Discworld & Narrative Causality

In Discworld, "stories are important" (Witches Abroad). They wrap themselves around people, play riddles with them, and shape their lives. A witch in a gingerbread house always has an unfortunate ending, a girl skipping through a forest in a red coat always meets. Nowhere is this more evident than in Witches Abroad, a tale of two powerful women fighting each other through stories. An evil queen forces people to obey the narrative, on threat of death.


Still, this is not the only place narrative causality takes precedence on the Disc. In The Wee Free Men, Tiffany Aching's only defence against the creatures from Fairyland is her knowledge of stories. Pratchett was obviously fascinated by the patterns stories take (as was Vonnegut, strangely), and it shows. In The Folklore of Discworld, Pratchett talks about "twisting and tangling" folklore to make it fit in his stories.

Despite this, he does not revere it. He "think[s] of folklore in much the same way a carpenter thinks about trees". In Hogfather, he seems to deplore it, think of it as wrong: "THIS IS HOW IT SHOULDN’T GO", Death says of the little match girl.

Pratchett was a folklorist with no respect for folklore, a walking contradiction. That's why his books worked: their quietly irreverent take on life created the sort of atmosphere only Pratchett could.