Nested Narratives: Biographical Accounts of Unlived Experience Across Three Narrative Orders

Studies of narrative identity have focused on positive formation: stories of ‘becoming’ who we are because of events that happened, people we met, and things that we said, did, or had. However, identities can also be negatively defined by things that we miss, lose, choose against, or events that never happened. Drawing on the sociology of nothing, this paper explores some ways in which biographical subjects may story their unlived lives and paths to unbecoming. We demonstrate this by analysing the same extract of data through three interpretive lenses, revealing different narrative orders: the intrapersonal, intertextual, and performative. Respectively, these refer to how nothing is narrated: self-reflexively by the experiencing subject, regarding a particular instance; as a sequence of thematically connected episodes, contextually emplotted within a general life story; and as a communicative act of telling, directed towards an imagined audience. Authors can move between these narrative orders, taking different temporal perspectives and producing ‘nested’ stories of alternative non-selves.