Who am I? Narration and its contributions to self and identity

Critical Analysis

In this text, the author makes a case for examining narrative as evidence of an emergent sense of self of a speaker, and argues that narration allows a speaker to work through three key challenges: navigating between consistency and change of identity, delineating oneself from others, and managing a relationship between oneself and the world.

Analyzing stories being narrated provides a view into identity being actively constructed. Identity is not something we have; the author argues that it is something that is continually negotiated across the three challenges above. Repertoires of speaking are viewed as “pre-conscious, not fixed, and open to change” (5) and are methods of construction.

Explication is often part of a research summary, where people, events, and things are asserted and delineated from one-another. This is focused on the subject of the narrative—what it is about—and disregards the nature of everyday life where identity is formed and changed, and performed. Instead, narrative should be viewed as a navigation process and focus should be placed on the process itself, not on the content of the process as presented.

One way that a person is brought into form through story is through social positioning, where “in order to differentiate (and integrate) a sense of self, others are ‘brought to existence’ (constructed) in terms of social categories” (6). Group membership is tried on, rejected, or accepted through speech. Membership in a group has governance structures and rules, and trying on membership discursively means exploring the relationship one has with those rules. This isn’t a stable process, but it is “contextually and locally held together” (7), and an analysis of narration provides insight into how internally consistent or held together the stories actually are. The assumption is that “narration is first of all a verbal act that is locally and bodily performed in situated, interactional contexts” (8), and so the performance through narrative is a window into the construction process occurring or, at least temporarily, congealing.

“Positioning analysis” is presented as a way to understand how someone is constructing their positional relationship between themselves and a referential world—“the way the referential world is put together points to how tellers ‘want to be understood’; or more appropriately, how tellers index a sense of self” (8).

While many researchers have focused on “big stories” (undefined by the author), it is argued that smaller, conversational stories provide better clues to the way self is being discussed and identity is being practiced and tested. Though comparison, the author explains that a small story supports a research intent to understand “how people… construct a sense of who they are, while big story research analyzes the stories as representations of world and identities within them” (14).

The act of narration is open to negotiation, and a narrative small-story approach to analysis works with an assumption “that neither self (or sense of self) nor identity is defined (or definable) in terms of fixed positions that are a priori, pre-discursively, rationally defined” (15). Some stories, and identities, are tried and discarded, where others become “personally inhabited and habitual” (16). The author summarizes an ethos of identity narrative; he explains that one “start inquiry into identity or sense of self in contexts where narrating activities are in the process of being performed” (16).

The author briefly acknowledges that emergent forms of video research can provide a more comprehensive view of this formation happening; “audio-visual material, of course, can be more fully (microanalytically) scrutinized in terms of the contextualized coordination of narrative form, content, and performance features, and how they interact in the service of identity formation processes” (8); “the use of audio-visual means of recording narrative interactions opens up the way bodily practices such as gaze, facial expressions, gestures, and posture contribute to how answers to the ‘who-am-I’ questions are accomplished and how they may come across” (14).