ABSTRACT
Wallace Martin (1986, as cited in Johnston 2000) argues that narratives provide a sense of patterns for those in a shared community or culture. He divides narratives into three categories: narrative as a sequence of events; a discourse produced by a narrator; or “verbal artifacts” that an audience organizes and gives meaning to. This chapter examines discourse produced by a narrator, President Bush, and demonstrates the verbal artifacts that were woven into the narrative in order to give it meaning. In Part I, I draw from the White House archives and comb through his public addresses and press conferences from 11 September 2001 through the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. From this data I analyze the storyline and the characters as he positions them throughout this period. During this time Bush created a discourse with a beginning, middle and projected end that depended on a shared set of assumptions that are characteristic of American culture and thought. Martin (1986) suggests that these deep narrative structures represent patterns of meaning and reveal the contours of a culture’s shared beliefs. These culturally assumptive “artifacts” surface through time as the narrative is constructed and given meaning by its audience (Johnston 2000).
