Narrative and Identity Management: Discourse and Social Identities in a Tale of Tomorrow

Abstract

The ways in which interactional details and roles enacted by participants in relation to the ongoing production of a story connect with larger roles and identities have not been at the center of the problematics of identity construction in narrative. In an attempt to redress the balance, this article uses a broad definition of the conversation analytic concept of discourse identities and takes into account the ethnography of its data to explore the discourse identities management in the course of a conversational tale of tomorrow constructed by 3 Greek female adolescents. Stories of projected events, along with stories of shared events, form the specific group's main narrative practices. I show that the joint construction of the story at hand rests on the participants' enactment of a set of discourse identities that are intertwined with the story's emerging internal structure, particularly the components of complicating action and evaluation. These identities are interrelated to the participants' larger social roles and identities as friends and members of a close-knit group who share an interactional history.