Third person vicarious experience versus first person personal experience

Narratives of vicarious experience are told in the third person, as opposed to the first person in narratives of personal experience. This distinction reflects a basic division in the participation framework proposed by Goffman (Reference Goffman1981). Goffman's participation framework (1981:137) includes the various categories of participation status. Goffman prizes apart the participation roles “laminated together” in the folk notions of speaker and hearer (for valuable discussion see Goodwin & Goodwin Reference Goodwin, Goodwin and Duranti2005). Of particular relevance for the present discussion is the assignment of all speaker roles to the teller in canonical cases of stories of personal experience in conversation: the teller is the animator [sounding box], who produces the talk, but also the author responsible for constructing the story, the principal socially responsible for what is said, and the figure or character depicted. By contrast, in stories of vicarious experience, the teller is the animator, but not the sole author, if the story is pieced together from some other source or sources, including other story tellers, books, newspapers, radio, television, or the internet. The teller does generally count as principal in bearing social responsibility for what is said, but, most significantly, the teller is not identical with the main figure.

This distinction in terms of participation status has a series of correspondences and consequences in the form and function of stories of vicarious experience vis-à-vis stories of personal experience. On the syntactic level, stories of personal experience are cast in the first person, while stories of vicarious experience are told in the third person. As animator, the teller speaks in the first person in both cases, but as the main figure (protagonist) only in stories of personal experience, while the figures (characters) in stories of vicarious experience are in third person. The syntactic identity of the teller and protagonist creates a natural pivot between the taleworld and the storyrealm. Memories, thoughts, and feelings flow from the protagonist in the taleworld to the teller in the storyrealm and vice versa, as can be seen in example (1), a brief story told by one nurse to another during a telephone conversation from the Switchboard Corpus. The two women have been discussing the risks inherent in the nursing profession.

(1)

Notice especially how the orientation of the first person alternates, referring first to the teller in the storytelling frame in line 3 with present tense “remember,” and then to the protagonist in lines 4 and 5 with past tense “worked” and “was terrified.” The switch to present tense in lines 6–7 signals that “I” again refers to the teller, although past tense and explicit reference to the protagonist would make more sense in line 7: the nature of knowing and the predicate “know” encourage inferences back and forth from the taleworld to the storyrealm. Past tense “scared” in line 10 again indicates that “I” refers to the protagonist in the taleworld. The lamination of the participant roles of teller and protagonist facilitates entry into the taleworld from the storyrealm and communication between the two as the story progresses. Even though Julie tells the story as an illustration of the sorts of dangers nurses must deal with, the identity of teller and protagonist automatically reveals her own attitudes and emotions in ways a third person story would not. The listener hears not just an illustration of the dangers nurses face, but also a personal confession.

Compare the third person story of vicarious experience from the SCoSE in (2) below. Four women are gathered before a late-afternoon Thanksgiving dinner in the living room just outside the kitchen where food preparation is ongoing. Appropriately, they are talking about roasting turkeys, when Jean is reminded of a story she heard “the other day at work.” But this temporal and spatial location are not sufficient for Jean, who goes on to anchor the story by identifying the topic of discussion in line 2, the teller Marge Jankowski in line 3, and then the protagonist, “one of her girlfriends,” in line 4.

(2)

Jean clearly assigns responsibility for the story to a specific source: “Marge Jankowski said” in line 3, “and she said” in line 7, and again “she said” in line 12. She further establishes her relationship to this source in her preface by saying they were laughing the other day at work. All of these moves are characteristic for stories of vicarious experience and they all differ from anything one finds in narratives of personal experience. The set-up—“we were laughing” in line 1 and “we were talking” in line 2, along with line 14 “and then I said,” leading into Jean's commentary—frame this narrative of vicarious experience from Jean's perspective. Then the phrase “Marge Jankowski said” in line 3 identifies the actual source of the narrative. These moves again reflect typical strategies in telling stories of vicarious experience as opposed to stories of personal experience. There can be no conflation of the teller's perspective with that of the protagonist as we saw in (1) above, where the lamination of the teller and protagonist roles allows assessments and attributions of knowledge to flow back and forth. Instead, the teller establishes a clear distance between herself and the unfortunate girlfriend who left the bag in the turkey.

