“Traditional”, “Romantic” and “Bildung” Hero—Identifying Polish Master Narratives

Abstract

The examination of master narrative models of identity development seems to be an important task in each national culture, as the culturally shared stories may vary in structure and topics. This article aims to identify Polish biographical master narratives. The study focuses on life-story interviews collected from a sample of 131 Polish adults. The examination of common themes of biographical narratives in Polish culture—suffering, home, and freedom—led us to identify three different dominant positions toward them: Traditional, Romantic, and Bildung. The results revealed that 37 analyzed life stories belonged to the traditional type, 22 to Romantic, and 18 to Bildung. 54 narratives represented the coexistence of two or three of the aforesaid types. Our research revealed that it is difficult to describe the Polish biographical narratives using one main type of master and one alternative narrative, as the participants find a way of managing the deviations from one type of master narrative by using its other type (one or more) and they reach for more than one type of master narrative, even without questioning any of them.