Sm. &i. Med. Vol. 30. No. II. pp. 1195-1200. 1990 Printed in Great Bntain. All rights reserved
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STRATEGIC USES OF NARRATIVE IN THE PRESENTATION OF SELF AND ILLNESS: A RESEARCH NOTE CATHERINEKOHLERRIES~MAN Smith College School for Social Work, Northampton, MA 01063, U.S.A. Abstract-Using GolTman’s theory and the methods of narrative analysis, the paper examines the divorce account of a white working-class man with advanced multiple sclerosis to show how he constructs a definition of his divorcing situation, and a positive masculine identity, despite massive disability. He accomplishes this positive self through narrative retelling of key events in his biography, healing discontinuities by the way he structures his account in interaction with the listener. The strategic choice of genre, or forms of narrative, guides the impression we form of him. From this case study, I show the usefulness of close textual analysis of biographical accounts of illness. Key w*orcis-narrative,
biography, multiple sclerosis, identity
INTRODUCTION We are forever composing impression of ourselves, projecting a definition of who we are, and making claims about ourselves and the world that we test and negotiate in social interaction. As Goffman remarks: “participants contribute to a single over-all definition of the situation which involves not so much a real agreement as to what exists but rather a real agreement as to whose claims concerning what issues will be temporarily honored” [ 11. Social constructivists add that we create social reality through these presentations and responses. In the research interview, as in the rest of social life, language is the major cultural resource that participants draw on to jointly create reality, a process that qualitative studies are ideally suited to uncovering. Narrative retelling in interviews is a vivid instance of this. A teller convinces a listener who wasn’t there that certain events ‘happened’, that the teller was affected by them. A particular self is constituted through these narratives, occasioned by the presence of a listener, her questions and comments. Typically, the moral character of the protagonist is sustained. This paper analyzes how one narrator, ‘Burt’-a recently separated working class man with advanced multiple sclerosis-projects a definition of himself as husband, father and worker. He narrates his experiences in each of these roles, interpreting the biographical disruption that resulted from his chronic illness [2]. Strategically, he breaks the frame set by the research interview, creating what Young calls a narrative enclave within the discourse, thereby reconstituting a self [3]. He inserts several kinds of narrative into the interaction-including stories at key points-guiding the impression we gain of him through the dexterous choice of form. The self that Burt projects is a very favorable one, and the narratives attest to his resilience. He does
not allow himself to be defined as a cuckold, as the rejected spouse (yet his wife left him for another man after he became disabled), nor does he portray himself as an inadequate parent or worker (yet his adolescent son left home and he is no longer able to hold down a job). By effectively narrating his experience, in the context of cultural understandings about sickness, he is able to project a strong masculine identity, even in the face of behavior that violates common sense definitions of masculinity. A close analysis of his narrative account, and especially its narrative structure, reveals how he accomplishes this reality. This paper also has a methodological purpose-to show how narrative analysis is done. This method is particularly well suited to studying the presentation of self in everyday life, for storifying experience is a naturalistic form for telling others about ourselves [4-6]. Unlike traditional qualitative methods, this approach does not fragment the text into discrete content categories for coding purposes but. instead, identifies longer stretches of talk that take the form of narrative-a discourse organized around time and consequential events in a ‘world’ recreated by the narrator. The approach assumes interviewees structure their replies in the ways they do for strategic reasons-to effectively communicate ‘what happened’-and, consequently, determining the organization of the discourse is an important analytic task. To enable this, a full taped transcription of the interview is made, the analyst identifies the boundaries of narrative segments, noting their contexts, and parses these texts to display the underlying structure (e.g. how clauses function strategically to orient the listener, carry the action forward, resolve it, evaluate it, etc. [7,8]). Along with this structural analysis, narratives are interpreted, both as individual units and in relation to one another, by identifying thematic and linguistic connections between the narrative segments. Taken together, they constitute a
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CATHERI!G
KOHLER
teller’s ‘narrative reconstruction’ [9] or ‘account’ [IO] of his or her lived experience [I 11. Going beyond some narrative analysts. I argue that the ‘how’ of the telling, is as important as the ‘what’ that is said, for it IS through choices in form that narrators persuade listeners and, ultimately, readers of their texts. Elsewhere I refer to this process of convincing someone who wasn’t there as ‘the teller’s problem’ in social interaction, which narrators attempt to solve by selecting and combining different genres, or forms of narrative [12]. (In this context, genre refers to types of narrative that are distinguished by a set of constitutive conventions and codes of presentation, including verb tense, temporality, sequencing, discourse markers, and other linguistic elements [13].) Here, I emphasize how Burt’s choice of narrative genre guides the impression others form of him, allowing him to assert a competent self and heal discontinuities that narrative can bind. I show that he selects the story form at key points, though more often relying on the habitual narrative genre to reconstruct ‘what happened’ in general. He elaborates his experience in non-narrative arguments as well. The moments when he inserts a story into the interaction-re-presenting particular instances for the listener-are strategically significant because this discourse form draws a listener most fully into the immediacy of the teller’s world, and into his point of view. In this interview, they are reserved for quintessential moments, and depict events that are critical to the narrator’s sense of himself as a devoted husband and responsible worker-a reality that he keeps alive despite his divorce and his disability. Goffman’s [I] concept of impression management in social interactions is useful for examining the narrative because it provides a sociological perspective on the performance aspects of language. Yet there are problems with his approach. Sociolinguists use the term ‘performance’ not in a literal or pejorative sense, but as verbal action in a social context [14], but Go!Tman is not clear on this point, sliding into a manipulative and machiavellian view of the social actor. He subtly intimates there is no self behind the performance, there is a genuine ‘reality’ that is being masked-a perspective that challenges, even trivializes, an empathetic reading of a text, such as Burt’s about physical vulnerability and loss. Nor is Goffman’s view always easy to reconcile theoretically with the view that narrative retelling is an imaginative and interpretive enterprise, a way that individuals actively shape and account for biographical disruption that disabling events have wrought in their lives [9]. Resolving the tension between Goffman’s framework and narrative theory is beyond the scope of this paper but let me say explicitly that my intention in drawing on Goffman’s insights is not to cleverly besmirch the narrator. Readers should keep this point in mind as they construct their interpretation of my interpretation of Burt’s interpretation of his experiences [ 151. As background, Burt is a 43-year-old man with a high school education who was married for 25 years before divorcing 3 years previously. He was interviewed in his home as part of a study of marital separation [12]. Like others in the sample,
RES.SMAN
he was located through probate court records of the divorcing in a northeastern state. Unlike others, he was severely disabled with multiple sclerosis, confined to a wheelchair, and dependent on services from the state. Although the structured interview schedule focused on divorce, Burt redirected the conversation at every opportunity toward the topic most salient to him-discontinuities in the appearance of a self-his masculinity as constituted in the roles of husband, father and worker, on the one hand, and his chronic illness and loss of physical function, on the other. “I
