The Blue State Conservative What started out as a nice word applicable to something as wonderful as Homer’s prose in his role as the narrator, the bard, of The Iliad and The Odyssey, has now become a pejorative of the meanest sort. “Narrative,” which according to an old Webster’s means ‘something that is narrated: STORY,’ is now used in reference to a “story” that is in no way instructive, emboldening, entertaining, inspiring, ennobling, transformative, or that all-important cathartic, which Homer’s nonpareil masterpieces are in all regards.
In these far-from-heroic treacherous times that totally lack the stuff of Homeric legends, “narratives” are just tawdry penny dreadfuls meant to spread abroad cheap gold-plated truths that tomorrow are tossed out and replaced with the next “narrative” du jour, this one more illogical, more confusing, more meaningless than the one that preceded it. Our credulity is being yanked around by a cruel master like a dog on a leash…
