If you have very small samples or short stories. When you have so little data that comparing and contrasting among respondents is impossible, then look at your data close up. Although these strategies are suited to working with samples comprised of even only one narrator, short segments of transcripts, and the smallest of parts of speech, they also can complement any of the broad strokes approaches that we’ve been discussing.
These strategies can be of help whether you’re using a realist paradigm or a more constructionist one. In the former situation, they can give you insight into a narrator’s possible biases; in the latter, as Polkinghorne (2007) had suggested, they can bring nuance and enhanced validity to your understanding of a narrator’s interpretations. Bauer and Thompson’s (2004) review of works on Jamaican transnational migration warns us to go about this with a grain of salt, being aware of how culturally available and historically grounded forms of expression (or what Part III will speak of as discourses) may be mistaken for distinctive and telling individual ones. They give the example of how,
when a woman describes herself as a stepdaughter treated as a Cinderella, she may be using this ancient metaphor not only to convey her childhood sufferings, but also to indicate the obstacles she has successfully overcome. It would be very dangerous, without looking at an interview as a whole, to assume that because she spoke of herself as a Cinderella child, the woman’s sense of self was as a Cinderella. (2004: 347)
A final observation before we launch into these strategies is that the imagery and other devices that we might interpret as narrators’ expressions of subconsciously held meanings, following Freud (1900/1999), are also used consciously as rhetorical devices by politicians and creative writers. It is probably best to be more cautious about claims as to whether a narrator uses a rhetorical device consciously or subconsciously, and more bold about claims as to how it affected you as a reader or listener.
Textbox 3.1: A Summary of Strategies for Beginning Fine-grained Analysis of Meaning
Remember that the expression of meanings is filtered or expressed through culturally available discourse.
Be cautious about attributing intention to speakers’ use of literary and rhetorical devices.
Analyzing Emplotment, Up Close
Labov and Waletzky’s Model of the Story
Emplotment is a term that speaks to narrators’ choices about what to include within their stories’ plots. The social sciences’ pre-eminent strategy for understanding emplotment was developed by sociolinguists William Labov and Joshua Waletzky (1967; see also Labov, 1997). In their model, because stories place events in sequence, that sequence must be understood to contain an argument for why those events occurred. The tiny story ‘Alice ate an orange and then got sick’ suggests that the orange caused Alice’s illness, while ‘Alice got sick and then ate an orange,’ proposes that Alice thinks the orange will help her. Labov and Waletzky’s model also posited that all stories had essentially the same formal structure, consisting of the following sequence of elements (plus one more that we’ll take up shortly):
an optional abstract that briefly sums up the story’s most newsworthy event.
orientation to the who, what, when, and where of events.
complicating action, a sequence of events that are implicitly causally related and relevant, and that include the event announced in the abstract.
an optional resolution, explaining the consequences of the most newsworthy event.
an optional coda that signals that the narrator considers the story complete.
To think through aspects of how this model works, we use the story of ‘Mollie’s worst job’ (see Textbox 3.2), told by a Toronto actor with whom Katherine conducted a career history interview. Mollie’s story initially abides nicely by Labov and Waletzky’s model, with an abstract in line 1 that signals that a restaurant’s failure to close when a customer died is the story’s most newsworthy event. Mollie orients us in line 2 to the story’s setting. By line 6, the restaurant’s failure to close has occurred. Mollie’s decision in line 10 to quit the job seems on track to be the story’s resolution. But, then, the model becomes confusing to apply. In line 13, Mollie orients us to a new character, that of a customer who asks to speak to the manager. Are we still in the same story? Are we in a new story whose abstract Mollie has opted not to provide, but at which she hints with ‘That’s never a good sign’? (line 14). Does it even matter?
These questions illustrate the frustrations of working with the sequential stages of Labov and Waletzky’s model, which often winds up being used as a foil. Countless studies have ‘discovered’ that stories may lack beginnings, middles, or ends, and that they do not all march stalwartly forward through the fields of time. More creative projects take the strategy of investigating why, or with what consequences, groups of narrators tell stories that systematically diverge from the model, either by making them more elaborate or by omitting elements altogether. Etter-Lewis (1993) does so in discovering that, as path-breaking African American women professionals told their life histories, they often embedded stories about significant others within their longer stories. Etter-Lewis maintained that by elaborating their stories in this way, her respondents were underscoring their sense of self as self-in-community. Meanwhile, Burnell and colleagues (2010) show that British veterans who recount their traumatic war stories with less coherence – e.g., by omitting orientations to the stories’ characters and locales, or by presenting contradictory complicating action – are those who garner less social support and perhaps therefore find it more difficult to cope with their traumas.
Another strategy starts off by modifying or discarding elements of Labov and Waletzky’s model, to arrive at a looser definition of story. Stanley (2008: 437) employs a working definition that includes ‘an account of things that have happened (usually, to some people), which has a beginning, middle and end, although not necessarily in this order; which involves some form of emplotment so that the story develops or at least has an end,’ while Frost (2009: 15) even writes of ‘identifying those sections of text that sounded, looked or simply “felt” like stories.’ Labov and Waletzky might shudder at this. However, these amendments let Stanley, Frost, and other researchers move on to the remaining component of Labov and Waletzky’s model, one that is not locked into any sequence. They concentrate on the narrator’s evaluation of what has happened. Like Frost (2009), we regard Labov and Waletzky’s emphasis on identifying and isolating evaluations to be the finest of their contributions to NA.
Returning to Mollie’s story, we see her offering evaluations at numerous points, in both direct and subtle forms. She explicitly describes the customer’s compensation-seeking as appalling and awful (lines 18, 20), and the manager’s decision as ‘unbelievable’ (line 12), while conveying her view that the manager was callous by means of her hand gesture (line 5). Her dismay at their profit motives and her decision, in this ‘defining moment’ (line 11), to quit the restaurant job connects to the money-versus-art struggle that she, like other cultural workers in the study, references elsewhere in her interview (Bischoping and Quinlan, 2013). Mollie’s effort to come to terms with the seeming unreality of what happened is also couched in terms familiar in the theatre, i.e. in her questioning of whether this was ‘real life,’ a movie, a TV show, or a black comedy (lines 7, 9, 21, 22). (In sharing this story in a graduate course on Interview, Katherine proposed to her students that Mollie’s use of ‘literal’ (lines 1, 7) could also be marking the reality/unreality question. The students, who were of Mollie’s generation, contended that ‘literal’ no longer had this meaning, and was simply a culturally available way of marking emphasis.)