Narrative Strands

Autobiography always entails a distance between two figures. There’s the narrator — the voice recounting the story of a life. And there’s the character — the person who is experiencing that life within the narrative. Yet the autobiographical act can also shape a life to come, which is a major theme running through Harold R. Johnson’s The Power of Story.

Johnson, who died in February 2022, lived many lives. He spent his childhood in his mother’s Cree community of “trappers and fishers.” As a teenager, he joined the Canadian navy as a marine engineer. Later, he became a miner, a “hard-working-provider-protector” to his family, then a Harvard-educated Crown prosecutor. Taken together, these different iterations make up what Johnson calls his “lifestory.” But the point, as he makes it, is not simply that he experienced a rich and varied life. Rather, it’s that “every time I...