WAS A GOOD
HUSBAND”
Burt moves to control the interviewer’s impression of him early in their interaction. He says he took the initiative and filed for divorce, adding “it wasn’t my fault that she just packed up and left one day and that was the end of it.” He elaborates this definition of the situation-that he is not to blame-by moving back in time and staging a narrative, beginning with a preface [ 161: Well, I can go back 10 1975when I first found out I had MS. And when she was told by the doctor that it eventually would cripple me, put me in a wheelchair. Seems like back in 1975 that she seemed to drift apart from me, that she
didn’t accept the disease. Although the two events-his diagnosis and his divorce-are not temporally related (the diagnosis occurred 9 years before he began to live apart from his wife), he has effectively linked them. As he later elaborates, MS is responsible for the divorce, not anything he did. She didn’t ‘accept the disease’, where he implies he has. In this preface, Burt has projected a definition of the situation, making an “explicit claim to be a person of a particlar kind” [ 1, p. 13; 171. He has also made a moral demand upon the interviewer, obligating her “to value and treat him in the manner that persons of his kind have a right to expect” [ 11. The divorce narrative formally begins after a series of moves. The interviewer asks a closed ended question (which spouse was primarily responsible for the decision to separate) that Burt responds to, saying that none of the fixed responses ‘actually apply’. To borrow from Young, he breaks into the framework of the realm of the research interview, flouting its conventions [3]. She responds by creating a ‘slot’ in the interaction for a narrative (“Tell me. then, in your own words”). Into this enclave, he inserts a long of which are reproduced in story, portions transcript I. Transcript 01
02
03 :z 06 07 08 10
1
OK, when she left in February we tried to get back together in May.. [tells of going to see her in motel and asking her to “come home” and she said “I’m not coming home.“] . . , That night (p) about twelve o’clock there was a call (p) and it was her and Susan [daughter] picked the phone up and she had been drinking and she said she wanted to come home so Susan went down to the motel and picked her up.. . brought her down here
Presentation of self and illness 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29
she slept here that night she came into my room gave me a big hug and a big kiss said “I’m glad to be back” I said “I’m glad you’re back’ I says “We have all missed you.” The following day she seemed like she had a split personality seemed like she changed into a different person. She got up in the morning I came out and sat in the chair here an’ she went back to the same routine that she had done before she (p) decided to move out. She’s telling me that I’m gonna be put in a nursing home . . she’s going sell the house. And I said “hey, look, no, nothin’ is gonna change it’s not gonna be any different than before we were married. Now if you want to stay here you can, you know, you gonna be-act the same way you were before you left.” So she just packed up and left.
Notation system: (p) = pause of 3 seconds or longer, - = break off of word. Stories, more than other forms of discourse, effectively pull the listener into the teller’s point of view. They re-present a slice of life, often by dramatizing and re-enacting a particular interaction, thereby providing ‘proof’ of how it was. They draw the listener so deeply into the teller’s experience that often a kind of intersubjective agreement about ‘how it was’ is reached [I 81.To borrow from Goffman, they can also function in interaction as “defensive practices,” saving the definition of the situation that a teller has projected [l]. Through the story in Transcript 1, Burt makes the claim that he was a devoted husband. He provides an illustrative instance of how he was willing to forgive, thus laying full responsibility for the divorce on his wife. This supportive story sustains a positive identity in the face of physical disability and loss. The story also reaffirms his central position, as a man, in the hierarchy of the family. Despite his confinement to a wheelchair, the point of the story is that he stood up to his wife, refusing to allow himself to be defined as incompetent. Looking briefly at the form of the story, we see that it has many of the structural features of this genre of narrative as outlined by Labov [7]. It orients the listener to time and place (lines 1, 3, 17), contains a core plot or complicating action (lines 4,7, I l-16,20, 22) which is resolved by the protagonist’s actions (lines 25-29), and the story includes the narrator’s evaluation of the events (lines 6, 18-19). Climactic points in the plot are dramatized (lines 14-16 and 25-28), an especially effective device for building tension and drawing a listener in. The evaluative clauses (the ‘soul’ of the narrative for they convey quality of mind and the attitude of the narrator) are especially significant in this story because they convey Burt’s understanding that it was her ‘illness’, not his, that was the problem-her drinking and her ‘split personality’. Yet the story leaves us with many questions unanswered. For instance, did Burt and his wife have
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sexual relations on the night they got back together? The plot as he develops it skips over this topic (perhaps because he is interacting with a woman interviewer), just as his narrative account more generally leaves out any mention of the effect of his disease on the sexual aspect of their marriage. Although we have no way of knowing what ‘really’ happened [19]. MS can result in sexual impairment. And we know from elsewhere in the interview [20] that Burt’s wife took a lover toward the end of the marriage. Yet narratives are always edited versions of reality, not objective and impartial descriptions of it [21], and interviewees always make choices about what to divulge. In this case, the ambiguity about intimacy functions to uphold the definition of the divorce situation that Burt has projected from the start. Goffman [l] alerts us to attend to the impression that Burt has composed of himself, one that takes as its central thread his marital devotion and masculine competence. Burt uses the story genre at only one other point in the interview (to be discussed shortly). More typically, he conveys his experience in habitual narratives-a genre that, like a story, illustrates and pulls a listener into the teller’s world, but not nearly so completely, for it does not re-present an irresistible moment. A habitual narrative tells of the general course of events over time, rather than what happened at a sped@ point in the past, and thus is constituted with verb tenses and adverbs that mark repetition and routinization, unlike the simple past tense of stories. As a consequence of these discourse codes and conventions, it has a more distant quality and sums across larger sections of time, unlike the blow-by-blow effect of a story. Because it relates habitual events, not instantiating with a particular event, and is less emotionally affecting than a story. For example, Transcript 2 displays a portion of a longer habitual narrative [20] that, again, functions to link the illness and the divorce. In it, Burt constructs a coherent account out of events that happened over a IO-year period, making sense by interpreting his wife’s drinking against the backdrop of his loss of physical function. Again, we note that sexual performance is not mentioned. It is her problems with his disease that necessitated a divorce [22]. The habitual narrative genre Burt chooses here is ideally suited to conveying his explanatory model for his divorce, just as the story was suited to another strategic purpose. In the words of Goffman, he has informed the listener “what is,” what she “ought to see as the ‘is’” [I]. Transcript 2 01
02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13
Well in ‘75 I was diagnosed you know, at that time I was still able to walk but I had to drag my right leg and as the years went on the leg got worse my right arm started to get weak I’d start losing my balance my coordination was going and un then l-naturally I had to start using a walker and I don’t think she liked the idea of having to help me all the time in the morning help me get dressed lift me out of bed in the morning
CATHERM KOHLER RIFSMAN
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14 15 16
help me sometimes with my bowel movement and things like that you know, she couldn’t take it anymore so she started drinking (p) very heavily.