Again, due to the distinction between first person and third person telling, the forms of evaluation may differ in narratives of personal experience and narratives of vicarious experience. When a single person fills the participant roles of both teller and main character in a story, events are usually related and evaluated from the perspective of the teller. Labov & Waletzky (Reference Labov, Waletzky and Helm1967) found that narratives of personal experience were generally constructed to assign praise and blame to show the teller in a positive light. As long as the teller is also the central figure in a story, this evaluation happens naturally; but in telling a story about another person, the obvious standpoint for evaluation is lacking as well. When conversationalists tell stories about someone they do not know personally, they have to establish a stance toward the events and characters based on the function of the story in the given context. This contrasts with narratives of personal experience, where the identity of the roles of teller and protagonist suggests a certain range of stances: typically empathy for the protagonist qua earlier embodiment of the teller. Stories of vicarious experiences often derive most of their evaluation from the telling context, whereby the larger conversational context already carries with it a particular evaluative stance, or set of stances. In a later paper, Labov (Reference Labov and Fought2004) considers another narrative of vicarious experience borrowed from Macaulay (Reference Macaulay1987), where the teller recounts how her mother experienced the death of her father: she has pieced together reports and invented details and dialogue to make the story her own, and it has taken on the feel of a narrative of personal experience. Unlike the narratives of vicarious experience examined by Labov & Waletzky, the story cited from Macaulay is replete with detail, dialogue, and fulsome evaluation. Family narratives represent a specific case of vicarious experience stories in so far as they include the teller by default as it were: even if the teller did not actually witness the events, she owns telling rights and claims epistemic authority by virtue of her membership in the family. Long acquaintance with friends (and their children) may invoke the same privileges. Here we investigate how participants in conversation construct narratives of vicarious experience so as to develop a perspective from which to evaluate the events they recount.

Labov & Waletzky (Reference Labov, Waletzky and Helm1967) saw a connection between evaluation and coherence in the narratives of vicarious experience they collected: specifically, they found stories of vicarious experience lacking in evaluation and organization. They consider two examples of vicarious experience narratives, a retelling of an episode from a television show called “The man from UNCLE” and a story about a pig and a boat in the rain, reconstructed from a cartoon seen on television (see also Labov Reference Labov1972:367–68). Labov & Waletzky argue that such stories of vicarious experience are incoherent primarily because they lack evaluation.Footnote ⁴ Recall, however, that Labov & Waletzky's example stories were elicited outside of natural telling contexts: tellers were asked to produce stories, and the third person accounts they produced lacked any normal contextual motivation for telling. In Sacks' (Reference Sacks, Atkinson and Heritage1984) terms, the tellers possessed neither epistemic authority to tell, nor telling rights for the stories. Their stories were tellable only in the sense that someone had requested that something be told. The whole situation was extremely artificial. In a collection of papers published in celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of Labov & Waletzky's groundbreaking study, Schegloff (Reference Schegloff1997:104) states that we might “entertain the possibility that the constitutive practices of storytelling incorporate recipients and that storytelling abstracted from its interactional setting, occasioning, and uptake is an academically hybridized form.” In real talk in interaction, stories of vicarious experience are told with specific purposes in mind, generally from a particular perspective—they are coherent within the telling context even if the stories themselves lack internal coherence. Tellers use them as illustrations and they draw conclusions from them. Such stories do not need much evaluation in the Labovian sense because their value inheres in the telling context. In real conversational contexts, the adults in my data use television episodes (films, novels, etc.) to illustrate specific points in discussion: the coherence of the stories they tell derives both from this contextual function and from internal features of the stories, though the latter is often unimportant so long as the story serves the purpose of illustration.

