Just a few years ago the prevailing narrative about oil was all about the amazing United States success with a newly improved extraction method, fracking, to the detriment of the less creative oil-exporting countries. That story has been resonant here in America, where it has been taken as a tale of peculiarly American creativity. The history of modern petroleum may be seen as an American story that goes back to 1859 and Edwin Drake, who showed the world how it was possible, in Titusville, Pa., to drive a pipe deep through bedrock to reach oil. Drake became part of a great social narrative, leading the way to an entrepreneurial revolution in oil production and to still enduring American pride.

The recent fracking revolution — the United States has emerged as one of the world’s top oil producers in just the last few years — and the continuing story of American creativity has had an effect on the whole stock market. Americans can easily become emotional about that history of innovation.

Unfortunately, the bottom has just dropped out of that narrative, and some of us have gotten emotional about that, too. With this year’s extremely low oil prices, many of these frackers, so recently hailed as heroes, are going out of business. Their very ingenuity in increasing the supply of oil has been part of the problem by contributing to the oil price drop. It is easy to jump from this to broader conclusions: Maybe we’re not so smart after all, or so the new story goes. This thinking is a downer: Sometimes social narratives are quite depressing.

There is also a fourth story, a tale of the tripling of the United States stock market from 2009 to 2014 and its supposed sudden unwinding this year. This is not just a story about numbers: It too is a human interest story, one in which many investors missed a huge profit opportunity. They missed it because they overreacted to the 2008 financial crisis and became too fearful to stay in the market. This tale focuses on the success of market believers, who were wonderfully rewarded for their prescience. As I pointed out in a column in August, the popularity of this narrative led to a situation in which many people became aware that the market has gone up enormously, and it has most likely heightened sensitivity to the possibility of human fallibility and of correction now that the market has been dropping.

Most economists generally do not refer to such popular stories or assess their emotional appeal. The same is true for most historians, but the Yale historian Ramsay MacMullen is something of an exception. In his remarkable book, “Feelings in History: Ancient and Modern” (Regina Books, 2003), he wrote: “History is feeling. It is feelings that make us do what we do; and feelings can in fact be read. But the reading of them requires writers and readers to join their minds in ways that have long been out of fashion among students of history.”

Professor MacMullen tries to convey to the reader the feelings people had long ago when they were inspired or dejected. He says he believes this will help us understand history at a deeper level. One emotional story loaded with moral value leads to another, in his retelling. As an example, he gives us the tale of the murder of the abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy by a pro-slavery mob in 1837. That story motivated John Brown, helping to lead years later to his revolt and capture and hanging in 1859. And those events created another widely recounted emotional story that helped to lead to the Civil War and, eventually, abolition. Such popular stories are serious matters. They can lead to revolutions, or to market collapses.

Those who care about the stock market will surely be living through a new sequence of stories this year, including the four that I have enumerated here. Whether these narratives have a cascading effect, leading to further price decreases and yet more negative stories, is one possibility. But only time will tell us how the stories go.