The Storytelling Animal

Jonathan Gottschall

28 annotations • data

First annotation on Apr 24th, 2025. Last on May 4th, 2025.

28 quotes

Chapter 1

But as the Philbrick snip illustrates, will has so little do with it. We come in contact with a storyteller who utters a magical incantation (for instance, "once upon a time") and seizes our attention. If the storyteller is skilled, he simply invades us and takes over. There is little we can do to resist, aside from abruptly clapping the book shut
Real combat sports obey similar storytelling conventions. Boxing promoters have long understood that fights don't attract fan interest (and dollars) unless they feature compelling personalities and backstories. Prefight hype shapes a story about why the men are fighting and, usually, how they came to despise each other. Fight hype is notoriously fictionalized—men who are friendly off camera pretend to hate each other for the sake of good drama. Without a strong backstory, a fight tends toward dullness, no matter how furious the action. It's like watching the climax to a great film without first watching the buildup that gives the climax its tension.

Chapter 2

It is the joy of story that needs explaining.
Children's pretend play is clearly about many things: mommies and babies, monsters and heroes, spaceships and unicorns. And it is also about only one thing: trouble. Sometimes the trouble is routine, as when, playing "house," the howling baby won't take her bottle and the father can't find his good watch. But often the trouble is existential.
Play is widespread in animals, and all but universal in mammals, especially the smart ones. The most common view of play across species is that it helps youngsters rehearse for adult life. From this perspective, children at play are training their bodies and brains for the challenges of adulthood—they are building social and emotional intelligence. Play is important. Play is the work of children.
Writing this, I feel a little like the narrator in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat." Before tying a noose and hanging the titular feline from a tree, the narrator first digs out the cat's eye with a jackknife. Confessing his crime, he writes, "I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity!" The idea that gender has deep biological roots is something almost everyone accepts these days but still avoids saying in polite company. It sounds too much like a limit on human potential, especially on the potential of women to move into positions of cultural equality.
And in a different study, researchers found that contemporary children's television programs had about five violent scenes per hour, while read-aloud nursery rhymes had fifty-two.

Chapter 3

Like the movie screen depicting a maniac in a hockey mask carving people up with a chainsaw; like Hamlet with its killings and suicides and fratricides and incestuous adultery; like all the violence, family strife, and catastrophic sex in Sophocles or on TV or in the Bible, . . . poems of loss and death, can please the reader mightily. —Robert Pinsky, The Handbook of Heartbreak: 101 Poems of Lost Love and Sorrow
There is a yawning canyon between what is desirable in life (an uneventful trip to the grocery story) and what is desirable in fiction (a catastrophic trip). In this gap, I believe, lies an important clue to the evolutionary riddle of fiction.
I'm exaggerating, of course, but you get the point: if fiction offers escape, it is a bizarre sort of escape. Our various fictional worlds are—on the whole—horrorscapes. Fiction may temporarily free us from our troubles, but it does so by ensnaring us in new sets of troubles—in imaginary worlds of struggle and stress and mortal woe.
We are drawn to fiction because fiction gives us pleasure. But most of what is actually in fiction is deeply unpleasant: threat, death, despair, anxiety, Sturm und Drang. Take a look at the carnage on the fiction bestseller lists—the massacres, murders, and rapes. See the same on popular TV shows. Look at classic literature: Oedipus stabbing out his eyes in disgust; Medea slaughtering her children; Shakespeare's stages strewn with runny corpses. Heavy stuff.
Hyperrealism is interesting as an experiment, but like most fiction that breaks with the primordial conventions of storytelling, almost no one can actually stand to read it. Hyperrealist fiction is valuable mainly for helping us see what fiction is by showing us what it isn't. Hyperrealism fails for the same reason that pure wish fulfillment does. Both lack the key ingredient of story: the plot contrivance of trouble.
Aristotle was the first to note this, and it is now a staple in English literature courses and creative writing manuals. Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction is adamant on the point: "Conflict is the fundamental element of fiction . . . In life, conflict often carries a negative connotation, yet in fiction, be it comic or tragic, dramatic conflict is fundamental because in literature only trouble is interesting. Only trouble is interesting. This is not so in life." As Charles Baxter puts it in another book about fiction, "Hell is story-friendly."
Stories the world over are almost always about people (or personified animals) with problems. The people want something badly—to survive, to win the girl or the boy, to find a lost child. But big obstacles loom between the protagonists and what they want. Just about any story—comic, tragic, romantic—is about a protagonist's efforts to secure, usually at some cost, what he or she desires.
Story = Character + Predicament + Attempted Extrication
This is story's master formula, and it is intensely strange. There are a lot of different ways stories could be structured. For example, we have already considered escapist fantasies of pure wish fulfillment. But while characters frequently do live happily ever after in fiction, they must always earn their good fortune by flirting with disaster
As many scholars of world literature have noted, stories revolve around a handful of master themes. Stories universally focus on the great predicaments of the human condition. Stories are about sex and love. They are about the fear of death and the challenges of life. And they are about power: the desire to wield influence and to escape subjugation. Stories are not about going to the bathroom, driving to work, eating lunch, having the flu, or making coffee—unless those activities can be tied back to the great predicaments.

