Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-Narratology by Arthur W. Frank

Author:Arthur W. Frank
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2010-07-03T16:00:00+00:00

5

Exemplars of Dialogical Narrative Analyses

A scientific activity is acknowledged or rejected as good science by how close it is to one or more exemplars, that is, practical prototypes of good scientific work.—Bent Flyvbjerg

Oral history does not cultivate the average, but often perceives the exceptional and unique to be more representative.—Alessandro Portelli

Every narrative analysis needs to discover its own singular way to proceed, but no one does narrative analysis for the first time. As Bent Flyvbjerg writes in the first of this chapter’s epigraphs, analysis claims to be science by following exemplars that are recognized as science.1 That is another level of dialogue: between the present analysis and previous ones. Because this dialogue, like any other, depends crucially on difference, following exemplars does not mean mimicking them. The distinctive originality of each previous analysis is its creative discovery of how to represent stories in a manner most appropriate to the research interests but also true to the stories themselves. These exemplars are resources for future work, but they are not templates.

This chapter presents six forms of narrative analysis. I discuss them not to synthesize some unified method from their practices, but rather to suggest what makes each exemplary. Specifically, what makes each a narrative analysis and also a dialogical analysis? If the socio aspect of socio-narratology was sometimes bracketed in the last chapter, here it returns full force. Each of these exemplars is committed to understanding how stories make life social, or in some cases, how stories reveal the loss of what makes life social. In all these exemplars, either stories are working, or the analysis is about what prevents them from working and the problems that causes. The work the stories do is not all good, but that is the topic of the final chapter.

One presupposition these exemplars share is expressed by this chapter’s second epigraph, from Alessandro Portelli. That statement begins a passage in which Portelli discusses the truth of stories and the different objectives of narrative truth versus factual truth. As an example, he cites historical research about slavery in the American South. The research concluded that “slaves were likely to be whipped an average of 0.7 times per year.”2 But what does this statistic—representing what Portelli notes is a physical impossibility—mean to those who were slaves, and thus what does it say about the system of slavery? Portelli observes:

The slave who was whipped one hundred times may illuminate the institution of slavery more than those who were whipped 0.7 times per year; the tiny number of drug victims in an industrial town may give us precious clues to youth experience as a whole. And one creative storyteller, a brilliant verbal artist, is as rich a source of knowledge as any set of statistics. (58)

Flyvbjerg, who does not cite Portelli, makes the same point:

When the objective is to achieve the greatest possible amount of information on a given problem or phenomenon, a representative or a random sample may not be the most appropriate strategy. This is because the typical or average case is often not the richest in information.

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