The distinction between first person and third person narrative has also been a recurrent theme in the discussion of fictionality. Hamburger (Reference Hamburger1993) saw a radical difference between factual reporting and fiction, namely portrayal of other minds as if from their own perspective. Hamburger says only third person narrative counts as true fiction, while first person narrative is always characterized by pretense (“Fingiertheit”) of reality.Footnote ⁵ Opposing Searle, who claimed there is a priori “no textual property, syntactical or semantic, that will identify a text as a work of fiction” (Reference Searle1979:65), Cohn (Reference Cohn1990) is really concerned only with fiction versus nonfiction, but many of her comments apply to vicarious versus personal narrative: the recipient of a narrative of personal experience “understands it to have a stable univocal origin, that its narrator is identical to a real person,” namely to the person telling the story. What Cohn calls “doubling of roles” in the person of the narrator and author amounts to a tripling of roles in narratives of personal experience, where the narrator, the author, and the protagonist are rolled up together into a single person. A fictional person is “a character known to his narrator as no real person can be known to a real speaker” (1990:785), but of course the first person narrator in a story of personal experience also enjoys a special relationship with the one central character in her narrative.

Though Cohn (Reference Cohn1990) and others have proposed the synchronic bi-level (story-discourse) distinction—the doubling of the narrative instance into author and narrator, chronology (order) and pace as signposts of fiction versus nonfiction—according to Genette (Reference Genette1993), only the mode of telling really differentiates them, especially the presentation of consciousness in the free indirect mode—which allows the author to be absent—but also stream of consciousness, and what Genette calls “external focalization,” where the author seems to have no access to a character's feelings, as in Hemingway's fiction (perhaps most clearly in Big two-hearted river). Genette sees relative, indirect, partial knowledge in personal narrative versus “elastic omniscience” enjoyed by the author of fiction. In my data no free indirect or stream of consciousness occurs in conversational narratives of vicarious experience. The relation of teller to action/protagonist is usually explicit in the opening of the narrative, by contrast with the simple “as a kid,” “one time,” and “I remember” in personal narratives.

Interactional consequences of the distinction

Labov & Fanshel (Reference Labov and Fanshel1977) distinguish three relevant types of events: (i) A-events are those known only to the primary storyteller. They provide the basis for narratives of personal experience. Last night's dream is accessible only to me; it thereby constitutes an A-event par excellence, and I initially own exclusive telling rights to it. (ii) A-B events are those known to the teller and one other participant in the conversation. They yield stories where both participants have telling rights, and both can relate pieces in the first person. Last summer's vacation spent with a partner present in the room constitutes an A-B event. (iii) O-events are those known generally to members of a group or culture: local, national, or even international happenings familiar from the media or word-of-mouth. Telling rights for O-events are shared by members of the relevant group (see Norrick Reference Norrick2000:106–7). These events are the stuff of third person narratives of vicarious experience conducive to co-narration.

Interactionally, the teller of a story of personal experience, an A-event, naturally has epistemic authority for the events reported as well as telling rights for the story. Just saying I remember when or as a kid is enough to establish the right to tell, because stories of personal experience are treated as belonging to the one who had the experience. In telling stories of vicarious experience, O-events, by contrast, the teller must establish epistemic authority indirectly through having heard reports, having read a story, having witnessed an event, and the like. This need to establish epistemic authority conspires with the need to establish reference to the (third) person in the vicariously experienced event to generate verbal structures much more complicated than those found in first person stories of personal experience. The epistemic authority of the teller may recede in importance as the contextual significance of a story qua illustration increases. A story of vicarious experience may illustrate a point and suggest a moral independent of who tells it, whereas the force of stories of personal experience resides in the lamination of the roles of teller and protagonist. Apparently everyone possesses storytelling rights for clever anecdotes and illustrative stories from the realm of O-events, while tellers naturally retain the right to tell their own stories of personal A-events. The only thing needed for a vicarious narrative to be told is that it be related by topic to the conversation, but it is still up to the teller to establish this relation, whereas with stories of personal experience the relation seems built in. Again, the relevance of a story of vicarious experience must be established for the current context, while relevance inheres in stories of personal experience due to the identity of the roles of teller and protagonist.