Chapter 4

As the children's book says, everyone poops, but this is not the point of eating
In short, Jouvet's experiment showed not only that cats dream but also that they dream about very specific things. He pointed out the obvious: a cat "dreams of actions characteristic of its own species (lying in wait, attack, rage, fright, pursuit)." But look at Jouvet's list. In fact, he didn't find that cats dream about the "characteristic" actions of their own species. Instead, his cats seemed to dream about a narrower subset of problems in kitty life—namely, how to eat and not be eaten. For your average tomcat, Dreamland is not a world of catnip debauches, warm sunbeams, canned tuna fish, and yowling bitches in heat. Dreamland for cats is closer to kitty hell than kitty heaven, as feelings of fear and aggression predominate.
As J. Allan Hobson put it, "[In dreams] waves of strong emotion—notably fear and anger—urge us to run away or do battle with imaginary predators. Fight or flight is the rule in dreaming consciousness, and it goes on and on, night after night, with all too rare respites in the glorious lull of fictive elation." Although there is some controversy about how to interpret the data, most dream researchers generally agree with Hobson: Dreamland is not a happy place.
It's therefore unsurprising that the dominant emotions in Dreamland are negative. When you are visiting Dreamland, you may sometimes feel happy, even elated, but mostly you feel dragged down by anger, fear, and sadness. While we sometimes dream of thrilling things, such as sex or flying like a bird, those happy dreams are much rarer than we think. People fly in only one out of every two hundred dreams, and erotic content of any kind occurs in only one in ten dreams. And even in dreams where sex is a major theme, it is rarely presented as a hedonistic throw down. Rather, like our other dreams, sex dreams are usually edged with anxiety, doubt, and regret.

Chapter 6

Wilson argues that religion provides multiple benefits to groups. First, it defines a group as a group. As the sociologist Émile Durkheim wrote, "Religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices . . . which unite into one single moral community called a Church all those who adhere to them." Second, religion coordinates behavior within the group, setting up rules and norms, punishments and rewards. Third, religion provides a powerful incentive system that promotes group cooperation and suppresses selfishness. The science writer Nicholas Wade expresses the heart of Wilson's idea succinctly: the evolutionary function of religion "is to bind people together and make them put the group's interests ahead of their own."
Revisionist historians such as Howard Zinn and James Loewen have argued that American history texts have been whitewashed so thoroughly that they don't count as history anymore. They represent determined forgetting—an erasure of what is shameful from our national memory banks so that history can function as a unifying, patriotic myth. Stories about Columbus, Squanto and the first Thanksgiving, George Washington's inability to lie, and so on, serve as national creation myths. The men at the center of these stories are presented not as flesh-and-blood humans with flaws to match their virtues, but as the airbrushed leading men of hero stories. The purpose of these myths is not to provide an objective account of what happened. It is to tell a story that binds a community together—to take pluribus and make unum.
This is remarkable, because people are willing to imagine almost anything in a story: that wolves can blow down houses; that a man can become a vile cockroach in his sleep (Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis"); that donkeys can fly, speak, and sing R&B songs (Shrek); that "a dead-but-living fatherless god-man [Jesus] has the super-powers to grant utopian immortality"; that a white whale might really be evil incarnate; that time travelers can visit the past, kill a butterfly, and lay the future waste (Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder").
I should say that people are willing to imagine almost anything. This flexibility does not extend to the moral realm. Shrewd thinkers going back as far as the philosopher David Hume have noted a tendency toward "imaginative resistance": we won't go along if someone tries to tell us that bad is good, and good is bad.

Chapter 7

People who believe that story systematically shapes individuals and cultures can cite plenty of evidence beyond Rienzi and Uncle Tom's Cabin: the way D. W. Griffith's 1915 epic film, The Birth of a Nation, resurrected the defunct Ku Klux Klan; the way the film Jaws (1975) depressed the economies of coastal holiday towns; the way Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843) is—in the words of Christopher Hitchens—responsible for much of "the grisly inheritance that is the modern version of Christmas"; the way The Iliad gave Alexander the Great a thirst for immortal glory (the eighteenth-century novelist Samuel Richardson asked, "Would Alexander, madman as he was, have been so much a madman, had it not been for Homer?"); the way the publication of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) inspired a spate of copy-cat suicides; the way novels such as 1984 (George Orwell, 1948) and Darkness at Noon (Arthur Koestler, 1940) steeled a generation against the nightmare of totalitarianism; the way stories such as Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison, 1952), To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee, 1960), and Roots (Alex Haley, 1976) changed racial attitudes around the world.

Chapter 8

For example, Thomas Gilovich's book How We Know What Isn't So reports that of one million high school seniors surveyed, "70% thought they were above average in leadership ability, and only 2% thought they were below average. In terms of ability to get along with others, nearly all students thought they were above average, 60% thought they were in the top 10%, and 25% thought they were in the top 1%!" These self-assessments are obviously wildly out of step with the facts: it is impossible for a quarter of students to squeeze into the top 1 percent.
It's different for depressed people. Depressed people have lost their positive illusions; they rate their personal qualities much more plausibly than average. They are able to see, with terrible clarity, that they are not all that special. According to the psychologist Shelley Taylor, a healthy mind tells itself flattering lies. And if it does not lie to itself, it is not healthy. Why? Because, as the philosopher William Hirstein puts it, positive illusions keep us from yielding to despair: The truth is depressing. We are going to die, most likely after illness; all our friends will likewise die; we are tiny insignificant dots on a tiny planet. Perhaps with the advent of broad intelligence and foresight comes the need for . . . self-deception to keep depression and its consequent lethargy at bay. There needs to be a basic denial of our finitude and insignificance in the larger scene. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah just to get out of bed in the morning.