Character

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

There is more than one way to do narrative analysis. As Catherine Kohler Riessman points out, narrative analysis can have different foci. Thematic narrative analysis is an examination of the content of a narrative. The researcher is looking for reoc-curring themes in the narrative that the participants construct and present. It is not so much a question of how the narrative is presented, but what it contains. Conversely, structural narrative analysis focuses on the arrangement and organization of the narrative. This form of analysis has its early roots in the work of narrative pioneers William Labov and Joshua Waletzky. They were among the first social scientists to articulate the form and structure of narratives.

When doing performative analysis, the researcher is examining the context of the narrative. Premised on Erving Goffman's dramaturgical theory, a performative analysis is aware that the narrative is not a verbatim recreation of events, but an identity presentation that incorporates sociocultural influences. It also recognizes the researcher/interviewer as a critical element of the narrative. The narrator is constructing and presenting him- or herself to a particular person, at a particular time and place. When the narrative is analyzed as a performance, one can see where C. Wright Mill's sociological imagination comes into play, as the connection [Page 139]between private troubles and public issues is evident in a single narrative.

The last, and perhaps the most underdeveloped and least representative of the latest “turn” in social science research, is use of narrative analysis to explore visual material. Researchers in this subfield of narrative analysis take their guidance from thematic and performance analysis methods. This means understanding the visual as representative of the experiences and social world of the visual creator.

Within each of these subfields of narrative analysis one sees that the first notion of character (who are the social actors, and what is their importance to the narrative?) has a different level of focus. Doing thematic analysis means that with a focus on more societal or global issues, the actual characters are not of primary concern. The related acts and understandings tend to be at the center of analysis. Similarly, for structural analysis, it is not the actors in the narrative that are important, but the sociolinguistic elements such as clauses and word choices that become paramount to the analysis. It is with the last two forms of analysis, performance and visual, that the characters of the narrative become more important to the analysis process. In performance analysis the characters in the narrative are important to contextualize and situate the narrative in the larger sociocultural structures.

The other way that character can be understood in narrative analysis is to look at the overall tone and timbre of the narrative. This would involve identifying key elements and themes that would pervade different people's narratives and set them apart from others. This can be connected to the concept of genre. As narrative analysis has its historic base in literature, narrative researchers draw on literary genres to explain the types of narratives people present and why a particular genre form was selected. This could include presenting narratives that are comical, dramatic, heroic, tragic, and so on, as a way to get a certain point across to the audience and/or to make an identity claim.

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