Burt is able to claim exemption from responsibility for the divorce because of aspects of the sick role [23-251. He is not to blame for his disability, is not morally accountable for getting MS and, consequently, has a right to be relieved of usual role-related activities. Whatever fault there may have been in his performance as a husband, sickness relieves him of personal blame. By effectively inserting narratives about marriage into the discourse about divorce, Burt convinces us that he was a good husband, that he was rational and forgiving. Yet the self that he creates is not cold, calculating or blaming but, instead, is full of feeling for his spouse. This is particularly evident in nonnarrative segments of his account (passages that report thoughts and actions, but do not draw the listener into a past time world of consquential events). He describes the first month after separation: “everytime I would think of her I would start crying”. Repeatedly he says life outside of marriage is “one big lonely world”. Talking of the difficulties since separation, he says: Not being with a partner, you know what I mean. You’re used to sleeping with a women for 25 years and now I am sleeping in my own bed. And there’s no one beside me to keep warm, let’s put it that way. Nights are cold.. . Somebody to hold on to, I miss that.
These touching non-narrative passages, taken together with his narrative reconstruction of specific marital events, shape our impression and make it possible to enter into this teller’s point of view, and to feel with him. He has constructed a reality that we can empathically enter by his way of telling, not simply by r&at he has told. Because so much of the interview was focused on the topic of marital separation, Burt has less chance to influence impressions of himself in other areas. Nevertheless, he does try and even succeeds in inserting narratives about parenting and work. In the “division of definitional labor” [l, p. 91 in the interview itself, both teller and listener as respondent and interviewer construct enclaves for these narratives for, as Goffman would predict, he has controlled her conduct, her responsive treatment of him. Reciprocally, she creates ‘slots’ for narrative in the question and answer format, and encourages elaboration with non-lexical utterances (uhm hum) while narratives are in progress (These have not been included in the transcripts for this paper, but are evident on the tape.) [4,26,27]. “I
WAS A GOOD
ENOUGH
FA’JIJER”
Burt deviates from the structure of the interview to tell that he has a strained relationship with his teenage son, on whom he depended for much of his daily care after his wife left, but who ultimately left home. A habitual narrative re-presents a typical conversation (see Transcript 3)-an ideal choice of form because it conveys the repetitious nature of
Transcript 01
02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10
3
There was times that (p) we’d get into an argument you know, I’d say to him “Bill, could you help me do this?” He’d be in his room watching TV and I’d holler for him, you know, to do something four or five times I’d holler for him and he wouldn’t pay any attention to me just block me out of his mind (p) you know And I felt bitter towards him, you know, when it happened.
their difficult interactions. Whereas Burt might have blamed himself or called his son a ‘rotten kid’, he does not project this definition of the situation. He absolves them both from responsibility, blaming his illness instead in a non-narrative segment: Like in ‘75 I had been sick for IO years. He was only 10 years old at the time, you know. And I didn’t have a chance to actually show him the good things in life, take him bowling, take him here, or take him to school.. . Baseball games, hockey games, things like that I never could do. . Actually I wasn’t a father to him and he could get away with lots of things some other child couldn’t. I couldn’t get up and give him a good boot in the fanny if he needed it.
This argument, like the earlier divorce narrative, rests on assumptions of the sick role [23], and the expectations for men in working-class families, as well [28]. Burt could not induct his son into the male world of sports, nor could he be the effective disciplinarian. His capacity to ‘normally’ father a son was impaired because of illness, so it is not Burt’s fault that his son didn’t turn out right. The fragmented and sometimes contradictory nature of the self has been acknowledged, but meaning has been controlled for the listener.
“I
WAS A RESPONSJBLE
WORKER”
Holding down a job is the third aspect of role performance that Burt presents-a core component of masculinity in this culture and yet the role that illness most often interferes with. He creates an enclave in the fixed question and answer format of the section of the interview on demographic characteristics to talk at length about his steady work history-a signal of the significance of this aspect of the self. Burt tells that he has been employed by the same company for many years, and he talks with pride of the company, telling how when he got sick “they got me an electric wheelchair”. Yet, he is unemployed. To resolve this contradiction, he inserts a story into the interaction (see Transcript 4) that vividly depicts his efforts to abide by the masculine work ethic despite massive physical disability. He re-enacts the last day he was employed, making himself the central character in a moral drama that also includes his boss and doctor as characters [29]. Rich in detail and elaboration, and employing structural features of the story genre noted earlier, it concludes the reconstitution of a positive self. It is a heroic portrait, depicting a man who would be a man against all odds.
Presentation of self and illness Transcript
01
02
03 04 05 06 07 08 09
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 la 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52
4
I had told my boss ahead of time that I was goin’ to see him [the doctor] and he said “well. let us know, you know, as soon as you find out so we can get your wheelchair all, you know, charged up and fixed up and everything.” So I had seen him on a Friday and I’d called soon as I got back Friday told him I’d be in that following Monday And he said “oh, it’s goin’ to be so good to have you back you’ve been out of work so long.” So I went in there (p) and before I used to be able to stand up in the men’s room you known, and urinate that way but this one time I took the urinal with me just in case I couldn’t do it. So I got up, I get in there at 7 o’clock that morning and at about 9 o’clock I felt like I had to urinate And I went over to where I usually go to try to stand up I couldn’t stand up the leg wouldn’t hold me they have a handicapped stall. So I went into the handicapped stall to try and use the urinal. Couldn’t use it. I had the urge that I had to go but nothing was coming out. So back to my desk I went and I continued working. And about fifteen or twenty minutes later I get the urge again. So back to the men’s room I go back to the handicapped stall. All day long this is happening. I couldn’t move my urine everything just blocked up. When I get home I figured well maybe it’s because I’m nervous coming back to work the first day on the job. So I get home (p) I still couldn’t go. So I called my doctor, Dr George and he said “well, can you get up to [name of hospital]?” I said, “well, I’m in my pajamas.” He said, “well, I’ll send an ambulance” so they sent an ambulance and brought me up there. And he put a catheter on me soon as he put that on I think I must have let out maybe two pints. Everything just went shhhhh. You know, I felt so relieved. And he said “well, I’m goin’ to keep you in,” he says “I want, I want this uh (p) urinologist to take a look at you.” So it was Dr Lavini I don’t know if you know Dr Lavini He’s one of the best around. He looked at it and said “we’re going to have to operate.” Everything just blocked up. They had to make the opening larger so the urine would come out, you know, freely. So I was in [name of hospital] I had gone to work for that one day.. .
