This is the thing with personal narrative: it lets you raise questions (and possible answers) that you couldn’t frame with your rational mind. Stories mediate between the conscious and the unconscious; storytelling is one of the most direct ways to transfer unconscious content into other people’s consciousness, so it can eventually become part of reasoned discourse. You can’t do or see or say everything yourself, right now—you’re one person! But, through narrative, you can communicate things you don’t know that you know, to people who live in the future, who can understand things that you don’t know yet. We are those people now, for Tolstoy. And later it will hopefully be someone else, for us.