Sacks (Reference Sacks, Atkinson and Heritage1984) discusses entitlement to tell stories through having witnessed and being in some way affected by the events reported. Sacks found that speakers routinely include in their stories epistemic grounds upon which the report is based and tell how they were affected by the events they report. This works naturally when someone actually witnessed an event, but potential tellers must establish their right to tell a third person story about an O-event in other ways. Vicarious narrative “operates as narrative by hearsay. Its tellability depends on the interest afforded by the described experience, which needs to have been especially funny, weird, exotic or outrageous” (Fludernik Reference Fludernik1996:54). These apparent distinctions in tellability, telling rights, and epistemic authority are mirrored in the linguistic means that tellers employ to gain the floor to tell stories of vicarious experience and to establish their right to tell such stories in the conversational context.

Bamberg (Reference Bamberg2004) analyzes a diffuse story co-narrated by three fifteen-year-old boys about a girl in their school who “had a lot of sex with a lot of boys” to secure the attention she craved. This “slut-bashing” story is told mostly in the third person, though it concerns a girl that all three boys know and events that they have witnessed at least second hand, although one co-narrator (Ted) includes himself in the story in the first person as someone who read a letter the “slut” had written. Tellers have epistemic authority when they were witnesses, and telling such stories has intrinsic value for identity construction by the tellers. These stories offer listeners as well as tellers opportunities for assessment and positioning, but the teller has a prior claim to assessment, having already adopted a stance in even telling the story, making a case for its tellability here and now.

In the examples from Sacks, the tellers establish their epistemic authority through witnessing the events reported, and in the Bamberg example the co-narrators have fairly direct experience of the events. In telling stories of vicarious experience, narrators draw their epistemic authority and right to tell by citing a specific source such as “Marge Jankowski” and “the other day at work” (see (2) above). They may also link their stories to some (perhaps fairly remote) family member, as in (3) below (from the SCoSE) where two students are talking about the dangers of “just messing around,” or even to a potential in-law, as in (4) below (from the Switchboard Corpus), where two men are discussing gun control on the phone.

1. (3) you know what happened to my-

   one of my aunt's friends out in Iowa?

   like when-

2. (4) you you know my uh uh oldest daughter's fiancé,

   is a uh is a part- part-

   he's a college professor.

   but he also is a reserve police officer.

In (4), the teller not only claims a special relationship with the characters in the story of vicarious experience, he chooses a person with expert knowledge in the area under discussion, namely guns and gun control. Even though tenuous, these connections apparently suffice to provide a serviceable epistemic authority for a storyteller.

In the cases cited so far, tellers position themselves through their relationship to the characters in the story. When the story concerns a friend, a colleague, or a (however distant) family relation, the teller can establish a connection to the characters described, and this allows positioning up front before the main story begins. As we shall see, however, stories sometimes also derive from literature, films, and television, as well as newspapers—sources to which the teller can claim no privileged access. In fact, there seems little reason for telling some stories of vicarious experience except to get the events on record.

Stories of vicarious experience as illustrations

Conversationalists have recourse to stories of vicarious experience to illustrate points in discussion. When no personal experience can generate an appropriate story, we naturally call on other sources for relevant narratives about O-events. Consider example (5) from the Switchboard Corpus where two men, Vic and Bob, are talking about guns and gun control on the phone. Vic's familiarity with an apposite example gives him a way to concretize the discussion. Instead of sticking with generalities like “a guy may,” as in Bob's foregoing description in line 1, Vic can report a specific local incident. He did not himself experience the events, but he has had access to them in the local news and perhaps in conversation with other local people, who may be perceived as having a special claim to knowledge of the incident by virtue of their local knowledge. The introductory formula “just recently here in Dallas” in line 11 puts the teller, Vic, in the unassailable position of an expert from the perspective of his interlocutor, Bob, living far from Dallas. Both “recently” and “here” situate the action close to the teller, in any case closer than to the listener, suggesting insider knowledge on the part of the teller.