CONCLUSION
1 have used narrative physically
disabled
analysis to show how a man sustains a positive impres-
1199
sion of himself-a portrait that contrasts sharply with some of the ‘realities’ of his condition and how he might he viewed, given outward signs and other ‘facts’ about his divorce [30]. To do this, he creates enclaves in the structured interview to assert a self, with the narrative retelling healing some of the discontinuities and contradictions in the nature of this self. The thematic material, while quite ancillary to the manifest purpose of the interview, can be
inserted and sustained because it observes the convention of narrative in conversation [31]. By retelling consequential events and elaborating on their meanings, he guides the impression that he gives, sustaining a reality, and a self, one that is sealed inside the narrative [3]. Although narrative analysts have focused on the story as the prototypic form, this case study shows how a narrator can select from several genres, and move back and forth between them to make points. Burt combines a series of habitual narratives and tells two stories of paradigmatic instances of what it is like to be a man. The combination of genres is especially effective and, I have argued elsewhere [12], is generally characteristic of qualitative replies if one examines them closely. It is crucial to attend to the linguistic coding of narrative segments of text, and their contexts, to see how genres illuminate in different ways how individuals construe their experience 1321. As a whole, this man’s narrative reconstruction of a biography disrupted by illness preserves key aspects of his masculinity-his adequacy as husband, father and worker [S]. Although chronic illness has interfered with his life plan in each domain, the narrator creates a social self that is competent, controlled and feelingful. This is not a portrait of a man who is denying the severity of his illness, or the sadness of his divorce, but neither is it a portrait of victimization and dependency. Narrative analysis has much to contribute to the study of chronic illness, as this method focuses on naturally occurring texts of identity that emerge in the course of interviews [33]. Telling narratives is a major way that individuals make sense of disruptive events in their lives. Beyond making meaning, examining the story told and the story listened to can illuminate the performance aspects of language-how we create our realities and ourselves through the strategic choices we make in social interaction. Acknowledgements-This research was jointly conducted with Naomi Gerstel and supported by a fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health (SF32MH09206). I thank Elliot Mishler, an anonymous reviewer, and my philosophy study group for comments on earlier drafts and Muriel Poulin for her clerical support.
REFERENCES
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2. Bury M. Chronic illness as biographical disruption. Social. HIth Illn. 4, 167, 1982. 3. Young K. Narrative embodiments: enclaves of the self in the realm of medicine. In Texts of Idenriry (Edited by Shotter J. and Gergen K. J.), pp. 152-165. Sage, Newbury Park, CA, 1989.
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Helm J.). University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA, 1967. 8. Labov W. Speech actions and reactions in personal narrative. In Analyzing Discourse: Text and Talk (Edited by Tannen D.). Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC, 1982. 9. Williams G. The genesis of chronic illness: narrative reconstruction. Social. Hlrh Illn. 6, 175, 1984. IO. Scott M. B. and Lyman S. M. Accounts. Am. Social. Rev. 46, 46, 1968. II. This summary of the steps in doing a narrative analysis
is adopted from Bell S. Becoming a political woman: the reconstruction and interpretation of experience through stories. In Gender and Discourse: The Power of Talk (Edited by Todd A. D. and Fisher S.). Ablex, Norwood, NJ, 1988. 12. Riessman C. K. Divorce Talk: Women and Men Make Sense of Personal Relationships. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1990. 13. In this paper, I focus on two genres-habitual narrative and story-but elsewhere [I21 I discuss others, including hypothetical and episodic narratives. Borrowing from structuralist critics such as Roland Barthes, the set of conventions and codes in a genre is a kind of implicit contract between listener and teller, altered from age to age, but which constitute a set of expectations that enable the listener to make sense of a teller’s utterance, that is “to naruralize it, by relating it to the world as this is defined and ordered by the prevailing culture.” (Barthes, as summarized in Abrams M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms, 5th edn, p. 74. Holt, Rinehardt & Winston, New York, 1988.) For another view of genre see Derrida H. The law of genre. In Ref. 161. 14. Bauman R. Srory, Perform&e and Event.’ ?omextual Studies of Oral Narrative. Cambridge University Press, London, 1986. 15. On the interactive production of texts from the discipline of literary criticism, see Fish S. Is There a Texr in This Class? Harvard University Press. Cambridge. I MA, 1980. 16. For more on the rules for producing narratives in . . . -_ conversatton, and how they are set otl trom normal discourse through frames, see Young K. G. Taleworlds and Storyrealms. Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1987.
17. Goffman does not mean “defensive” or “projected” in the Freudian sense. 18. I am grateful to Dennie Wolf for this observation. 19. Katharine Young makes the important distinction between the story realm (the realm of the narrative discourse) and the taleworld (in which events the story recounts are understood to have transpired). See Ref. [ 161. As she notes, this distinction depends on the existence of different realms of being. what Shutz calls “multiple realities”. See Schutz A. Transcendencies in multiple realities. In On Phenomenology and Social Relarions (Edited bv Wagner H). Universitv of Chicaeo Press, Chicago, IL: 1973: 20. For a fuller version of this man’s narrative account, see Riessman C. K. Life events, meaning and narrative: the case of infidelity and divorce. Sot. Sri. Med. 29, 743-751, 1989. 21. Schafer R. Narrration in the psychoanalytic dialogue. In On Narrafive (Edited by Mitchell M. J. T.). pp. 25-49. University of Chicago Press. Chicago, IL, 1981. 22. For a perspective that links attribution theory and divorce accounts see Harvey J. H., Weber A. L., Yarkin K. L. and Stewart B. E. An attributional approach to relationship breakdown and dissolution. In Personal Relationships 4: Dissolving Personal Relarionships (Edited by Duck S.), pp. 107-126. Academic Press, New York, 1982. 23. Parsons T. Social structure and dynamic process: the case of modern medical practice. In The Social Sysfem. Free Press, Glencoe, IL, 1951. 24. For a critique of Parsons’ formulation of the sick role, see Freidson E. Pro/ession of Medicine, pp. 205-243. Dodd Mead, New York, 1971. 25. For a defense, see Fox R. C. The Sociology ofMedicine: A Participanr Observer’s View, pp. 25-33. Prentice Hall, New York, 1989. 26. On the co-production of narratives and the role of the interviewer, See Ref. [I I], also Paget M. Experience and knowledge. Human Scud. 6, 67, 1983. 27. Riessman C. K. When gender is not enough: women interviewing women. Gender & Sot. 1, 172, 1987. 28. Halle D. America’s Working Man. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1984; Rubin L. B. Worlds of Pain. Basic Books, New York, 1976. 29. On stories as moral statements, see Linde C. Private stories in public discourse: narrative analysis in the social sciences. Poetics 15, 183, 1986. _ 30. Bereer P. L. and Luckmann T. The Social Construction of Reality. Doubleday, New York, 1966. 31. Polanyi L. Telling the-American Story. Ablex, Not-wood. NJ. 1985: Youne K. G. See Refs 13. 161. 32. For an alternahve approach, see Keily G. A. The Psychology of Personal Constructs, Vols I and 2. Norton, New York, 1955. 33. Mishler analyzes a narrative about a work identity that displays many similar features. See Mishler E. G. Work, identity and narrative: an artist-craftman’s story. In Storied Lives (Edited by Rosenwald G. and Ochberg R.). Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. In press.
