Chapter 14

While chapter thirteen discussed language as a dialogue, this chapter discusses language as a narrative. Each narrative has a beginning, middle, and an end. (Aristotle) There is a specific sequence in narratives that carries out the conversation being told. A narrative always responds to the question "and then what happened?" (Labov and Waletzsky) I think this is very true because when people are having a conversation and someone is telling a story, the audience is often left in suspense wondering what the next order of events is in the story. Sometimes when telling a story, the teller lets the audience know when a story is about to be told or when it is over. In research interviews or other examples, it can be hard to identify whether a story is being told or not. The author, Catherine Kohler Riessman continued to say that personal narratives need structure to hold them together. Stories may contain the same ideas or concepts and be told differently, which is why the placement of events are very important in narrative. Labov had a paradigmatic structural approach to narratives. He said that there are six common elements in a narrative that include an abstract (summary), orientation (time, place, situation, characters), complication action (sequence of events), evaluation (significance and meaning of the action, tone or attitude of the narrator), resolution (what happened at the end), and coda (returns the perspective to the present).

The purpose of including all of these different narrative techniques and ideas from different people is to portray all of the rules we use when we converse. When we are young, we do not think about the rules of conversing and telling stories. Instead, we learn them from our culture. Riessman reiterates that we need to keep remembering in the middle of our stories that we need to answer the audience's question "what happens next?" Jean Francois Lyotard, a French scholar of postmodernism, said that when we speak we are in a sense playing games. This is because like a game, our speaking has rules and factors that play into it. Laurel Richardson stated that narrative is both a mode of reasoning and a mode of representation. People are able to understand the world by using narrative and they are also able to speak about the world narratively. Jerome Bruner said that narrative is one of the two basic and universal human cognition modes. The other mode is logico-scientific, which looks for universal truth conditions and is taken from spatial and temporal events. Narratives play a very important role in our lives because they surround us and they are used in everyday language to understand what is going on in the world.