‘My Mind Is with You’: Story Sequences in the Talk of Male Friends [2001]

Abstract

In this chapter,¹ I want to focus on the extent to which narrative construction involves collaboration between speakers, and how collaboration functions in informal friendly talk. Increasingly, conversation is seen as an achievement which involves ‘the collective activity of individual social actors whose final product … is qualitatively different from the sum of its parts’ (Duranti 1986: 239). More specifically, narrative that occurs as part of spontaneous conversation is never a solo performance in the way oral narratives performed out in the public arena are (see Abrahams 1983; Bauman 1986; Labov 1972b). Conversational narrative is only possible when all participants in conversation jointly orient to someone telling a story. The terms ‘narrator’ and ‘audience’ set up a false picture of an active story-teller and a passive group of listeners, whereas the reality is that co-participants (the audience) are always co-authors in some sense. Commentators on narrative (for example, Goodwin 1986; Goodwin 1990; Ryave 1978; Sacks 1995) emphasise the fact that story-telling in conversation is a collaborative achievement, with narrative form and content being ‘continuously reshaped by the co-participants, through their ability to create certain alignments and suggest or impose certain interpretations’ (Duranti 1986: 242).