M.F. Greene
Apr 07, 2021 9:00 PM ET
That’s the essence of a body of research in the field of narrative psychology. “We study the arc within a given memory,” Dan McAdams, the Northwestern psychology professor, told me. “Let’s say a person describes a turning point, like: ‘I got fired from my first job, went into a depression, and couldn’t talk to anybody for three weeks. But I crawled out of it, and a year later, I landed a fabulous position and haven’t looked back.’ We call that a ‘redemptive’ sequence.”
That’s Man in a Hole. “Somebody gets into trouble, gets out of it again” is how Vonnegut described it in his lecture. “People love that story. They never get sick of it.”