(5)

Vic's introduction “just recently here in Dallas” in line 11 gives the story a specific local grounding as well as constituting a kind of claim to epistemic authority. When Vic says “down the street” in line 22 and again in line 25, it seems as if he is talking about his own street or a street he knows. The tense shift to the conversational historical present in lines 17–22 also serves to convey the impression that Vic somehow witnessed the action reported. By contrast, other details reported fail to support this impression; they are the sort of information one might find in a newspaper article: it happened “in front of a Seven Eleven” (line 14), and the guy was sitting talking to his brother (lines 18–20). No dialogue is reported at all. In addition, the references to persons in the story are generic: “somebody jumped in front of somebody” (line 13) and “this one guy” (line 17). This lack of specificity and individualizing details leads to problems in keeping the two primary characters separate: the phrase “the second party” (line 24) seems out of place in conversational storytelling. By the time the second party has shot “the other guy” (line 28), it is difficult to remember just who jumped in front of whom. Notice also “they got out and have more words” (line 23), which is again curious, since only one of them needs to go out, as the other must already be in the street. Vic's conclusion in lines 31–33 is also of particular interest, because it expresses his view of how this story relates to the current conversational topic of gun control, namely: “when they're available like that, people who normally wouldn't do things like that, but momentarily fly off the trigger.” The phrase “fly off the trigger” provides an excellent example of how an idiomatic formula (“fly off the handle”) can become infected by its context—the teller replacing “handle” with the contextually appropriate “trigger” and nicely reflecting the story's two themes of anger and guns. Though the concluding statement is syntactically garbled and this crucial idiom anomalous, listener Bob immediately agrees “that's right.”

Significantly, storytellers seek to establish their epistemic authority to relate a narrative, even if it serves only as an illustration of a point in the current topical discussion with no personal relevance for them. Stories of vicarious experience may derive from multiple sources, and tellers may register the effort they require to reconstruct them for the present audience. Furthermore, the sources of a vicarious narrative may remain visible as prior hypotexts informing the narrative, as in the notion of palimpsest, specifically transpositions of the original(s) in the sense of Genette (Reference Genette1997). When stories of vicarious experience are told for their value as illustrations, they may remain sketchy, characterization and details may be minimal, and dialogue may be lacking entirely.

Stories of vicarious experience as local news

In the course of conversation, topical talk may suggest stories about common acquaintances, local news, and items of interest from the media. The stories may be told for the primary purpose of sharing news, but at the same time they express and elicit judgments. Sacks (Reference Sacks, Atkinson and Heritage1984) discusses narratives of personal experience in their function of “doing being ordinary,” but narratives of vicarious experience also play a role in doing being ordinary precisely in this exchange of opinions about everyday events and people in the news. In excerpt (6) below, all of the participants are local and they all know where Flavey Road is with its “funny intersection,” but Pat and Ralph have both followed the story in the local news (at least the newspaper and perhaps radio as well); note Pat's comment, “you never read a follow-up” (line 47). Pat and Ralph are seated at the dinner table with their two college-age daughters, Mary and Amy. They live in the suburbs north of Chicago near the Great Lakes Naval Base mentioned in the narrative. Pat has been talking about her mother avoiding the funny intersection at Flavey Road for reasons of safety, and she concretizes this danger by introducing a story about a recent accident there. Pat apparently assumes all of the pertinent background knowledge on the part of Ralph and the girls, and she makes no attempt to claim the story as her own. In fact Ralph fills in the blanks for her when she cannot finish her phrases in lines 4–5 and 6–7; during the initial telling down to (line 32), Ralph is responsible for the most clearly evaluative moves: “isn't that amazing” (line 15) and “wow” (line 32). From that point on, Mary and Amy are more interested than the tellers in passing judgment and considering punishments. The connection of her own mother with the dangerous intersection gives Pat telling rights and insures local topical relevance, though the story does not serve to illustrate a point in an ongoing discussion as did the story in (5). Instead, this narrative offers a topic for discussion and evaluation by the tellers and listeners, and this too counts as a major function of storytelling in everyday conversation.

(6)

The whole story has current relevance because Pat's mother used to drive through but now avoids the intersection at Flavey Road (lines 3–4), along with its status as local news due to the references to young people from the nearby Great Lakes Naval Base (lines 8, 31). Once Pat returns to the issue of the dangerous intersection at Flavey Road (lines 79–81), the story closes for good and talk turns to other matters.

