Narrative Violations

The term "Narrative Violation" is well past its prime: it was featured in a critical thinkpiece in The New York Times back in 2019, and has worked its way into countless Medium essays and LinkedIn comments in the years since.

At its most fundamental, this term is meant to refer to something that runs contrary to conventional expectations.

Someone becoming the CEO of a tech company after teaching for little money at a rural public school is a narrative violation, by some standards, because the archetypical tech startup founder is more likely to have dropped out of Stanford to build an app from their parent’s garage.

That said, this is only a narrative violation if you are aware of this specific stereotypical caricature of what a tech CEO looks like.