This paper argues that narrative theory and the political theory of assemblage complement each other in ways that can both illuminate and contribute to political struggle. Assemblage thinking points to complex, catalytic interactions that might open further lines of inquiry to key aspects of narrative analysis, such as meta-narrative, heteroglossia and collectivisation of memory. In turn, narrative theory offers the prospect of further elaborating the key processes by which human social assemblages are composed and decomposed and thus filling some of the critical ‘silences and absences’ (Anderson et al. 2012: 212) of assemblage theory.