Narrative madness : the Quixotic quest for reality

Like Don Quixote, we are driven mad by narrative language, which determines how we\ud perceive the world and, therefore, how we live our lives. Examining various definitions and tracing a conjectural history of narrative, I will show (through the lens of Cervantes???\ud masterpiece) how each aspect and quality of narrative affects our thought and experience. Although our language and stories distort perception and alter behavior, we must tell stories in order to understand the world, community, and self. We can only do so within pre-existing forms and genres, yet each use reinvents the genre, the form and the narrative, and so the stories we borrow are uniquely our own. Finally, I conclude that\ud everything we can refer to is fiction, yet fiction has material existence and is therefore real.\ud Rather than separating us from the world as a ???filter," language and narrative are the\ud primary ways we interact with and construct social reality