Moreover, this knowledge tends to be attached to significant persons or events, such as Jesus, or the Last Supper, or a wedding, or a death. Thus rather than talking about concepts of trust, justice, beauty or honesty, an oral culture weaves narratives about truthful people, an act of justice, a beautiful woman, or an honest warrior. In this way, stories are often the primary repositories of cultural values and wisdom is stored in stories that remember human or divine activity. Just as a story is never actualized except in a particular telling, the full power of a story is never felt unless it is realized in an experience. We never remain just the passive recipients of an interpretation, mechanically transmitted.
Interpretation requires that an active self engage in it.
Stories are not just reducible to a basic formula. In any given telling, a story is situated in the real world, in a particular context, and told in a voice that takes account of other voices either by suppressing, denying, acknowledging, or responding to them. Jerome Bruner in Text, Play and Story , suggests that a historical narrative is transformed into a personal narrative as we gain the right to tell the story. The consequence is to align individual biography with tradition. As one incorporates stories within the self, meaning is individualized, and culture becomes autobiography.