What are narratives good for?

•What makes a narrative worth telling? Turning points.•Turning points are contingent per se; the outcome is contingent upon them.•Narratives are often said to be chance-effacing, and there is some truth in this.•But chance is also a very productive constituent of narratives worth telling.•The role of chance in a narrative is not just to be got rid of.

Narratives may be easy to come by, but not everything is worth narrating. What merits a narrative? Here, I follow the lead of narratologists and literary theorists, and focus on one particular proposal concerning the elements of a story that make it narrative-worthy. These elements correspond to features of the natural world addressed by the historical sciences, where narratives figure so prominently. What matters is contingency. Narratives are especially good for representing contingency and accounting for contingent outcomes. This will be squared with a common view that narratives leave no room for chance. On the contrary, I will argue, tracing one path through a maze of alternative possibilities, and alluding to those possibilities along the way, is what a narrative does particularly well.