Narrative, text and time: Telling the same story twice in the oral narrative reporting of 7/7

Abstract

The question of whether it is possible to ‘tell the same story twice’ has been explored in work on conversational narratives, which has set out to understand the existence of some kind of ‘underlying semantic structure’ and ‘script’ (Polanyi, 1981). In conversational narratives, ‘local occasioning’ and ‘recipient design’ (Sacks et al., 1974) are factors that determine the form and function of the story. Here, ongoing talk frames the narrative while other participants provide a ready made audience, all of which, form part of the storytelling process. What happens, however, when a survivor of 7/7 (the date in 2005 of the co-ordinated terrorist bomb attacks on the London transport system in the morning rush hour, which killed 52 and injured hundreds of people), whose personal narrative was reported globally on the day of the event, is again interviewed two and a half years later for their experience of that morning? Is the ‘same story’ retold? Specifically, how far does the latest story replicate the experience and events of the first and which of the prototypical features of a personal narrative – at the level of both the macrostructure and microstructure – remain constant? By comparing both interviews and using Labov and Waletzky’s (1967) narrative framework as the central model for analysis, it is possible to see whether events within the complicating action or features of evaluation remain the most memorable, that is, they are recalled in the second telling as important aspects of the experience, and may be seen to be core narrative categories. While findings show that both narratives are comparable in form, a closer investigation finds compelling differences as well as unexpected linguistic choices. Not only has the second narrative become informed by other, external narratives to become part of a broader, mediated narrative but various discourse strategies of ‘dissociation’ in both interviews have resulted in a retelling of a traumatic experience that appears to have features of an eye witness report rather than a personal narrative. Moreover, this blurring of two distinct genres of storytelling provides a true insight of how the narrator positions himself inside this terrible experience.

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