Notes from J. Hillis Miller's "Narrative" Essay (included in Critical Terms for Literary Study, Eds. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. 66-79.

--Telling stories natural to human experience
--critical discussion of narrative as old as narrative tradition, dating back as far as Aristotle, who in Poetics stated that plot was the most important feature of narrative. A good story has a beginning, middle, and an end. All other features (specifically character, setting, and diction) are all subsidiary to plot.
--according to Aristotle, narration plays a fundamental social and psychological role. Narratives (specifically tragedy) effect a catharsis of the undesirable emotions of pity and fear. After arousing these emotions, tragedy purges them.
--all forms of narrative (fictional and factual) are "order-giving" and/or "order-finding"
--narratives provide a detachment from immediate circumstances and obligations
--just as we [humans] are tool-using animals, we are symbol-using animals, and thus we are fiction-making animals
--make-believe is a fundamental human activity
--according to Aristotle, we enjoy fictions as a source of imitation (mimesis) for two reasons: imitation pleases the imagination by providing rhythm and order, and imitation gratifies the intellect by offering learning experiences. We learn by imitation.
--What exactly do we learn? We learn the nature of things as they are. We need fictions in order to experiment with possible selves and to learn to take our places in the real world. We learn about our world, or other possible worlds, and how we might experience our world[s].
--in fictions we order or reorder the givens of experience. We experience a form and a meaning, a linear order with a shapely beginning, middle, end, and central theme.
--The human capacity to tell stories is one way we collectively build a significant and orderly world around us.
--with fictions we investigate, perhaps invent, the meaning of our lives.
--Do fictions create or reveal?
--To say reveal presupposes that the world has one kind or another of preexisting order and that the business of fictions is in one way or another to imitate, copy, or represent that order. In this case, the ultimate test of a good fiction is whether to not it corresponds to the way things are.
--To say create presupposes that the world may not be ordered in itself or, at any rate, that the social and psychological function of fictions is what speech-act theorists call "performative." A story is a way of doing things with words. It makes something happen in the real world: for example, it can propose modes of selfhood or ways of behaving that are then imitated in the real world.
--Would we know about love if we had not read fictions about love?
--Fictions have a tremendous importance not merely as reflectors of a culture but as makers of that culture and as ostentatious--but therefore all the more effective--policemen of that culture. Fictions keep us in line and tend to make us more like our neighbors.
--Fictions tend to draw attention to cultural boundaries.
--Yet there is a function that runs counter to the "policing function. Narratives are relatively safe or innocuous places in which the reigning assumptions of a given culture can be criticized. In narratives, alternative assumptions can be entertained or experimented with--not as in the real world where experimentation might have dangerous consequences, but in the imaginary world where safe experimentations are possible.
--Narratives both reinforce the dominant culture and question it at the same time. The putting into question may be obliquely affirmative: we can ward off dangers to the reigning assumptions or ideologies of our culture by expressing our fears about their fragility or vulnerability in the safe realm of fiction.