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STRATEGIC USES OF NARRATIVE IN THE PRESENTATION OF SELF AND ILLNESS: A RESEARCH NOTE CATHERINEKOHLERRIES~MAN Smith College School for Social Work, Northampton, MA 01063, U.S.A. Abstract-Using GolTman’s theory and the methods of narrative analysis, the paper examines the divorce account of a white working-class man with advanced multiple sclerosis to show how he constructs a definition of his divorcing situation, and a positive masculine identity, despite massive disability. He accomplishes this positive self through narrative retelling of key events in his biography, healing discontinuities by the way he structures his account in interaction with the listener. The strategic choice of genre, or forms of narrative, guides the impression we form of him. From this case study, I show the usefulness of close textual analysis of biographical accounts of illness. Key w*orcis-narrative,
biography, multiple sclerosis, identity
INTRODUCTION We are forever composing impression of ourselves, projecting a definition of who we are, and making claims about ourselves and the world that we test and negotiate in social interaction. As Goffman remarks: “participants contribute to a single over-all definition of the situation which involves not so much a real agreement as to what exists but rather a real agreement as to whose claims concerning what issues will be temporarily honored” [ 11. Social constructivists add that we create social reality through these presentations and responses. In the research interview, as in the rest of social life, language is the major cultural resource that participants draw on to jointly create reality, a process that qualitative studies are ideally suited to uncovering. Narrative retelling in interviews is a vivid instance of this. A teller convinces a listener who wasn’t there that certain events ‘happened’, that the teller was affected by them. A particular self is constituted through these narratives, occasioned by the presence of a listener, her questions and comments. Typically, the moral character of the protagonist is sustained. This paper analyzes how one narrator, ‘Burt’-a recently separated working class man with advanced multiple sclerosis-projects a definition of himself as husband, father and worker. He narrates his experiences in each of these roles, interpreting the biographical disruption that resulted from his chronic illness [2]. Strategically, he breaks the frame set by the research interview, creating what Young calls a narrative enclave within the discourse, thereby reconstituting a self [3]. He inserts several kinds of narrative into the interaction-including stories at key points-guiding the impression we gain of him through the dexterous choice of form. The self that Burt projects is a very favorable one, and the narratives attest to his resilience. He does
not allow himself to be defined as a cuckold, as the rejected spouse (yet his wife left him for another man after he became disabled), nor does he portray himself as an inadequate parent or worker (yet his adolescent son left home and he is no longer able to hold down a job). By effectively narrating his experience, in the context of cultural understandings about sickness, he is able to project a strong masculine identity, even in the face of behavior that violates common sense definitions of masculinity. A close analysis of his narrative account, and especially its narrative structure, reveals how he accomplishes this reality. This paper also has a methodological purpose-to show how narrative analysis is done. This method is particularly well suited to studying the presentation of self in everyday life, for storifying experience is a naturalistic form for telling others about ourselves [4-6]. Unlike traditional qualitative methods, this approach does not fragment the text into discrete content categories for coding purposes but. instead, identifies longer stretches of talk that take the form of narrative-a discourse organized around time and consequential events in a ‘world’ recreated by the narrator. The approach assumes interviewees structure their replies in the ways they do for strategic reasons-to effectively communicate ‘what happened’-and, consequently, determining the organization of the discourse is an important analytic task. To enable this, a full taped transcription of the interview is made, the analyst identifies the boundaries of narrative segments, noting their contexts, and parses these texts to display the underlying structure (e.g. how clauses function strategically to orient the listener, carry the action forward, resolve it, evaluate it, etc. [7,8]). Along with this structural analysis, narratives are interpreted, both as individual units and in relation to one another, by identifying thematic and linguistic connections between the narrative segments. Taken together, they constitute a
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KOHLER
teller’s ‘narrative reconstruction’ [9] or ‘account’ [IO] of his or her lived experience [I 11. Going beyond some narrative analysts. I argue that the ‘how’ of the telling, is as important as the ‘what’ that is said, for it IS through choices in form that narrators persuade listeners and, ultimately, readers of their texts. Elsewhere I refer to this process of convincing someone who wasn’t there as ‘the teller’s problem’ in social interaction, which narrators attempt to solve by selecting and combining different genres, or forms of narrative [12]. (In this context, genre refers to types of narrative that are distinguished by a set of constitutive conventions and codes of presentation, including verb tense, temporality, sequencing, discourse markers, and other linguistic elements [13].) Here, I emphasize how Burt’s choice of narrative genre guides the impression others form of him, allowing him to assert a competent self and heal discontinuities that narrative can bind. I show that he selects the story form at key points, though more often relying on the habitual narrative genre to reconstruct ‘what happened’ in general. He elaborates his experience in non-narrative arguments as well. The moments when he inserts a story into the interaction-re-presenting particular instances for the listener-are strategically significant because this discourse form draws a listener most fully into the immediacy of the teller’s world, and into his point of view. In this interview, they are reserved for quintessential moments, and depict events that are critical to the narrator’s sense of himself as a devoted husband and responsible worker-a reality that he keeps alive despite his divorce and his disability. Goffman’s [I] concept of impression management in social interactions is useful for examining the narrative because it provides a sociological perspective on the performance aspects of language. Yet there are problems with his approach. Sociolinguists use the term ‘performance’ not in a literal or pejorative sense, but as verbal action in a social context [14], but Go!Tman is not clear on this point, sliding into a manipulative and machiavellian view of the social actor. He subtly intimates there is no self behind the performance, there is a genuine ‘reality’ that is being masked-a perspective that challenges, even trivializes, an empathetic reading of a text, such as Burt’s about physical vulnerability and loss. Nor is Goffman’s view always easy to reconcile theoretically with the view that narrative retelling is an imaginative and interpretive enterprise, a way that individuals actively shape and account for biographical disruption that disabling events have wrought in their lives [9]. Resolving the tension between Goffman’s framework and narrative theory is beyond the scope of this paper but let me say explicitly that my intention in drawing on Goffman’s insights is not to cleverly besmirch the narrator. Readers should keep this point in mind as they construct their interpretation of my interpretation of Burt’s interpretation of his experiences [ 151. As background, Burt is a 43-year-old man with a high school education who was married for 25 years before divorcing 3 years previously. He was interviewed in his home as part of a study of marital separation [12]. Like others in the sample,
RES.SMAN
he was located through probate court records of the divorcing in a northeastern state. Unlike others, he was severely disabled with multiple sclerosis, confined to a wheelchair, and dependent on services from the state. Although the structured interview schedule focused on divorce, Burt redirected the conversation at every opportunity toward the topic most salient to him-discontinuities in the appearance of a self-his masculinity as constituted in the roles of husband, father and worker, on the one hand, and his chronic illness and loss of physical function, on the other. “I