Apparently stories of vicarious experience are sometimes told in conversation by tellers, simply because some reference in talk evokes them. This story has obvious earmarks of a news report: neither the truck driver nor the unfortunate passengers in the car could tell the story as Pat and Ralph do. The ages of the young people in the car (lines 49–50) and the fact that the driver had driven all the way from Atlanta to Chicago without a rest stop (lines 12–13) represent the kind of information a reporter would put together following the accident in writing up the story rather than the sort of personal observations any individual directly involved would know or even any eye-witnesses could report. Ralph asks whether “he burst into flames, didn't he?” (line 19), presumably referring to the truck, but he receives only a minimal “mhm” confirmation from Pat in line 20. Burning vehicles are the sort of events newspapers regularly report, so it is odd that Ralph cannot remember for sure and Pat offers no specific comment on this issue.

Beyond the proximity of the fatal intersection and the mother's avoidance of it, little of personal importance hinges on this story for either of the co-narrators. As just noted, Pat fails to respond to Ralph's question about the truck (or car?) bursting into flames, and Ralph disengages with the story at line 61, preferring to talk about the clock being slow, and he continues to demonstrate his disinterest in the story of the accident with comments on the clock (63–64, 67, 71) and the VCR (lines 73, 75). The daughters, Amy and Mary, are much more concerned with evaluating the action and assigning blame than either of the tellers: Mary begins by saying “they should shoot him” (line 41), and Amy commences the discussion of what legal charges the truck driver should face (line 52), but only Ralph replies briefly “probably manslaughter” (line 54). Neither Ralph nor Pat responds to Amy's sarcastic comment in lines 76–77 that it's “obvious that you killed somebody if you went up and over.” Apparently after rehearsing the story together, Pat and Ralph are ready to drop the matter and ignore the issues it raises.

In vicarious third person stories from newspapers, the teller may not have any exclusive entitlement to telling rights. The tellers may not invest any effort in establishing any special personal connection to the characters and action in the story, even though we imagine that tellers have a tendency to choose certain kinds of stories and pick out certain features, characters, and themes. Still, the last example demonstrates that conversational storytellers sometimes rehearse a story from local news sources in which they have no personal stake simply because it is suggested by some reference in conversation. The act of co-narration with a partner may be reason enough for telling a story. In doing so, the co-tellers do not necessarily aim to make any special point but only to get the story straight and to contribute to the pool of shared vicarious experience in the family circle. In other cases, like the relating of the argument and shooting story, however, tellers are clearly at pains to register their right to tell and entitlement to claim as their own even stories of vicarious experience. Moreover, they generally tell such stories to make a specific point in a topical discussion, again as in example (1). Significantly, both this story in (6) and the one in (5) derive from newspaper (and radio/television?) accounts of local events, and they both seem to bear the marks of this source; stories from film in the following section help round out this picture.

Regarding evaluation and identity in telling stories of vicarious experience, we have seen that evaluation is tied to the function of the storytelling in the interactional context, as in the story about arguing and shooting, or is up for discussion, as in the co-narrated account of the truck and car accident. Epistemic entitlement and storytelling rights can be largely irrelevant; the value of the telling is based on other factors such as illustration of a point or local news for discussion (and movie telling for entertainment, as we see below). The amount and kind of details that tellers supply depends at least in part on the source of a story, for example, newspapers, television, news, or movies.

