Small stories as a new perspective in narrative and identity analysis

Critical Analysis

In this text, the authors argue the importance of analyzing “small stories”—“a gamut of underrepresented narrative activities such as tellings of ongoing events, future or hypothetical events, and shared (known) events” (381), that are about the “everyday, mundane situations” people experience (378). Specifically, these stories provide a view into identity work in action, and analyzing them shows how people continually build and rebuild who they are and how they see themselves: “Narratives are focused upon not as tools for reflecting on (chunks of) lives but as constructive means that are functional in the creation of characters in space and time… narratives are also aspects of situated language use, employed by speakers/narratives to position a display of contextualized identities” (379).

This is a functionalist view of the role of language: that stories do not present something that happened or is happening, but instead, “people actually use stories in everyday, mundane situations in order to create (and perpetuate) a sense of who they are” (378). These stories are regular, not exceptional; “it is in the everyday practices as sites of engagement that ‘identity work’ is being conducted” (379), and an analysis of “how the referential world is constructed points to how the teller wants to be understood, what sense of self they index” (380). Fundamentally, the authors look at small stories as glimpses into identity formation in action. They note that “we are interested in how people use small stories in their interactive engagements to construct a sense of who they are” (382).

Prior to showing an example, the authors describe their analysis approach, which follows five steps. First, the authors analyze the characters, and how each character positions themselves relative to the others. Next, they look at what is accomplished through the narration that occurs, and then, at the research setting and questioning, and how questions were answered. The authors look at intersectional engagement between all participants, and finally, look at how participants construct themselves and each other.