Narratives are massive dimensionality reducers.

They must be!

That's the whole point!

Many orders of magnitude of signal reduction into a clean, easy-to-reason-about signal.

Pick a frame of interpretation that is compatible with the known information, and then keep the details that "make sense" in that world (i.e. that make the actors in the narrative operate in believable ways following their incentives in that narrative) and throw out the parts that don't.

This helps cut through the noise to give us something to work with... but by creating a grotesque, deeply distorted vision of reality.

And yet what else could we possibly do?

If it were just a cacophony of swirling background noise we'd be frozen in place unable to sense or decide anything, and thus unable to do anything with intention.

Narratives are our way of grabbing on, of riding this bucking bronco of the real world.

The main thing is to never hold too tightly to a narrative, to see it as just one way of seeing the situation, and one that you should be willing to update or change with more disconfirming evidence.