Eat, Pray, Love : Confronting and Reconstructing Female Identity

EAT, PRAY, LOVE: CONFRONTING AND RECONSTRUCTING FEMALE IDENTITY
10 
Kirkwood’s (1992) and Stroud’s (2002) specific focus on how new possibilities for belief are 
presented in stories, their perspectives will be especially useful in understanding the text. 
Walter Fisher’s Narrative Paradigm
 
In his seminal book on narratives, Human Communication as Narration, Walter Fisher 
(1987) presented perhaps one of the most comprehensive theories for understanding human 
communication through stories. He asserted that stories are “
symbolic actions, words and/or 
deeds that
have sequence and meaning for those who live,
create, or interpret them
”
as the 
foundational belief for his narrative paradigm 
(Fisher, 1987, p. 49). In Fisher’s description, we 
reminded of the 
Foss’ (2011) 
advocacy for the use of interpretation to create change in an 
individual’s life, which suggests that stories are an impo
rtant symbolic resource to draw from in 
this process. We also see how 
the third wave’s highly
-individualistic feminist subject in 
Gilbert’s personal narrative might be especially drawn to stories as preferred symbolic resource 
to create meaning in her life.
The primary function of 
Fisher’s narrative paradigm is to offer “a way of interpreting and 
assessing human communication that leads to…a determination of whether or not a given 
instance of discourse provides a reliable, trustworthy, and desirable guide to thought and action 
in the world” (Fisher, 1987, p. 90). 
Given that stories are more than just a figure of speech and 
have the power to both inform and influence, Fisher e
stablishes “narrative rationality” as a 
universal logic and means for the assessment for stories (p. 47). This assessment is tested against 
narrative “probability (coherence) and fidelity (truthfulness and reliability)” (p. 47) –
in other 
words, humans come to believe in and act on stories in so much as they relate to and identify 
with them. Narrative rationality helps readers determine: 
“Does 
the set of conclusions advanced 
by the story ring true with [my] perceptions of the world? Are the central conclusions 

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EAT, PRAY, LOVE: CONFRONTING AND RECONSTRUCTING FEMALE IDENTITY
11 
reliable/desirable guides for [my] life?” (p. 176).
These are the primary questions that will guide 
the current narrative analysis. 
However, several researchers (Bennett & Edelman, 1985; Kirkwood, 1983, 1992; 
McClure, 2009; Rowland, 1989; Stroud, 2002; Warnick, 1987) felt that this assessment was 
limited in its ability to accoun
t for the acceptance of stories that may not “ring true” with one’s 
perceptions or experiences of the world. For example, Kirkwood (1983) offered a view of how 
stories allow readers to understand and adopt new ideas, especially those that are intensely 
per
sonal such as one’s own identity. He argues that:
“Stories do more than convince listeners to adopt new ideas about what feelings and 
states of consciousness humans may be capable of; they evoke such states in listeners and 
thus allow them to experience the new possibilities firsthand. By evoking an unfamiliar 
and often unexpected feeling or state of awareness in an individual, stories call forth a 
new reality in that person’s life, a reality which is intrapersonal and private (Kirkwood, 
1983, p. 73). 
Give
n that previous studies have recognized that Fisher’s narrative paradigm doesn’t 
fully allow for the acceptance of stories that contain contradictions and new possibilities 
–
both 
of which are highly characteristic of the female subject’s search for identi
ty under postmodern, 
third wave influences 
–
and 
that Gilbert’s personal narrative presents new possibilities for female 
identity and includes examples of how she acted upon stories that contained foreign concepts for 
her, we will turn to William Kirkwood’s (1992) and Scott Stroud’s (2002) research specifically 
to re-conceptualize the questions of probability and fidelity in the narrative analysis for this 
study.