WAS A GOOD
HUSBAND”
Burt moves to control the interviewer’s impression of him early in their interaction. He says he took the initiative and filed for divorce, adding “it wasn’t my fault that she just packed up and left one day and that was the end of it.” He elaborates this definition of the situation-that he is not to blame-by moving back in time and staging a narrative, beginning with a preface [ 161: Well, I can go back 10 1975when I first found out I had MS. And when she was told by the doctor that it eventually would cripple me, put me in a wheelchair. Seems like back in 1975 that she seemed to drift apart from me, that she
didn’t accept the disease. Although the two events-his diagnosis and his divorce-are not temporally related (the diagnosis occurred 9 years before he began to live apart from his wife), he has effectively linked them. As he later elaborates, MS is responsible for the divorce, not anything he did. She didn’t ‘accept the disease’, where he implies he has. In this preface, Burt has projected a definition of the situation, making an “explicit claim to be a person of a particlar kind” [ 1, p. 13; 171. He has also made a moral demand upon the interviewer, obligating her “to value and treat him in the manner that persons of his kind have a right to expect” [ 11. The divorce narrative formally begins after a series of moves. The interviewer asks a closed ended question (which spouse was primarily responsible for the decision to separate) that Burt responds to, saying that none of the fixed responses ‘actually apply’. To borrow from Young, he breaks into the framework of the realm of the research interview, flouting its conventions [3]. She responds by creating a ‘slot’ in the interaction for a narrative (“Tell me. then, in your own words”). Into this enclave, he inserts a long of which are reproduced in story, portions transcript I. Transcript 01
02
03 :z 06 07 08 10
1
OK, when she left in February we tried to get back together in May.. [tells of going to see her in motel and asking her to “come home” and she said “I’m not coming home.“] . . , That night (p) about twelve o’clock there was a call (p) and it was her and Susan [daughter] picked the phone up and she had been drinking and she said she wanted to come home so Susan went down to the motel and picked her up.. . brought her down here
Presentation of self and illness 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29
she slept here that night she came into my room gave me a big hug and a big kiss said “I’m glad to be back” I said “I’m glad you’re back’ I says “We have all missed you.” The following day she seemed like she had a split personality seemed like she changed into a different person. She got up in the morning I came out and sat in the chair here an’ she went back to the same routine that she had done before she (p) decided to move out. She’s telling me that I’m gonna be put in a nursing home . . she’s going sell the house. And I said “hey, look, no, nothin’ is gonna change it’s not gonna be any different than before we were married. Now if you want to stay here you can, you know, you gonna be-act the same way you were before you left.” So she just packed up and left.
Notation system: (p) = pause of 3 seconds or longer, - = break off of word. Stories, more than other forms of discourse, effectively pull the listener into the teller’s point of view. They re-present a slice of life, often by dramatizing and re-enacting a particular interaction, thereby providing ‘proof’ of how it was. They draw the listener so deeply into the teller’s experience that often a kind of intersubjective agreement about ‘how it was’ is reached [I 81.To borrow from Goffman, they can also function in interaction as “defensive practices,” saving the definition of the situation that a teller has projected [l]. Through the story in Transcript 1, Burt makes the claim that he was a devoted husband. He provides an illustrative instance of how he was willing to forgive, thus laying full responsibility for the divorce on his wife. This supportive story sustains a positive identity in the face of physical disability and loss. The story also reaffirms his central position, as a man, in the hierarchy of the family. Despite his confinement to a wheelchair, the point of the story is that he stood up to his wife, refusing to allow himself to be defined as incompetent. Looking briefly at the form of the story, we see that it has many of the structural features of this genre of narrative as outlined by Labov [7]. It orients the listener to time and place (lines 1, 3, 17), contains a core plot or complicating action (lines 4,7, I l-16,20, 22) which is resolved by the protagonist’s actions (lines 25-29), and the story includes the narrator’s evaluation of the events (lines 6, 18-19). Climactic points in the plot are dramatized (lines 14-16 and 25-28), an especially effective device for building tension and drawing a listener in. The evaluative clauses (the ‘soul’ of the narrative for they convey quality of mind and the attitude of the narrator) are especially significant in this story because they convey Burt’s understanding that it was her ‘illness’, not his, that was the problem-her drinking and her ‘split personality’. Yet the story leaves us with many questions unanswered. For instance, did Burt and his wife have
1197
sexual relations on the night they got back together? The plot as he develops it skips over this topic (perhaps because he is interacting with a woman interviewer), just as his narrative account more generally leaves out any mention of the effect of his disease on the sexual aspect of their marriage. Although we have no way of knowing what ‘really’ happened [19]. MS can result in sexual impairment. And we know from elsewhere in the interview [20] that Burt’s wife took a lover toward the end of the marriage. Yet narratives are always edited versions of reality, not objective and impartial descriptions of it [21], and interviewees always make choices about what to divulge. In this case, the ambiguity about intimacy functions to uphold the definition of the divorce situation that Burt has projected from the start. Goffman [l] alerts us to attend to the impression that Burt has composed of himself, one that takes as its central thread his marital devotion and masculine competence. Burt uses the story genre at only one other point in the interview (to be discussed shortly). More typically, he conveys his experience in habitual narratives-a genre that, like a story, illustrates and pulls a listener into the teller’s world, but not nearly so completely, for it does not re-present an irresistible moment. A habitual narrative tells of the general course of events over time, rather than what happened at a sped@ point in the past, and thus is constituted with verb tenses and adverbs that mark repetition and routinization, unlike the simple past tense of stories. As a consequence of these discourse codes and conventions, it has a more distant quality and sums across larger sections of time, unlike the blow-by-blow effect of a story. Because it relates habitual events, not instantiating with a particular event, and is less emotionally affecting than a story. For example, Transcript 2 displays a portion of a longer habitual narrative [20] that, again, functions to link the illness and the divorce. In it, Burt constructs a coherent account out of events that happened over a IO-year period, making sense by interpreting his wife’s drinking against the backdrop of his loss of physical function. Again, we note that sexual performance is not mentioned. It is her problems with his disease that necessitated a divorce [22]. The habitual narrative genre Burt chooses here is ideally suited to conveying his explanatory model for his divorce, just as the story was suited to another strategic purpose. In the words of Goffman, he has informed the listener “what is,” what she “ought to see as the ‘is’” [I]. Transcript 2 01
02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13
Well in ‘75 I was diagnosed you know, at that time I was still able to walk but I had to drag my right leg and as the years went on the leg got worse my right arm started to get weak I’d start losing my balance my coordination was going and un then l-naturally I had to start using a walker and I don’t think she liked the idea of having to help me all the time in the morning help me get dressed lift me out of bed in the morning
CATHERM KOHLER RIFSMAN
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14 15 16
help me sometimes with my bowel movement and things like that you know, she couldn’t take it anymore so she started drinking (p) very heavily.
