This theme’s essay traces the universal human impulse to tell stories and how humans have chosen to tell stories, ranging from ancient cave art to modern forms of communication like manga. The essay also discusses several key thinkers who have explored the nature of storytelling. Aristotle, in Poetics, argued that stories are powerful because they imitate life and spark the imagination, following recognizable structures with key elements like a beginning, middle, and end. Russian philologist Vladimir Propp identified common narrative functions in folk tales, while structuralist theorists like Roland Barthes and Claude Levi-Strauss extended this idea to suggest that all cultural interactions are forms of storytelling. Joseph Campbell’s study of myths led him to propose the concept of the "monomyth," the universal hero’s journey, which underscores the shared narrative structure across cultures.
