Antenarrative
Before, beneath, between, and toward what may happen
In David M. Boje’s work, antenarrative has a double sense: ante as what comes before narrative coherence and ante as a bet placed on an unknown future. It names fragments, tensions, lived details, silences, and prospective possibilities that have not yet been organized into a stable beginning–middle–end plot. Antenarrative is not simply a defective or incomplete story. It can be collective, nonlinear, multivoiced, and materially situated; its fragments may later be gathered into competing narratives, or remain unresolved.
Boje’s later account broadens the process through the Seven Bs: before, beneath, between, being, becoming, bets, and beyond. These direct attention to antecedent conditions; what a dominant account leaves underneath; relations among voices; lived existence; change in process; future wagers; and possibilities excluded from the present account. In this study, an antenarrative reading keeps Illa’s separate episodes and interpretations visible before arranging them into a single explanation.
See Boje (2001, 2011, 2014). This is a scholarly paraphrase, not a verbatim quotation.
Storying
Story as action and relation
Storying is the ongoing activity through which people tell, enact, remember, revise, contest, and carry stories with others. It includes the words spoken, the interaction in which they are spoken, what listeners recognize or question, the material records that persist, and the consequences of retelling. Storying is therefore not only a finished text or a retrospective account. It is a social process that can alter what is noticed, what becomes credible, who is heard, and which futures people treat as possible.
For this project, human–AI storying includes the human’s prompts, system replies, human edits and corrections, changes across platforms, and later interpretations. A model response is one event in that process. It does not by itself establish the history, authorship, or cause of an idea.
Pain story · David Boje’s working term
Witnessing hardship without reducing a person to it
A Pain story is an account of suffering, threat, loss, exclusion, bodily vulnerability, or struggle for recognition. It identifies what hurt, what conditions and relationships shaped the experience, what the storyteller needed, and what remains unresolved. In ethical storying, the listener does not turn pain into spectacle, demand a neat lesson, or treat suffering as evidence for an unrelated technical claim.
In this project, the term is an interpretive lens, not a diagnosis and not a claim that every event has been independently verified.
Paradise story · David Boje’s working term
Meaning, gifts, and futures that open within or after pain
A Paradise story names the storyteller’s account of insight, gratitude, care, connection, renewed agency, or a future worth building. It can arise alongside pain rather than after it, and it does not erase loss or prove a supernatural, medical, or physical explanation. In Illa’s interview, the language of “life is a gift,” present-moment awareness, compassion, and care for neighbors is part of this meaning-making.
The research records these as Illa’s interpretations and aspirations, while distinguishing them from externally testable claims.
How the terms work together
Hold fragments open; then test specific claims
A Pain–Paradise reading can make a meaningful arc visible, but it must not force a “redemption” ending onto a speaker. Antenarrative analysis preserves contradictions and unfinished bets; storying analysis asks how tellings and retellings change relations and action. Empirical work then takes one observable claim at a time—such as whether a distinctive phrase appears in dated records—and tests it with independent evidence.
Publication and consent: The interview’s detailed Pain and Paradise accounts include intimate experiences and family material. This public page defines the analytical terms; it does not reproduce the longer personal stories. Those are being prepared separately for Illa’s review before any public release.
Read the selected interview excerpts → Read the evidence plan →