Hannah H. Kim ponders the plotless narrative as a tool for meaning-making.

A DECADE AGO, the term “storytelling” was everywhere. University career centers pitched “chief storytelling officer” as a career path, LinkedIn profiles listing “storyteller” jumped from almost none to half a million, and even shampoo bottles had “Our Story” sections on the back. Between 2000 and 2022, use of the word nearly tripled in print. Capturing the conviction of the time, Annette Simmons wrote in her 2007 book Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins: How to Use Your Own Stories to Communicate with Power and Impact that “every problem in the world can be addressed […] with better storytelling.”

Then, almost without notice, the boom died down. Or, at least, the word faded as our collective fascination with storytelling moved on to other modes of organizing experience. And this shift matters, because the structures replacing the traditional story form today tell us as much about what we find meaningful as the form we’re leaving behind did. Stories have lost the plot, and other structures—characters, mood, identity labels, and games—are becoming the default frames for making meaning.

The proliferation of stories suggested that everything—identity, politics, history, branding—was about telling a story. But what, exactly, is a story? Narratologists distinguish between events (fabula, story) and the way those events are told (syuzhet, plot). In cultural discourse, though, “stories” usually refer not to raw events but to their shaping—so for our purposes, what’s generally called a “story” is a narrative that organizes events into a coherent form. E. M. Forster writes that a sequence of events becomes a narrative when it answers “why” questions, not just “what next” questions. J. David Velleman extends this idea, describing a narrative as a genre of explanation that provides emotional resolution. Their accounts suggest that narrative’s built-in demand for coherence makes it an appealing model for understanding a wide range of things, including selfhood and reality.

In 1984, literary critic Peter Brooks published Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, in which he argued that we live in “an episodic, sometimes semiconscious, but virtually uninterrupted monologue” and have situated ourselves “at the intersection of several stories not yet completed.” In his 2022 book Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative, he condemned the “storification of reality,” arguing that it frames the world as inherently coherent and teleological. He worried that the tidy coherence of traditional story forms produced damaging epistemic and political consequences, including the rise of conspiracy theories. Indeed, research shows that conspiracy theories share the hallmarks of a good story: clear heroes and villains, dramatic twists, and a preference for provocative explanations. Given the tendency of stories to oversimplify, it is easy to see why Velleman remarks that “telling a story is often a means to being believed for no good reason.”

Byung-Chul Han’s The Crisis of Narration (2024) adds two forces to the critiques of storytelling: fragmentation of attention and the loss of narrative communities. In the past, the hectic pace of life might have driven us toward stories for closure and coherence; instead, today, the same pace—amplified by ongoing political and climate crises—collides with a media environment that undermines narrative form. We traffic in information that is additive and cumulative, stimulating but contingent, never shaped into an arc. Narrative depends on pacing the release of relevant information, but today we are either bombarded with an endless stream of updates or confronted with institutional opacity that withholds crucial information. Both forces prevent events from organizing into a meaningful arc, and Han thus argues that we now live in a post-narrative world.

In this environment, “storytelling” becomes “storyselling,” a communication technology that can be more or less effective. And the kinds of stories that do thrive tend to be narrow in form: either “those people are the problem (and the truth will save us)” (e.g., news, conspiracy theories) or “you’re wounded, and understanding that will help you live differently” (e.g., therapy). The potent mix of capitalism, social media, and information overload has rendered most “stories” brief, disconnected, and designed for consumption rather than connection. Think TikTok reels, Instagram Stories, or the news cycle.

These structural changes are mirrored in our own shrinking capacity to engage with narrative. Both telling and listening to a story require deep attention, and we increasingly lack the patience for it. I reach for my phone while reading, my spouse listens to audiobooks at double speed, and my Gen Z sister skips dialogue in shows. We lack not just present time to devote to a story but also past time to draw upon, the temporal distance between events and their telling that traditional narrative requires. When all time is flattened into the present, narrative form begins to erode. Instant communication collapses tenses into an interminable “now,” and live streams keep us there. Finally, storytelling demands leisure, or at least a relaxed mind, since immersion requires the mental margin to forget ourselves and linger in the unfolding. That capacity for temporal extension—for losing oneself inside a story—is becoming harder and harder to exercise.

Brooks, Han, and the psychological trends we see all account for the changes in how we relate to narratives. What’s missing, however, is a more proactive dimension: storytelling is not just lost but is being reshaped as well. The rise of “content” is both a symptom of market forces and a sign of an aesthetic and epistemic pivot that reflects the current mood. We no longer trust the emotional cadence that traditional narrative imposes, and plot-driven storytelling no longer persuades when reality resists explanation and the search for meaning feels burdensome.

Of course, plotlessness isn’t new, and narrative forms have been disrupted before. The modernists—T. S. Eliot in *The Waste Land *(1922), James Joyce in *Ulysses *(1922)—broke narrative coherence as an act of will, dismantling inherited forms to reassemble them in a way that matched their vision. And even earlier, works like Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) and Tristram Shandy (1759–67) were episodic and digressive, showing that teleological plot was not always the default. The modernists’ fragmentation, however, was deliberate, forming a kind of manifesto. Today’s “content,” by contrast, abandons narrative forms without the deliberation and passion of revolt. It does not destroy something so that something else can be built in its place. In Fredric Jameson’s terms, it becomes “pastiche”—imitative fragments with no political or social upshot. If the modernists flipped the table, contemporary creators are quiet quitting at the table, disengaging from inherited forms without resolve. After all, flipping tables requires energy, even optimism, which many lack.