Co-narration in stories of vicarious experience

Stories gleaned from sources available to more than one participant in a conversation lend themselves to co-narration. O-events spawn narratives of vicarious experience and potential co-narration. In the previous section, we inspected a story about a traffic accident familiar to two co-narrators who shared the telling performance. That story was told primarily for its news value, but the next and final example is a story told primarily for its entertainment value, not as an illustration of a point in the conversation. Instead, it is suggested by the movie guide that one of the tellers is describing. The passage originates in a set of recordings made during a long weekend that Ned and his family spent at the home of his parents, Frank and Lydia, along with the family of his brother. At this particular time, Frank and Ned are alone in the den; Ned is leafing through a movie book and asking Frank about various movie titles and actors as he comes across their names. The name of William Powell leads Frank to mention the film Mister Roberts. Although the co-narrators have no personal interest at stake in this fictitious action, the story offers opportunities for them to position themselves on various levels. They evaluate the film as a whole, the actors, and their acting; they evaluate the fictional characters and their actions within the fictional context portrayed in the film; and they construct dialogue of their own. They go through the cast of characters starting in line 7, and once the actual story begins in line 26, references to people in the taleworld—as distinct from the telling performance or storyrealm—are clear and consistent. Despite Labov & Waletzky (Reference Labov, Waletzky and Helm1967), there is nothing about vicarious experience in itself that prevents tellers from establishing clear references and evaluating copiously. Because of the way some people watch and talk about movies, the references may involve names of actors, as they do here, rather than the characters they portrayed in the film, but the references are nevertheless definitive. This is another instance where the source of a story of vicarious experience influences the way it is told. Frank has just recently watched the movie again, but Ned has not, and Frank ends up supplying most of the narrative thread, though both contribute to description of action and even dialogue. The overall coherence of the storytelling performance is due as much to co-narration, in particular joint construction of dialogue, as to Frank's clear narrative organization.

(7)

The story is not told as news or as an illustration to make a point, but instead is told for its entertainment value: it exhibits a certain amount of co-narration and it generates a fair amount of laughter. The men agree on what scene to relate and what stance to adopt toward it; Frank uses appropriately nautical vocabulary like “commanding officer” (line 23) and “bridge” (line 27), and both men use “overboard” (lines 33, 54); and the telling is punctuated by laughter once the actual story commences (line 26). The characters are uniformly identified by the names of the actors who portray them, avoiding the confusion of reference with terms like “somebody, this one guy, the other guy,” as in (5) above. Their rapid-fire turn exchanges and overlaps attest to their high level of involvement in the sense of Tannen (Reference Tannen1989). Each man laughs about the way the other dramatizes events and finally about their joint performance overall. They consequently succeed in making their separate past experiences into a common experience, which represents a fundamental mechanism of rapport through talk.

Both men employ swearing language appropriate to the scene described, though certainly not present in the original dialogue of the movie, released in 1955, when all major films were suitable for all ages by definition. The swearing seems to add emotion and humor to the shared storytelling performance. Ned actually initiates the construction of dialogue in lines 36–37 with: “he was- says ‘I'm gonna’,” and continues with “to hell with this plant” in line 40, but Frank consummates the story with the final line of dialogue, “I threw your goddamn plant overboard” (line 54). Frank uses the epithet “son of a bitch” twice (lines 22, 25) to refer to a character in the movie; and uses “goddamn” twice (lines 35, 38) as a modifier in his own voice and in the simulated dialogue in line 54. Ned contributes the swearing phrase “to hell with” in simulated dialogue in line 40. This represents a surprising amount of swearing for two men who rarely used strong language at all, and then only “damn,” in the remaining ninety minutes of conversation recorded between them. Perhaps the co-narrators associate swearing with men in the military, with sailors on ships or the like, though, as noted already, no swearing occurs in the movie itself. This choice of language corresponds to the stance they adopt toward the episode recounted and the whole movie, and thus to identity construction in general.

We have inspected a story of vicarious experience based on an episode from a movie viewed recently by the primary teller and related primarily for its entertainment value, enhanced by considerable co-narration and constructed dialogue. By contrast with previous examples with a certain amount of referential vagueness and lack of coherence as Labov & Waletzky (Reference Labov, Waletzky and Helm1967) found characteristic in their stories of vicarious experience, this excerpt illustrated clear, consistent reference based on the names of the actors in the movie and admirable coherence. Clearly stories of vicarious experience can differ widely in structure and function, featuring various sorts of internal coherence and contextual relevance. Epistemic authority and telling rights, in the sense of Sacks (Reference Sacks, Atkinson and Heritage1984), may be established very loosely, having heard a story at work or having recently seen a film on television.