Narrative analysis offers unique charms for the methodologically minded, too. The strategies we discuss in this part of the book are derived from an extraordinarily wide range of disciplines, each bringing something to the party. You will find historians and psychologists, philosophers and journalists, poets and geographers, anthropologists and more, jostling noisily and happily. The challenge is largely to synthesize their offerings. Many typologies of narrative analysis are available, most notably that developed by American sociologist Catherine Kohler Riessman (2005). But, when we compare her fourfold typology to those outlined by United Kingdom (UK) health researchers Phoenix, Smith, and Sparkes (2010) or South African education researchers Rogan and de Kock (2005), or UK psychologist Nollaig Frost (2009) we find the same terms, such as ‘structural’ or ‘performative’ narrative analysis, to have inconsistent or even contradictory meanings. Our solution has been to avoid choosing amongst the mid-range theorizing that these typologies represent. Instead, we situate NA research questions, concepts, and analytic strategies in relation to their ontological and epistemological underpinnings.
So, what is a narrative? We begin by defining stories or narratives, two terms we use interchangeably, as recountings of experiences that have taken place over time. Time is an essential element of narratives, whether we are thinking of talk about a specific period, such as this afternoon, about what has been continuous over time, such as our habit of having tea together, or about change, such as what happened after 9/11. Time matters because when narrators turn the vast complexity of their experiences into the stories that they tell, they are mustering what they now understand to be most important about what happened into a parsimonious sequence. To analyze a story is to analyze the consequences, the meanings explicit or implicit in it, to understand how narrators are answering questions such as: What is the essence of what happened? Was what happened ethical? Was it desirable – and by what system of values? Why did it happen? What caused things to differ from ‘the usual’? How did I understand it then? What does it mean for me, and others, now? What is to be learned?
We begin with a chapter on ‘broad strokes’ strategies of working with oral histories or life histories, using narratives to understand the past, or treating narratives as speaking to the perspectives of the present. The next chapter of ‘fine-grained’ narrative analysis strategies take a magnifying lens to stories and the surrounding text, drawing on literary and psychoanalytic perspectives. It is in Chapter 4, on interviewing, that we shift from thinking of stories as texts to thinking of them as told in the moment of the interview, jointly constructed by narrators and listeners who come to the interview from different social locations, and are caught up in each others’ presences as stories emerge. The interdisciplinary party that is narrative analysis smiles on all of these strategies, combining them freely, mixing grain and grape in a way that you will not see elsewhere in this book.
Two Broad Strokes Approaches to Narrative Analysis
Broadly different research questions and different ways of conceiving of time inform how we have divided this chapter into sections. We start off with the oral historian’s question: ‘What exactly happened?’ The strategies for answering all orient to time as though it were a river that flows clearly forward from a fixed, knowable past into the present. As we will explain, to believe that this question can make sense in the first place is to rely on positivist/realist paradigms.
Next, we take heed of how time can instead be conceived of as a river’s eddy. That is, from the standpoint of the storytelling present at the eddy’s center, narrators can be thought of as looking back upon their past experiences. What they see there informs how they gaze toward the future; likewise, what they today imagine or hope their futures will be whirls back to inform how they look back upon their pasts (see Ricoeur, 1984). With this conception of time, narratives do not track the ‘real’ course of the past, but instead speak to the perspectives of the present and to projections of the future. Exploring narratives in this way involves shifting – to various degrees – toward a constructionist paradigm for research, one that values the multiplicity of narrators’ possible subjective interpretations and meanings, and the processes by which they arrive at them. The three broad strokes strategies that we set forth use narratives to explore: present-day meanings of the past; the transitions, turning points, and interconnectedness of lives; and the relation of narrative to the self and its mutability over time.
Knowing the Past through Oral History
Ontology and Epistemology in the Realist Paradigm
Within the discipline of history, the 1960s and 1970s saw a fresh blossoming of oral history research, in which personal narratives were recognized as a valuable source of information about overlooked or obscured aspects of the past. At the outset of that new blossoming, historians had predominantly endorsed positivism. In response to the ontological question, ‘What can be known?’ positivist historians would say, ‘Facts about what took place in the past.’ (Historians have likewise tended to be realists, which means that they believe some real past does exist, independent of anyone’s observing it. If a tree falls in a realist’s forest, it always makes a sound.)
With regard to the epistemological question, ‘How do we know?’ positivist historians would answer that they are objective knowers, ones who observe the past from a neutral, value-free position. Thus, although many practitioners of oral history had avowedly political motivations for posing research questions about the hidden histories of subjugated groups, positivism informed how those in history departments defended the validity of their sources and analyses to colleagues accustomed to scrutinizing written sources. ‘Our analyses are valid because memories canbe accurate,’ the oral historians would have said, falling back to the position that if the vagaries of oral narrators’ memories and ephemerality of talk had tainted their data, so too had the subjectivity of the document writers of times past.
It was historian Luisa Passerini who, in 1979, made a significant intervention into her discipline’s paradigm with her interviews about Italy under fascism. Passerini (1979) maintained that the conflicted feelings that her working class narrators recounted did not taint her project of discovering the objective truths of the past so much as they served as truths of a qualitatively different character. That her narrators had felt their labor to be a moral duty at the same time as they found it alienating helped to explain why they initially did not revolt against fascism, but later did: their subjectivity held the seeds for revolt. Since Passerini’s intervention, oral historians in history departments have been far less apologetic about working with subjective data. In so doing, those seeking out the truths of the past have not had to abandon their positivist paradigm. As Guba and Lincoln (1994) explain, positivism can be stretched to incorporate and welcome subjective data, treating it as commensurate with what more objective sources offer. Thus, to technical analyses of the 1984 Bhopal, India industrial disaster, Mukherjee (2010) adds the voices of survivors as they recount their first glimpses of the strange white mist that would change their lives, their harrowing stampede for survival, and the continuing ordeal of unpredictable health conditions that they experience as monstrous.
Strategies for Rigorous Realist Analysis
Within both positivism and realism, reliance on talk data gathered well after events have passed means that errors of memory are seeping in, muddying oral historians’ views into the past. Important criteria for such an analysis are whether it minimizes such errors and assesses whether data reliably point to clear conclusions: every single strategy we outline is concerned with achieving rigor by that definition. A first strategy is to take into account oral historians’ experiences with the reliability of various kinds of oral evidence. Finnegan (2006) provides a most helpful summary of the reliability of key data involved in tracking individuals. While people’s memories of place names tend to be highly reliable, memories of first names and of dates are fraught with error, owing to nicknaming, mix-ups