On LIfe and Death as a Narrative with Meaning

Recently I wrote a long post that discussed, among other things, David Foster Wallace, fiction and the purpose (or lack thereof) of life. In a part of that post I mentioned the idea of life as a narrative that we attempt to gain meaning from. While reading Julian Barnes' book Nothing To Be Frightened Of I noticed he tackled this very same subject. He rejects this idea of life as a narrative and thinks it is merely randomness.  Barnes writes 

...I resist this line of thought. Lessing described history as putting accidents in order, and  a human life strikes me as a reduced version of this: a span of consciousness during which certain things happen, some predictable, others not; where certain patterns repeat themselves, where the operations of chance and what we may as well for the moment call free will interact...if we are lucky we find someone to love, and with them a way to live, or, if not, a different way to live; where we do our work, take our pleasure, worship our god (or not)...it may be a narrative, but it doesn't feel like one to me.

Barnes further elaborates and writes about our need for a narrative, our own personal narrative that we construct for our own needs. So he doesn't reject the notion of a narrative at hand but rejects the objective reality of it. 

I do not disagree with any of this really; we feel a need for a narrative and some (a few?) know that that life is a game of chance and patterns emerge, diverge but we all are at the mercy of the throw of the dice. 

We need the narrative, we need to have some kind of meaning from life, whatever it is. All the heartbreak, despair and moments in the sun have to mean something.

The narrative, our narrative keeps us going, gives us meaning, it will be a story that has an ending, as all must. We are not just static in the ether, spontaneous, random and ephemeral.

Or at least we'd like to think so.