Analyzing Talk in the Social Sciences. Katherine Bischoping
position as a cultural worker. Differently positioned characters in the story might give very different evaluations of what had happened. For example, as Mollie went on to recount ironically, the family members wrote to the restaurant saying, ‘Thank you for all your help. It was our mum’s favorite restaurant.’ Meanwhile, a narrative analyst interested in the relation of narrative to Mollie’s self might focus on how her persistent interest in the reality, believability (line 19), and speakability (lines 15, 19, 20) of what happened could be manifestations of trauma. Such a researcher would note that although Mollie says she has no words, she continues to look for them, finding some value in the process of telling the story.
Textbox 3.2: Mollie’s Worst Job
1 I also worked as a hostess in a restaurant where someone quite literally died in the restaurant and they didn’t close the dining room.
2 An elderly lady came in with her son and her daughter-in-law, and it was a big room, like twice the size of this, and that was just the back dining room; it was a restaurant across from the Convention Center.
3 This woman had a heart attack and fell over.
4 When the waitress came to take her order, she’s on the floor.
5 The family is sobbing, the waitress is in shock, the people at the next table are ordering another round of beer, and the staff – the manager said just [makes a ‘big round nothing’ with her fingers].
6 They didn’t shut the dining room.
7 The paramedics were, they literally intubated her and were pumping [makes CPR motions], and people were still eating, and they carried her out with a blanket over her face.
8 Through the front dining room.
9 You’d think it was something out of a movie, that you couldn’t possibly have this happen in real life.
10 That was the day I decided to leave that place.
11 That was a defining moment.
12 That guy was unbelievable.
13 And that night, a customer came in as we were closing down and said, ‘Can I speak to the manager?’
14 That’s never a good sign.
15 And I got the manager and the manager asked what the trouble was, and he said, ‘I was here when the lady’ – and trailed off – ‘and I called 911 on the cell phone.’
16 The guy wanted some sort of compensation that his dinner was interrupted.
17 And he wanted some kind of compensation from the restaurant.
18 I’ve never been so appalled by, sort of, your average human being.
19 I have no words to even assess that.
20 It was … It was awful.
21 But it’s like the type of thing you would see in a TV show, as a black comedy.
22 You would think it would never happen in real life and it did.
Source: by permission of K. Bischoping and E. Quinlan
Textbox 3.3: A Summary of Strategies for Analyzing Emplotment
Investigate why, or with what consequences, groups of narrators may tell stories that diverge from Labov and Waletzky’s model.
Concentrate on narrators’ evaluations.
Discerning the Language of Agency
To what extent do narrators regard themselves as sole authors of their own fates, as members of a collective, or as pawns in others’ games? Where do they think responsibility for the triumphs and disasters of the past lie? Attention to the agents whom narrators highlight in their stories can point to the answers to such questions. Returning to Textbox 3.2, we can notice that Mollie absents herself from her own story between line 1, when she says that she worked as a hostess in the restaurant, and line 10, when she reveals that she decided to quit this job. During lines 2 through 8, other characters are depicted as responsible for every single one of the story’s actions. Others die, sob, are in shock, order beer, say nothing, intubate their patient, eat, or fail to close the dining room. Mollie’s complete self-effacement maintains that the events of lines 2 through 8 were not of her making. It could additionally be read as an indication of their traumatic nature, as she seems to dissociate herself, her thoughts, and her feelings from what was happening around her.
Sociolinguists and literary analysts alike have several additional strategies for identifying how narrators take up questions of agency and responsibility; here, we will give you a flavor of two of them. In English and many other languages, attending to the pronouns that narrators use to refer to the actors in a story can be a powerful strategy for pinning down how they evaluate their agency and responsibility, and others’. An exposition of this strategy is to be found in Timor and Landau’s (1998) study of Israeli ex-convicts who had begun to attend yeshivot (religious academies) for rehabilitation:
Narrators use the first person singular pronoun, I, to identify themselves as the prime movers of events. Timor and Landau found narrators to speak of their reputable present selves in the first person singular, with its spirit of self-determination: ‘Today if I open a small synagogue, it would be wonderful’ (p. 368).
Narrators use we, the first person plural pronoun, to present a collective story emphasizing solidarity or diffusing agency and responsibility. Timor and Landau’s narrators tended to recount their criminal pasts in the first person plural, e.g., ‘Before, we used to judge a guy by the laws of crime. […] We didn’t respect anyone honest. In the unwritten law of crime, we considered informers garbage, not humans’ (p. 368).
Narrators can also use the second person pronoun, you, to diffuse responsibility by maintaining that any reasonable listener would perceive things in the same way and feel the same way about them. For example, one of Timor and Landau’s narrators explains his past crimes with, ‘You see people dressed nicely, then you become jealous. Then you try to steal some money’ (p. 369).
Finally, when narrators use third person pronouns, describing what he, she, it, or they have done, they portray their own agency as diminished, circumstances as beyond their control, and events occurring willy-nilly.
Narrators also offer interpretations of agency and responsibility for events by means of what’s called the voice of their verbs and by whether actions are described using verbs versus nouns. We give the vocabulary for talking about this in Textbox 3.4, using the title of the Bob Marley (1973) song, ‘I shot the sheriff’ as our example. Applying its vocabulary, we can say that when one of Timor and Landau’s narrators refers to his past with, ‘In general there was violence and people were hurt’ (1998: 369), it is by using nominalization, followed by an agentless passive construction. The effect is that he is blurring over what happened, distancing himself from his actions and eliding responsibility for them.
Pronouns and voice can also be important cues to understanding how narrators experience or represent the degree of agency that they have in institutional settings. Lapum et al. (2010) give the example of an open-heart surgery patient named Joseph, who recounts his experience as follows:
What they did as soon as you enter the hospital, they take all the information, they give you a robe and put you in bed, they want to prepare you … she gave me a pill, she said, ‘Put under your tongue.’ … and she said, ‘Okay we’re going to take you to the operating room.’ ‘Thank god,’ I said, ‘We’re finally going.’ (p. 757, authors’ emphases)
Analyzing this quotation, Lapum et al. emphasize how Joseph experiences himself to be giving over his agency to the medical practitioners and technology surrounding him. By the end of the quotation, he is subsumed into their ‘we.’ The patients that Lapum et al. studied tended to speak of themselves as ‘I’ again as they spoke of recovering from surgery and becoming less dependent on others