What incident did the narrator tells us about her when she was a one year old child?
Answers
She was charming and attracted everyone easily. When she turned one year old, she started walking. She also imitated everyone she saw. It was a sudden fever that closed her eyes and ears forever.
It was called the congestion of the stomach and the brain. Helen also had fits of rage as a child. But things changed as she grew up. Thus the significant events of her initial years include her relationship with the people around and how the sickness changed her life forever.
Helen remembers vividly about the illness and how it led her into the world of darkness and silence. The first comfort that she received was from her mother, who used soothe her in her moments of pain. What appeared to be light in the early days, was now a wall of darkness and she felt her eyes were hot and dry.
She also sensed that her sight was becoming dim over time. However, with the passing of time, she became used to the silence and darkness that her eyes and ears were subjected to. She learnt to live with it and it became a part of her life. It was the presence of her teacher in her life that once again transformed her life.
In Paul Murray's novel Skippy Dies, there’s a point where the main character, Howard, has an existential crisis.“‘It’s just not how I expected my life would be,'" he says.
“‘What did you expect?’” a friend responds.
“Howard ponders this. ‘I suppose—this sounds stupid, but I suppose I thought there’d be more of a narrative arc.’”
But it's not stupid at all. Though perhaps the facts of someone’s life, presented end to end, wouldn't much resemble a narrative to the outside observer, the way people choose to tell the stories of their lives, to others and—crucially—to themselves, almost always does have a narrative arc. In telling the story of how you became who you are, and of who you're on your way to becoming, the story itself becomes a part of who you are.
“Life stories do not simply reflect personality. They are personality, or more accurately, they are important parts of personality, along with other parts, like dispositional traits, goals, and values,” writes Dan McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, along with Erika Manczak, in a chapter for the APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology.In the realm of narrative psychology, a person’s life story is not a Wikipedia biography of the facts and events of a life, but rather the way a person integrates those facts and events internally—picks them apart and weaves them back together to make meaning. This narrative becomes a form of identity, in which the things someone chooses to include in the story, and the way she tells it, can both reflect and shape who she is. A life story doesn’t just say what happened, it says why it was important, what it means for who the person is, for who they’ll become, and for what happens next.
“Sometimes in cases of extreme autism, people don’t construct a narrative structure for their lives,” says Jonathan Adler, an assistant professor of psychology at Olin College of Engineering, “but the default mode of human cognition is a narrative mode.”