ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explores intergenerational differences in people's relationships with time and how temporality becomes a marker of social difference and distinction. The author turns to distinctive characteristics of narrative style among my research participants. These are shifting temporal frameworks, 'irrelevant' information and the decoupling of background information from narrative accounts. Ultimately, the decoupling of background information from the narrative being told, combined with 'irrelevant' information and shifting temporal frameworks, can destabilize younger interlocutors, leading at times to disruption in the transmission of meaning. This destabilization is due to a rupture between the temporal rhythms and the conventions of narrative accounts and positionality used by older speakers, and those used by younger co-conversationalists. The author had hoped that an approach to ageing that privileged narrativity and temporality would also permit him to attend to the creative agency that he felt older people would exercise over the stereotypes governing old age.