Burt is able to claim exemption from responsibility for the divorce because of aspects of the sick role [23-251. He is not to blame for his disability, is not morally accountable for getting MS and, consequently, has a right to be relieved of usual role-related activities. Whatever fault there may have been in his performance as a husband, sickness relieves him of personal blame. By effectively inserting narratives about marriage into the discourse about divorce, Burt convinces us that he was a good husband, that he was rational and forgiving. Yet the self that he creates is not cold, calculating or blaming but, instead, is full of feeling for his spouse. This is particularly evident in nonnarrative segments of his account (passages that report thoughts and actions, but do not draw the listener into a past time world of consquential events). He describes the first month after separation: “everytime I would think of her I would start crying”. Repeatedly he says life outside of marriage is “one big lonely world”. Talking of the difficulties since separation, he says: Not being with a partner, you know what I mean. You’re used to sleeping with a women for 25 years and now I am sleeping in my own bed. And there’s no one beside me to keep warm, let’s put it that way. Nights are cold.. . Somebody to hold on to, I miss that.
These touching non-narrative passages, taken together with his narrative reconstruction of specific marital events, shape our impression and make it possible to enter into this teller’s point of view, and to feel with him. He has constructed a reality that we can empathically enter by his way of telling, not simply by r&at he has told. Because so much of the interview was focused on the topic of marital separation, Burt has less chance to influence impressions of himself in other areas. Nevertheless, he does try and even succeeds in inserting narratives about parenting and work. In the “division of definitional labor” [l, p. 91 in the interview itself, both teller and listener as respondent and interviewer construct enclaves for these narratives for, as Goffman would predict, he has controlled her conduct, her responsive treatment of him. Reciprocally, she creates ‘slots’ for narrative in the question and answer format, and encourages elaboration with non-lexical utterances (uhm hum) while narratives are in progress (These have not been included in the transcripts for this paper, but are evident on the tape.) [4,26,27]. “I
WAS A GOOD
ENOUGH
FA’JIJER”
Burt deviates from the structure of the interview to tell that he has a strained relationship with his teenage son, on whom he depended for much of his daily care after his wife left, but who ultimately left home. A habitual narrative re-presents a typical conversation (see Transcript 3)-an ideal choice of form because it conveys the repetitious nature of
Transcript 01
02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10
3
There was times that (p) we’d get into an argument you know, I’d say to him “Bill, could you help me do this?” He’d be in his room watching TV and I’d holler for him, you know, to do something four or five times I’d holler for him and he wouldn’t pay any attention to me just block me out of his mind (p) you know And I felt bitter towards him, you know, when it happened.
their difficult interactions. Whereas Burt might have blamed himself or called his son a ‘rotten kid’, he does not project this definition of the situation. He absolves them both from responsibility, blaming his illness instead in a non-narrative segment: Like in ‘75 I had been sick for IO years. He was only 10 years old at the time, you know. And I didn’t have a chance to actually show him the good things in life, take him bowling, take him here, or take him to school.. . Baseball games, hockey games, things like that I never could do. . Actually I wasn’t a father to him and he could get away with lots of things some other child couldn’t. I couldn’t get up and give him a good boot in the fanny if he needed it.
This argument, like the earlier divorce narrative, rests on assumptions of the sick role [23], and the expectations for men in working-class families, as well [28]. Burt could not induct his son into the male world of sports, nor could he be the effective disciplinarian. His capacity to ‘normally’ father a son was impaired because of illness, so it is not Burt’s fault that his son didn’t turn out right. The fragmented and sometimes contradictory nature of the self has been acknowledged, but meaning has been controlled for the listener.
“I
WAS A RESPONSJBLE
WORKER”
Holding down a job is the third aspect of role performance that Burt presents-a core component of masculinity in this culture and yet the role that illness most often interferes with. He creates an enclave in the fixed question and answer format of the section of the interview on demographic characteristics to talk at length about his steady work history-a signal of the significance of this aspect of the self. Burt tells that he has been employed by the same company for many years, and he talks with pride of the company, telling how when he got sick “they got me an electric wheelchair”. Yet, he is unemployed. To resolve this contradiction, he inserts a story into the interaction (see Transcript 4) that vividly depicts his efforts to abide by the masculine work ethic despite massive physical disability. He re-enacts the last day he was employed, making himself the central character in a moral drama that also includes his boss and doctor as characters [29]. Rich in detail and elaboration, and employing structural features of the story genre noted earlier, it concludes the reconstitution of a positive self. It is a heroic portrait, depicting a man who would be a man against all odds.
Presentation of self and illness Transcript
01
02
03 04 05 06 07 08 09
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 la 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52
4
I had told my boss ahead of time that I was goin’ to see him [the doctor] and he said “well. let us know, you know, as soon as you find out so we can get your wheelchair all, you know, charged up and fixed up and everything.” So I had seen him on a Friday and I’d called soon as I got back Friday told him I’d be in that following Monday And he said “oh, it’s goin’ to be so good to have you back you’ve been out of work so long.” So I went in there (p) and before I used to be able to stand up in the men’s room you known, and urinate that way but this one time I took the urinal with me just in case I couldn’t do it. So I got up, I get in there at 7 o’clock that morning and at about 9 o’clock I felt like I had to urinate And I went over to where I usually go to try to stand up I couldn’t stand up the leg wouldn’t hold me they have a handicapped stall. So I went into the handicapped stall to try and use the urinal. Couldn’t use it. I had the urge that I had to go but nothing was coming out. So back to my desk I went and I continued working. And about fifteen or twenty minutes later I get the urge again. So back to the men’s room I go back to the handicapped stall. All day long this is happening. I couldn’t move my urine everything just blocked up. When I get home I figured well maybe it’s because I’m nervous coming back to work the first day on the job. So I get home (p) I still couldn’t go. So I called my doctor, Dr George and he said “well, can you get up to [name of hospital]?” I said, “well, I’m in my pajamas.” He said, “well, I’ll send an ambulance” so they sent an ambulance and brought me up there. And he put a catheter on me soon as he put that on I think I must have let out maybe two pints. Everything just went shhhhh. You know, I felt so relieved. And he said “well, I’m goin’ to keep you in,” he says “I want, I want this uh (p) urinologist to take a look at you.” So it was Dr Lavini I don’t know if you know Dr Lavini He’s one of the best around. He looked at it and said “we’re going to have to operate.” Everything just blocked up. They had to make the opening larger so the urine would come out, you know, freely. So I was in [name of hospital] I had gone to work for that one day.. .
