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12:13 pm: Brewer (1985: 170), who attempted to devise universal properties of stories, hypothesized that readers enjoy narratives if they produce "surprise and resolution, suspense and resolution, or curiosity and resolution". To support his hypothesis, he reports results of a study conducted with Lichtenstein (Brewer & Lichtenstein 1980) in which readers were asked to rate narratives on the degree to which they were stories or non-stories, did not consider texts without an "initiating event" or an "outcome" to be stories. Thus the way we conceive of stories usually reflects a general expectation about their structure: stories may be told for many reasons including to enjoy, inform, argue, and express feelings, but they are expected to convey a sense of suspense or surprise and a closure of some kind.

(no Identity in Narrative. A study of immigrant discourse)