Chapter 7 is about the narrative understanding of emotion, that is, the construal of emotional episodes in narrative forms. I draw on literature to explore inner dimensions unavailable to ethnographic observation. Differences between real-world engagement and fictional emotion are explored; but neither science nor art has a monopoly of truth. Experience is the touchstone of ethnographic knowledge; but our own emotions are an unreliable guide to the emotions of cultural others. I consider apparently non-narrative factors (facial expressions, bodily harmonizing) in the construal of emotion, showing that narrative is involved here as well, the place in a sequence implying a narrative frame. Crucially, narrative understanding responds to synchronic and diachronic dimensions of an emotion episode. I draw on psychologist Keith Oatley’s view that the clash of goals with contingencies, modelled in literature, is what drives narrative and what arouses emotion in reading and in life. Drawing on Tolstoy and Conrad, however, I show the limitations of a formulaic account of emotions. The key point of the chapter is the entanglement of emotional episodes in interlaced stories and lives, something that literature is better equipped to show than science, but which science - and especially ethnography - cannot safely ignore.