In a strategy that doesn’t hinge on grammar, Marie-Françoise Chanfrault-Duchet (1991) recommends that a narrator’s key phrases can be used to analyze how a narrator understands and problematizes the link of self to normative social models, making a micro to macro link that intrinsically involves the narrator’s agency. Key phrases can indicate that the narrator accepts, denies, resists, or is ambivalent about these models. Amber’s grandmother, for example, used to cap off stories of hardships, such as of a family member’s difficulty in obtaining adequate health care, with the phrase ‘That’s just the way it is.’ This phrase would turn stories that could otherwise have been read as outright criticisms of the social model into resigned acceptance of it.
Textbox 3.4: Voice and Nominalization
Textbox 3.5: A Summary of Strategies for Discerning the Language of Agency
Notice which agents stories highlight.
Use pronouns and voice as clues about agency.
Observe what key phrases reveal about how a narrator problematizes the link of self to social norms.
Observing Uses of Imagery and Figurative Language
Although time and sequence, and related ideas about perspective, cause, and effect, are all essential to storytelling, there is good reason to pay attention to the ways that narrators talk that are not all about plot. Stoler and Strassler (2006) press narrative analysts to recognize this by contrasting how Javanese people who had been servants spoke of working for Japanese occupiers versus Dutch colonizers. These narrators spoke spiritedly about the Japanese occupation of Java, but told few eventful stories about injustice they had experienced at Dutch colonizers’ hands. Rather than expressing their interpretations of colonial relations through plot, they mentioned fragments of concrete sensory memories of employers who would pat them on the head, scold them, or eat only ‘potatoes, potatoes, always potatoes, potatoes with this, potatoes with that … potatoes, potatoes, potatoes non-stop … with steak’ (p. 34). Stoler and Strassler thus propose that submerged meanings, judgments, and markers of difference were surfacing through imagery, that is, through vivid descriptions that appeal to the senses. The same can be proposed of figures of speech, defined as words or phrases whose meaning extends beyond its literal interpretation, such as metaphors, catchphrases, and proverbs.
In oral histories with women who left Ireland in the 1930s, Louise Ryan (2002) noted how frequently the narrators mentioned clothing, whether in references to wearing an undershirt made of flour sack during adolescence, having painful and squeaky shoes while training in England to become a nurse, or buying a ‘bottle green’ (p. 50) outfit to wear for a first trip back home. One power of such imagery, and thus one reason to look out for it, is that it invites a narrative’s audience to partake in the narrator’s experiences and evaluations. If reading about a story of squeaky shoes led you to imagine hearing a squeak or to feel vicarious embarrassment, then this image has begun to draw you into sympathy with the narrator’s point of view. Further, by recounting detailed images such as the precise shade of a green suit, narrators can persuade their audiences that they still feel close to their earlier lived experiences and are able to recall them faithfully (Ross and Buehler, 1994). According to Tannen (2007), narrators who voluntarily divulge detailed images are also showing that they are at ease with their audience. This sign of a narrator’s trust can be used by constructionist researchers to strengthen the claims to rigor that Polkinghorne (2007) discussed, i.e., the claim that a narrative reflects experienced meanings. For all these reasons, considering whether detailed images have been provided, and how and why they affect you, can be a useful strategy.
Further, you might test whether the meanings of a narrative’s imagery corroborates what you have observed about the narrative’s plot. Ryan (2002) observed that her narrators repeatedly mentioned clothing as a symbol of their life transitions, tensions about family relationships, and experiences of belonging or being an outsider in Ireland and England, all elements directly relevant to the analytic concerns typical in a life course perspective. In our reading of Mollie’s story in Textbox 3.2, one of its most commanding images is that of the dead woman being ‘carried out with a blanket over her face’ (line 7). The relation between this woman’s dead and covered face, and Mollie’s new and clear-sighted awakening to the realization of her employer’s profit motive, is very nearly one in which a death leads to a figurative rebirth. Because Mollie’s distinctive and personal experience is expressed in a widely available vocabulary for speaking of epiphanies (DeGloma, 2010), the imagery of her story corroborates its epiphany theme.
The strategy of paying particular attention to narrators’ uses of metaphors is worthwhile because of the wealth of meanings that such expressions reveal. Metaphors work by taking mental associations about a source domain, one that is usually concrete and readily accessible, and mapping them onto a target domain that is usually more abstract or unfamiliar. Take this statement that Kamal, a Biology undergraduate at a large Canadian university, made at a focus group on first-year university experiences conducted for our colleague Logan Donaldson:
The first time I was at [X University], I walked into Stavener Hall and you just see a bunch of ants going everywhere, so it’s not ... I wouldn’t say it’s a home but it’s not horrible either.
Here, Kamal uses ‘ants’ as the source domain in his metaphor for the people in Stavener Hall, who are his target domain. He thus invites readings of these people as rational, purposeful, and industrious individuals, scuttling in an undifferentiated and not especially gregarious mass within an environment that dwarfs them. Had Kamal instead chosen lemmings or cats, sled dogs, dinosaurs, or robots as his source domain, a host of different evaluations, again condensed into a single word, would have been implied.
In Metaphors We Live By, linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson (2003) explain how metaphors are socially shared and can direct understandings (also see Gibbs, 2008). We can be on the watch for metaphors that become extended throughout a narrative or narratives, linking associations into an argument. An example is of how adolescent Bosniak girls born of war rapes speak of themselves as cancers whose malignant contamination of healthy tissue (i.e., their loved ones) can be destroyed only by bloodletting (i.e., suicide) (Erjavec and Volcčicč, 2010). To assess the universality of a metaphor can also be helpful. When Henry (1999) explored how Hmong migrants to the US understood measles, she found that many of them metaphorically equated their bodies with landscapes, and measles with agricultural crops that responded to changes in weather and the seasons. In contrast, American health care professionals metaphorically equated measles and other diseases with an enemy in warfare. These differences directed profoundly different understandings of how measles should be treated. For instance, Henry explains that Hmong could understand a fever as a way for a rash, equated with seed, to grow and run its course, as in this narration about a child’s illness: ‘maybe the measles start on her body – that’s why the body is kept hot – for it to come out. Otherwise you make the body cool and measles [will be] dead inside and [this] will cause a problem for the body’ (p. 41).
Working with imagery and figurative language poses especial challenges when research requires translation between languages. Identifying the challenges and explaining how they affect narrators’ apparent meanings is important in a rigorous analysis. Often social scientists, like professional translators, choose to aim for what is called transparency, rendering the meaning of the original in a way that readers will readily grasp, rather than for fidelity, a word-for-word