And yet, stepping away from plot does not mean abandoning narrative entirely. Instead, it means shifting the meaning-making work to other structures—character, mood, identity labels, games—that now do what plot once did. It’s unlikely that humans will wholly move on from the need for narrative, and the closure and emotional satisfaction it offers. If narrative is a genre of explanation, we will always need it to make sense of things. If narrative is a bid for connection, we will always need it to bond with other people and communities. But if narrative is plot—a series of events unfolding toward coherence and closure—then perhaps that form of narrative is something we can move on from, or already have.

Indeed, many critically acclaimed and popular TV shows and movies—the most prevalent form of culture—are no longer plot-driven. Instead, they organize themselves around different centers of gravity, drawing audiences in through atmosphere, character psychology, or the immersive texture of experience. Today’s stories can be celebrated without much forward momentum of events. This isn’t entirely new—Seinfeld (1989–98) was “about nothing” and driven by character texture—but what feels new is the scale, and the normalization, of plot-light forms across media. Consider Drive My Car (2021), which doesn’t even properly begin—the title doesn’t appear—until 40 minutes in; it went on to win the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. The widely acclaimed films Nomadland (2020), Perfect Days (2023), and *The Florida Project *(2017) also follow their protagonists through the texture of everyday life, forgoing the traditional arc of exposition, rising action, climax, and denouement. In these films, coherence and satisfaction come not from the propulsion of events but from immersion in character and mood.

Television shows and genre films exhibit the same shift. *The Bear *(2022– ) lingers over key plot points for nearly two seasons and invests most of its energy into character development and retrospective. I Saw the TV Glow (2024) plunges the viewer into uncertainty, dread, and eeriness, making atmosphere the primary driver of engagement. Across these works, the sequence of events has become secondary; other elements—tone, performance, emotional texture—now anchor the viewer’s sense of meaning.

What we’re witnessing is a shift in narrative emphasis: the sequence of events is no longer the primary source of satisfaction. Literary theorist Katherine Elkins suggests that emotional structure may be more fundamental than plot structure since “plotless” narratives can have emotional arcs that create key moments and produce momentum. The film and television examples above show how coherence and emotional payoff can emerge from other dimensions of narrative, now taking on the meaning-making work that plot once performed. If we can’t move on from the need for narrative altogether, but the plot-focused form no longer satisfies, then we turn to these other engines. To live in a “post-narrative” world is not to abandon narrative but to drive it differently.

Philosopher Elisabeth Camp and sociologist Manvir Singh write that frames such as identity labels can also be tools for meaning-making. Psychiatric labels, personality tests, astrological signs, and generational markers model social identity because they offer a way of understanding one’s own experience—and this produces personal stakes in these labels. As our interest in the traditional story arc waned, our interest in characters rose.* *Notice the rise of character archetypes that permeate popular culture: “main character,” “NPC,” “tradwife,” “goblin,” “pick-me girl/boy,” and “Karen,” to name a few. Identifiable character types, like identity labels, supply the kind of stability, meaning, and direction that plot-driven stories once provided. The rise of autofiction could be read in this light as well since autofiction is a form in which the centrality of the character-narrator-author eclipses the need for a tightly plotted arc.

Gamification is another substitute for plot’s sense of progress and purpose. Fitness trackers, language-learning streaks, and sales leaderboards structure action and outcome in a way that moves the participant through a meaningful sequence. This mimics the teleology of traditional narrative, which moves the protagonist, and by extension the listener, through events whose significance builds toward an ending or goal.

Finally, irony as a prominent cultural mood may signal an attempt to move away from the vulnerability that narrative demands. Irony makes sincerity—including the earnest acknowledgment of our cognitive and emotional needs—feel “cringe,” and it makes resolution impossible. It works as a defense mechanism, creating distance from immersion. To be transported by a story is to enter another world and abandon yourself and your immediate context. This is a vulnerable thing to do, and irony shields against that surrender.

The replacements are not arbitrary. They retain certain functions of plot, offering orientation, momentum, or emotional cadence without narrative architecture. The shift tells us not only what audiences are weary of but also what kinds of meaning they are still hungry for. Even if resolution is suspicious or passé, we continue to crave recognition, understanding, and emotional satisfaction—or, in the case of irony, control and security.

Much of our storytelling today is individualized and limited in form—therapeutic, gamified, or organized around role-giving character archetypes. At other times, a prevailing mood of irony ridicules the very desire for narrative coherence. These tendencies can be read both as symptoms of distraction or commercialization and as an evolution of the form itself—an aesthetic and epistemic experiment in finding what still works when older narrative forms feel exhausted.

Such shifts are neither unprecedented nor necessarily impoverished; every era reshapes its dominant forms to match its conditions. But in tracing how plot has ceded ground to mood, character, identity, and game-like structures, we begin to see the contours of our present moment. We are wary of resolution and quick to protect against vulnerability while still needing a way to make sense of our experience. If the early 21st century considered storytelling the answer to every problem, the current moment asks what comes after. Whether our new forms can offer the same depth of connection and understanding—or whether they signal a long-term narrowing of the role narrative plays in our collective lives—is a cultural narrative that’s still unfolding.

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Featured image: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Paolo et Francesca, 1846, is in the public domain. Image has been cropped.

LARB Contributor

Hannah H. Kim is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona. Her work has appeared in Wired, Los Angeles Times, Aeon, and Bright Wall/Dark Room, among others.

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