Chapter 10: What Makes a Story Coherent?

In this chapter I present a case study in the developmental psychology of narrative discourse and thought. The narrative material that I examine consists of an unusual story—if it is a story at all—told by a 6-year-old boy from the Austrian Alps. I came across this story during a research project on children’s understanding of writing. When talking to this boy about the meaning of writing and learning to write in his life, at one point in our conversation he began to tell a story that set free a narrative dynamic on its own. From the first moment on, I was fascinated by this story, even though it was all but easy to figure out what it was about. What the boy told me seemed to be a mix of several fragmented and discontinuous storylines that were associated with the diverse worlds of his experience and imagination. Yet what made this unexpected effusion of words a narrative?