Cultural Evolution of Storytelling and Fairy Tales Sentence Reflection

“Stories do not belong to storytellers and story listeners because all stories are “reassemblies of fragments on loan” and “depend on shared narrative sources.”

This sentence I found very interesting. I like how it makes the point that all stories have no ownership. In class and some of the books that we’ve read, like The Truth About Stories and Story as a Way of Knowing, we’ve talked about how stories have no ownership and that once they have been told they disappear. It talks about the idea that stories are only present in the moment that they are spoken which relates to the fact that none can be owned. It brings out a sense of community and how stories can help build community and bring people together through “shared narrative sources”. Stories and storytelling were used to help educated and bring people together, and because of their uses, it’s impossible for any single story to be owned by a single person. The “reassemblies of fragments on loan” are all of the many different variations possible for a story. When people re-tell stories they can be slightly changed with different words, inflections, or grammar. These small fragments of changes make stories different and almost impossible to re-tell in the exact same way. 

I think those points that this sentence brings up are important to the art of storytelling and the community that stories create.