Author: Saikiran D

Saikiran teaches English at St Mary's College. His research interests include Masculinity Studies, African-American Literature, Postcolonial Literature and Minority Studies. He has an eclectic approach to acquiring new information and learning new languages.
The Need for a Narrative

The Need for a Narrative

I write this to share my thoughts about something that caught my attention in this post written by a colleague. What I found interesting in it was the expressed need for a narrative to frame this global Covid’19 crisis. That the current situation lacks a narrative that is grand, like those classics written by Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, to describe what is happening. I understand this impulse as it is something that I have been witnessing in various forms since this crisis began. It is the most basic response that human beings have, one of meaning-making. It is an attempt to grasp what is happening and in some ways foist meaning onto a situation to make it palatable.

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