

Best Cultural Identity Essay Topics

• The impact of globalization on cultural identity
• The role of language in shaping cultural identity
• Cultural appropriation in the fashion industry
• The influence of social media on cultural identity
• The interplay between religion and cultural identity
• The portrayal of cultural identity in literature and film
• The significance of traditional food in cultural identity
• The impact of immigration on cultural identity
• The evolution of cultural identity in the digital age
• The intersection of gender and cultural identity
• The role of education in shaping cultural identity
• The representation of cultural identity in art and music
• The impact of colonialism on cultural identity
• The influence of technology on cultural identity
• The role of family in shaping cultural identity
• The impact of cultural identity on mental health
• The relationship between cultural identity and national identity
• The significance of cultural festivals in shaping identity
• The impact of cultural identity on social justice movements
• The portrayal of cultural identity in the media

Cultural Identity essay topics Prompts

• Imagine a world where cultural identity is completely fluid and constantly changing. How would this impact society and individual experiences?
• Write about a time when you felt a strong connection to your cultural identity. What was the experience like, and how did it shape your sense of self?
• Consider the role of language in shaping cultural identity. How does language influence the way we perceive ourselves and others?
• Explore the concept of cultural hybridity and its impact on individual and collective identity.
• Reflect on the ways in which cultural identity can be both a source of pride and a source of conflict. How can individuals navigate these complexities in today's world?

Choosing a cultural identity essay topic is an important step in the writing process. By considering your own experiences, the complexity of the topic, and its potential impact, you can choose a topic that is both engaging and meaningful. With the recommendations and list of topics provided in this article, you are well-equipped to begin your exploration of cultural identity through writing.

Cultural Autobiography Example

Cultural identity in amy tan’s fish cheeks, made-to-order essay as fast as you need it.

Each essay is customized to cater to your unique preferences

+ experts online

My Cultural Identity Personal Narrative

I am proud of my cultural identity, the importance of cultural identity and socialization in education, cultural identity and the importance of preserving culture, let us write you an essay from scratch.

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Cultural Identity of an Indonesian Immigrant

I am proud to be mexican, my cultural identity: who i am, cultural identity in city of clowns by daniel alarcón, get a personalized essay in under 3 hours.

Expert-written essays crafted with your exact needs in mind

The Impact of Globalization to Cultural Identity

A topic of cultural identity in gene yang’s american born chinese, the theme of sruggling with cultural identity: the inheritance of loss by karen desi, the connection of food and identity, unique culture of nicaragua, egypt, mexico, and united states: understanding cultural similarities and differences, analyzing cultural systems through a sociologist perspective, benefits of cross-culture awareness, understanding the significance of personal identity, the role of student life in the identity formation, a shared national identity of britain in the period 1830-1951, puerto rican identity in the united states, the culture of canada, the national and cultural identity in children's films toy story 3 and spirited away, experiencing different cultures: my personal experience, living in the czech republic, the role of cultural norm in formulating a person’s identity, african music as a part of social and cultural context, complexities of cultural identity in frozen river, relation of cultural industries and cultural heritage.

Cultural identity is a part of a person's identity, or their self-conception and self-perception, and is related to nationality, ethnicity, religion, social class, generation, locality or any kind of social group that has its own distinct culture.

There are three pieces that make up a person's cultural identity, these are cultural knowledge, category label, and social connections.

1. Schwartz, S. J., Zamboanga, B. L., & Weisskirch, R. S. (2008). Broadening the study of the self: Integrating the study of personal identity and cultural identity. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2(2), 635-651. (https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2008.00077.x) 2. Hall, S. (1989). Cultural identity and cinematic representation. Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, (36), 68-81. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/44111666) 3. Bhugra, D. (2004). Migration, distress and cultural identity. British medical bulletin, 69(1), 129-141. (https://academic.oup.com/bmb/article/69/1/129/523340) 4. Jo Hatch, M., & Schultz, M. (1997). Relations between organizational culture, identity and image. European Journal of marketing, 31(5/6), 356-365. (https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/eb060636/full/html) 5. Lucy, S. (2007). Ethnic and cultural identities. In Archaeology of Identity (pp. 96-119). Routledge. (https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780203087572-10/ethnic-cultural-identities-sam-lucy) 6. Karst, K. L. (1985). Paths to belonging: The constitution and cultural identity. NCL Rev., 64, 303. (https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/nclr64&div=21&id=&page=) 7. Otcu, B. (2010). Heritage language maintenance and cultural identity formation: The case of a Turkish Saturday school in New York City. Heritage Language Journal, 7(2), 273-298. (https://brill.com/view/journals/hlj/7/2/article-p273_6.xml) 8. Schachter, E. P. (2005). Context and identity formation: A theoretical analysis and a case study. Journal of Adolescent Research, 20(3), 375-395. (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0743558405275172) 9. Hall, S., & Ghazoul, F. (2012). Cultural identity and diaspora. Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, (32), 257-258. (https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA302403835&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=11108673&p=AONE&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7E81809ec)

Relevant topics

• American Identity
• Physical Appearance
• Indigenous People
• African American
• Intercultural Communication
• Mexican American
• Sex, Gender and Sexuality
• Social Justice

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Bibliography

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free