CONCLUSION
1 have used narrative physically
disabled
analysis to show how a man sustains a positive impres-
1199
sion of himself-a portrait that contrasts sharply with some of the ‘realities’ of his condition and how he might he viewed, given outward signs and other ‘facts’ about his divorce [30]. To do this, he creates enclaves in the structured interview to assert a self, with the narrative retelling healing some of the discontinuities and contradictions in the nature of this self. The thematic material, while quite ancillary to the manifest purpose of the interview, can be
inserted and sustained because it observes the convention of narrative in conversation [31]. By retelling consequential events and elaborating on their meanings, he guides the impression that he gives, sustaining a reality, and a self, one that is sealed inside the narrative [3]. Although narrative analysts have focused on the story as the prototypic form, this case study shows how a narrator can select from several genres, and move back and forth between them to make points. Burt combines a series of habitual narratives and tells two stories of paradigmatic instances of what it is like to be a man. The combination of genres is especially effective and, I have argued elsewhere [12], is generally characteristic of qualitative replies if one examines them closely. It is crucial to attend to the linguistic coding of narrative segments of text, and their contexts, to see how genres illuminate in different ways how individuals construe their experience 1321. As a whole, this man’s narrative reconstruction of a biography disrupted by illness preserves key aspects of his masculinity-his adequacy as husband, father and worker [S]. Although chronic illness has interfered with his life plan in each domain, the narrator creates a social self that is competent, controlled and feelingful. This is not a portrait of a man who is denying the severity of his illness, or the sadness of his divorce, but neither is it a portrait of victimization and dependency. Narrative analysis has much to contribute to the study of chronic illness, as this method focuses on naturally occurring texts of identity that emerge in the course of interviews [33]. Telling narratives is a major way that individuals make sense of disruptive events in their lives. Beyond making meaning, examining the story told and the story listened to can illuminate the performance aspects of language-how we create our realities and ourselves through the strategic choices we make in social interaction. Acknowledgements-This research was jointly conducted with Naomi Gerstel and supported by a fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health (SF32MH09206). I thank Elliot Mishler, an anonymous reviewer, and my philosophy study group for comments on earlier drafts and Muriel Poulin for her clerical support.
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Helm J.). University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA, 1967. 8. Labov W. Speech actions and reactions in personal narrative. In Analyzing Discourse: Text and Talk (Edited by Tannen D.). Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC, 1982. 9. Williams G. The genesis of chronic illness: narrative reconstruction. Social. Hlrh Illn. 6, 175, 1984. IO. Scott M. B. and Lyman S. M. Accounts. Am. Social. Rev. 46, 46, 1968. II. This summary of the steps in doing a narrative analysis
is adopted from Bell S. Becoming a political woman: the reconstruction and interpretation of experience through stories. In Gender and Discourse: The Power of Talk (Edited by Todd A. D. and Fisher S.). Ablex, Norwood, NJ, 1988. 12. Riessman C. K. Divorce Talk: Women and Men Make Sense of Personal Relationships. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1990. 13. In this paper, I focus on two genres-habitual narrative and story-but elsewhere [I21 I discuss others, including hypothetical and episodic narratives. Borrowing from structuralist critics such as Roland Barthes, the set of conventions and codes in a genre is a kind of implicit contract between listener and teller, altered from age to age, but which constitute a set of expectations that enable the listener to make sense of a teller’s utterance, that is “to naruralize it, by relating it to the world as this is defined and ordered by the prevailing culture.” (Barthes, as summarized in Abrams M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms, 5th edn, p. 74. Holt, Rinehardt & Winston, New York, 1988.) For another view of genre see Derrida H. The law of genre. In Ref. 161. 14. Bauman R. Srory, Perform&e and Event.’ ?omextual Studies of Oral Narrative. Cambridge University Press, London, 1986. 15. On the interactive production of texts from the discipline of literary criticism, see Fish S. Is There a Texr in This Class? Harvard University Press. Cambridge. I MA, 1980. 16. For more on the rules for producing narratives in . . . -_ conversatton, and how they are set otl trom normal discourse through frames, see Young K. G. Taleworlds and Storyrealms. Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1987.
17. Goffman does not mean “defensive” or “projected” in the Freudian sense. 18. I am grateful to Dennie Wolf for this observation. 19. Katharine Young makes the important distinction between the story realm (the realm of the narrative discourse) and the taleworld (in which events the story recounts are understood to have transpired). See Ref. [ 161. As she notes, this distinction depends on the existence of different realms of being. what Shutz calls “multiple realities”. See Schutz A. Transcendencies in multiple realities. In On Phenomenology and Social Relarions (Edited bv Wagner H). Universitv of Chicaeo Press, Chicago, IL: 1973: 20. For a fuller version of this man’s narrative account, see Riessman C. K. Life events, meaning and narrative: the case of infidelity and divorce. Sot. Sri. Med. 29, 743-751, 1989. 21. Schafer R. Narrration in the psychoanalytic dialogue. In On Narrafive (Edited by Mitchell M. J. T.). pp. 25-49. University of Chicago Press. Chicago, IL, 1981. 22. For a perspective that links attribution theory and divorce accounts see Harvey J. H., Weber A. L., Yarkin K. L. and Stewart B. E. An attributional approach to relationship breakdown and dissolution. In Personal Relationships 4: Dissolving Personal Relarionships (Edited by Duck S.), pp. 107-126. Academic Press, New York, 1982. 23. Parsons T. Social structure and dynamic process: the case of modern medical practice. In The Social Sysfem. Free Press, Glencoe, IL, 1951. 24. For a critique of Parsons’ formulation of the sick role, see Freidson E. Pro/ession of Medicine, pp. 205-243. Dodd Mead, New York, 1971. 25. For a defense, see Fox R. C. The Sociology ofMedicine: A Participanr Observer’s View, pp. 25-33. Prentice Hall, New York, 1989. 26. On the co-production of narratives and the role of the interviewer, See Ref. [I I], also Paget M. Experience and knowledge. Human Scud. 6, 67, 1983. 27. Riessman C. K. When gender is not enough: women interviewing women. Gender & Sot. 1, 172, 1987. 28. Halle D. America’s Working Man. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1984; Rubin L. B. Worlds of Pain. Basic Books, New York, 1976. 29. On stories as moral statements, see Linde C. Private stories in public discourse: narrative analysis in the social sciences. Poetics 15, 183, 1986. _ 30. Bereer P. L. and Luckmann T. The Social Construction of Reality. Doubleday, New York, 1966. 31. Polanyi L. Telling the-American Story. Ablex, Not-wood. NJ. 1985: Youne K. G. See Refs 13. 161. 32. For an alternahve approach, see Keily G. A. The Psychology of Personal Constructs, Vols I and 2. Norton, New York, 1955. 33. Mishler analyzes a narrative about a work identity that displays many similar features. See Mishler E. G. Work, identity and narrative: an artist-craftman’s story. In Storied Lives (Edited by Rosenwald G. and Ochberg R.). Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. In press.
