What then are the principles on which narratives and histories are to be conceived as authentic? How do narratives order themselves. The truth claim of narratives, according to Mink could be seen both for the individual parts as well as it being taken distributively. This applies even for the complex forms of the narratives. Narrative plans cannot be said but shown. Narratives cannot be measured by pieces of evidence but to be shown all over. A story is one whole of interrelated bits of the emotional, aesthetic that must be kept together in a very fruitful tension (ibid., 198). From place to place, person to person and through different mentalities, narratives, to which history belongs, are open to a variety of forms of being composed. “When it comes to the narrative treatment of an ensemble of interrelationships, we credit the imagination or the sensibility of the individual historian. It is so as there are no rules for the construction of a narrative as there are for the analysis and interpretation of evidence” (ibid., 199). Narrative in both fiction and history is an artifice – a product of the individual imagination. The hypothesis of a grid for which evidence is gathered does not hold true here in this case.
“So we have a second dilemma…show more content… Though ethical and moral considerations in the United States had made of the Slave Trade a shame to identify oneself with it, and despite many obstacles, even from some close family members who thought he was bringing on them dishonor, Ball doggedly carried out the research that started from South Carolina amongst slave descendants and went as far as Sierra Leone. Ball was not only tracing his family’s involvement in the Slave Trade, but also interested in guaging how much of this past people remembered and to what extent they identified with that phase of the history of their
