4 - Retellings

Summary

This chapter focuses on multiple tellings, oral and written, about a fight. Unlike most of the fight stories told at the junior high, these stories concern a fight that actually occurred. The multiple tellings provide an opportunity for the close examination of differences between oral and written versions and between versions told among adolescents, among adults, and told (and written) by adolescents for adults.

A few points elaborated in earlier chapters have a bearing on this discussion. First, the story is not the same as the event described; further, events are categories of experience, not to be confused with the experiences themselves. Stories are one way of categorizing experiences as events. Second, stories build shared knowledge by creating categories of experience as tellable. Fights are one such category. Third, clarity is not necessarily the professed or assumed goal of storytelling, and stories may conceal as well as reveal. Mutual intelligibility involves more than clarity and depends upon shared means of communication (codes, narrative devices, framing devices) rather than upon pieces of information.

Rarely are so many versions, oral and written, told by adolescents, teachers, and reporters available for research. Although retellings are a common phenomenon in everyday storytelling, custom decrees that ordinarily one may not be the audience for more than a few versions. The versions presented here were not solicited; rather, they were collected as they were told, as part of everyday conversations.