Stories Mean Something

When my oldest two brothers were very young—the second was still an infant, I think—the oldest loved to run a stick along the rungs of his brother’s crib. It sounded cool, kind of like a dull, toneless xylophone. The sleeping brother usually didn’t sleep through this instrumental performance, and after a while, my parents were exasperated, so my dad told my oldest brother a story. It was pretty simple.

Once upon a time, there was a boy who woke up his little brother by running a stick along the rungs of his crib. This was bad, because the little brother needed to sleep!

With tears in his eyes, my oldest brother interrupted the story. “The boy in the story is me! I did that to Timmy’s crib and woke him up. I’m so sorry!”

Stories carry meaning. The meaning can be as specific as the contents of the story itself (“Aunt Mavis finally sold her house this Thursday to the man with the droopy mustache”), but it can also include more general assertions about right and wrong or how the world works.

The person telling the story can try to infuse it with a meaning (such as Little boys should not wake up their brothers by rattling their cribs), but you can’t count on the audience to get it.

Stories are like words in that way: you can use a word (like trunk) to mean different things, but the person you’re talking to may or may not understand how you’re intending to use the word.

When someone tells a story, they intend a meaning to come across.

Though words and stories can have multiple meanings, we keep using words and stories to communicate, don't we? Multiple possible meanings can make communication confusing, but the way we use a word or story usually makes our meaning pretty clear.