More broadly speaking, we can observe how narratives serve to explain the breaches, turmoil, discontinuities, or glitches in our lives. Järvinen (2001), for example, analyzes the justifications and excuses in the life histories of two male alcoholics in Copenhagen to show how they are turning their amoral behavior into moral tales that say more about who they want to be than who they have been becoming. Another strategy holds that the narratives we generate in such circumstances are drawn from cultural repertoires, that is, the conventional narratives available in a specific cultural context (Linde, 1993). This focus somewhat echoes our earlier mention of how narrating epiphanies in one’s life are linked to cultural and institutional contexts but here we see more specific emphasis on how these narratives are culturally constituted and perhaps constrained. Among Soviet Gulag survivors, Figes found some to offer what he called a ‘Survival’ narrative of transcending troubles through individual struggle (2008: 126). Although this is a narrative that will be familiar in many cultural contexts, Figes also found survivors to offer a distinctively ‘Soviet’ narrative (p. 16) of taking consolation in thinking that their forced labor had contributed to the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War (World War II) or to the Soviet economy, creating the industrial towns in which they and former Gulag administrators continued to live and in which they take pride. ‘It is our little Leningrad,’ (p. 131) says one such survivor of her fume-ridden Arctic mining town.
Within a familiar setting, we may take repertoires for explaining discontinuity, and even for identifying what constitutes a discontinuity, so much for granted that they become invisible. Charlotte Linde (1993) proposes that a strategy for locating discontinuities and repertoires is to hone in on what narrators take the most pains to explain and how they go about doing so. Applying this strategy to white middle-class Americans’ career histories, Linde (1993) observed that her subjects offered copious explanations of how they found silver linings in the accidental turns their careers had taken. They also exerted themselves to explain how apparent discontinuities in their careers could actually be understood as continuities at some deeper level. These narrators achieved coherence by using cultural repertoires that emphasized the persistent exercise of agency, not to mention having a job. Linde’s strategy is thus alert to the values accentuated in particular contexts and to the hazards of appearing to fail to embody them. (If this appeals to you, then Part III’s discussions of discourse analysis should, since cultural repertoires might equally be called ‘discourses.’)
As this review of strategies for studying narrative’s relation to the self draws to a close, we note that it has been preoccupied with projects of self-understanding in which bounded individualism and rationality are valorized (see Bordo, 1986). If individuals can understand themselves and tell their stories, the logic goes, they can become happier. Much as the urge to self-expression may be being experienced as natural, who has been schooled to tell what to whom, and to what end, reflects social inequalities (Tilly, 2006). Steedman (2000) also makes this case through her 300-year history of the project of self-narration, in which she draws parallels between the recent flourishing of pedagogy about self-expression and the requirement in place in England since the eighteenth century that the poor confess their troubles as a condition of obtaining social assistance. Freund (2014) even cautions that oral histories can compel narrators to construct selves as something to be known, to be fixed, and to be surveilled. In Chapter 9, we will see such themes again emphasized by philosopher Michel Foucault.
Moreover, cross-cultural studies have long pointed to alternate conceptions of the self that emphasize relational and communitarian values (e.g., De Craemer, 1983; Markus and Kitayama, 1991). In certain contexts, neither the concept of the self as an essence nor that of the self as a process of narration holds up. Further, citing examples from their own and others’ ethnographies around the globe, in which narrators who had been asked for life stories presented information about myths, taboos, or their lineage, sometimes in song, sometimes in dramatic performance, and sometimes by handing over their identity cards, Kratz (2001) and Giles-Vernick (2001) argue that the life story – and the conception of the self that it entails – is far from universal. If your respondents explicitly or implicitly question the logic by which you understand the self, consider making that the focus of your investigation.
Textbox 2.4: A Summary of Strategies for Studying the Narrative Process
Explore whether your narrators think of their selves as essences or as processes of narration.
Ask what the implications are of viewing one’s self as a narrative (or by a particular narrative about their selves).
Inquire into how well models relating narrative to breaches of the self can be generalized.
Observe how narratives serve to explain the breaches, turmoil, discontinuities, or glitches in our lives.
If your respondents question the logic by which you understand the self, consider focusing your investigation there.
Chapter Summary
Table 2.1
People are storytellers engaged in a search for meaning, their memories and constructions of their experiences intimately linked to the flows or eddies of time. Table 2.1 sums up the relation between how data is viewed, what typical data are, and the paradigm informing analysis. In broad strokes, if we think of time as flowing forward like a river, talk data can help realist analysts piece together the answer to the question ‘what happened?’ If we think of narratives as constructed in the present, but eddying into the future and back into the past, then we have many choices for how analysis of talk data can proceed. Each of these is profoundly humanist in its orientation, valuing the individual search for meaning and capacity to re-evaluate the past, rather than seeing these as impediments. Through talk data, we can aim to understand the present-day meanings of the past, and how and why communities and sub-communities may remember the past in ways that align with or be distinct from official histories. Alternately, we can analyze talk data to understand how individuals experience the course and stages of their lifetimes, in terms of how their agency is conditioned by various social structures and of how their lives are linked to those of others. Our final broad strokes analytic strategies take up how the self can be understood to have continuity, yet be able to change, through its narrative essence. The structure of a narrator’s story thus becomes a clue to the state of the narrator’s self.
Three Fine-grained Analyses of Meaning
So far, we have painted narrative analysis in broad strokes, outlining strategies for comparing sizable samples of narratives and lengthy segments of interview transcripts in order to find their common themes, orientations, or storylines. We now turn to literary, linguistic, and psychoanalytically based strategies for focusing more closely on the miniscule, and the meanings it conveys. These will be especially useful in three situations:
If you’re thinking, ‘I just have stories! I don’t think my project fits into any of the broad strokes approaches discussed so far!’ Okay. Then try these. You may need only one or two strategies, pursued in depth, for your project to work.
If you’re thinking, ‘Sure, I have some stories, but storytelling isn’t all that my respondents