What exactly is a narrative, and what kind of narratives are there?  In a Tocquevillian tradition of understanding the relevance of identity to action, K. Anthony Appiah has noted that collective identities relevant to the debates over identity correspond to particular notions of behaviour. He has written :

"These notions provide loose norms or models, which play a role in shaping the life plans of those who make these collective identities central to their individual identities. Collective identities, in short, provide what we might call scripts: narratives that people can use in shaping their life plans and in telling their life stories.  (...)This is not just a point about modern Westerners: crossculturally it matters to people that their lives have a certain narrative unity; they want to be able to tell a story of their lives that makes sense. The story - my story - should cohere in the way appropriate by the standards made available in my culture to a person of my identity. In telling that story, how I fit into the wider stories of various collectivities is, for most of us, important. It is not just gender identities that give shape (through, for example, rites of passage into woman- or manhood) to one's life: ethnic and national identities too fit each individual story into a larger narrative." - "In order to construct a life with dignity, it seems natural to take the collective identity and construct positive life-scripts..."

    What's wrong about Appiah's account? First, the critique: Appiah seems to believe that it is a matter of choice to adopt collective identities for one's individual life. I think he is wrong on that, as research on the construction of gender, class and race roles has amply shown , and as Tocqueville has suggested (see above). It is a postmodern assertion, however, that it is a matter of personal choice to understand, adapt and/or transcend collective identities, and the re-creation of one's self has indeed captured the imagination of the happy jugglers in the underwood of the human mind, such as Richard Rorty, rooted, of course, in Nietzsche's more violent overcoming of one's socially constructed self.
    But what's good about Appiah? Appiah offers us a broad vocabulary helpful in dealing with narratives.  First, there seem to be two kind of narratives: a collective one and a personal one. The collective narrative is the account of the order that determines the self-understanding of a larger collectivity. The personal narrative is the account of an order that provides the individual with a sense of stable and coherent guidance and meaning, and that entails a place accorded to the individual in relation to other ideas, institutions, and people. In short, a personal narrative details the sense of who we are, the sense of identity. The idea of a narrative having a certain (perceived) unity and leading to a life in dignity is the idea of an authentic existence. It means that in telling our stories, we aim to express our precise particularity, Herders 'having one's own measure.'  Appiah also proposes that the collective and the personal narrative are interconnected - that our personal (particular) story may cohere with, or be the personal twist of, a larger (more universal) collective narrative, and that the personal horizon ties into the collective one. - I will also call a "meta-narrative" any narrative that is more inclusive than one more particular narrative, ergo bridging the gap between at least two different particular narratives. For example, the federal narrative of the United States provides for the inclusion of the more particular narratives of the fifty states. The UN-narrative is a meta-narrative to the US- narrative and of other countries, and so on.
    How should we think of narratives? A narrative can be conceptualized as system of questions and answers. A question arises, an answer is given, it leads to the next question.  While it is tempting to think of narratives only as answers, the questions are mostly implicit - and most answer really are new questions. The picture below offers the model of a narrative. The interplay of questions and answers establishes a (constructed) truth, one that is possibly closer to the 'ultimate reality', the 'final Truth' 'out there', in other words, that which we seek to come closer to by eliminating flaws in our perceptions, interpretation and expression of perceptions. I am not going to discuss in detail the nature of Truth ‘out there’, nor the quality of the truth as constructed, because this is not the place to do so. Suffice it to observe that in most cases we believe narratives to establish a certain truth on the foundation of which rests an according order. The perception of things as true, in the end, is more decisive to our behavior than the actual facts. Questions and answers aim to come closer towards Truth, and meet in a valid provisional truth.