ABSTRACT
A central distinction in narratology is that between story and discourse, what happens and the presentation of what happens. Imagine a murder. There are facts about who committed the murder and why. There is a sequence of events—psychological, physical, social—that lead up to the murder. Roughly, that real sequence of events is the story. Smith fired Jones from his job. Jones’s life fell apart. He blamed everything on Smith. He began to think about killing Smith. He went to buy the gun. He began target practice. He hung out at Smith’s apartment building, to learn when Smith enters and leaves, and so on. Now suppose you are a juror at Jones’s trial. You first learn that Smith has been murdered, and that Jones is accused of the crime. The first witness discusses seeing Jones at Smith’s building on the day of the crime. The next witness testifies that Jones bought a pistol two weeks earlier. The third witness testifies that the caliber of the bullet that killed Smith is the same as that in the gun bought by Jones, though the gun itself has not been recovered. Inthetrial, you pick up bits and pieces of what happened. You hear about parts of events from different times and places. The order of the testimonies is not the same as the order of the events in real life (e.g., one witness talks about the day of the murder, then a later witness speaks about a time two weeks earlier). Indeed, some of what you hear may be untrustworthy. Perhaps someone testifies to seeing Jones across town at the time of the murder. Other things you hear may be irrelevant. Thus someone else testifies that Doe had shouted at Smith, “I’m gonna kill you for this!” after Smith backed into Doe’s new car. This jumble of mixed and partial retellings is the discourse.
