"She was like me": Identity Construction in Vicarious Narratives

While it has been widely accepted that narratives of personal experience, told about the teller's character, are sites of identity construction (Schiffrin 1996; De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012), narratives of vicarious... [ view full abstract ]

While it has been widely accepted that narratives of personal experience, told about the teller's character, are sites of identity construction (Schiffrin 1996; De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012), narratives of vicarious experience, told about third-person characters, have been held to have less relation to the teller's identity (Labov 2004; Norrick 2013). This paper argues that vicarious narratives can be used to construct personal identities.

This paper presents a close discourse analysis of two vicarious narratives told by a participant with a physical disability in conversational discourse with a researcher without a disability. It follows Bamberg's (2011) framework for analyzing identity in narrative by examining uniqueness of a self among others and agency of a self in the world. In the first narrative, the teller relates the experiences of marriage and child birth of an acquaintance who also has a disability. The teller's identity work is done by constructing a unique self among others: while the point of view is largely the character's, the evaluation is solely the teller's. The teller uses the character's experiences to display the teller's own attitudes toward these life choices and to construct her own identity as a person with a disability. In the second narrative, the teller describes the circumstances that led to another friend with a disability moving out of her parents' home. The identity work in this narrative navigates both the uniqueness of a self among others and the agency of a self in the world. By connecting her own agency to the character's, the teller constructs a highly agentive personal identity.

The analysis demonstrates that the teller does identity work by creating a unique self and displaying agency in comparison to the third-person characters. Thus, the teller constructs her own identity as a person with a disability by telling vicarious narratives.