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THE EVALUATION OF NARRATIVE
RETELLINGS BY SIXTH GRADE STUDENTS
BY
James Robert Kalmbach
A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English
1980
("fl/(1017
ABSTRACT
THE EVALUATION OF NARRATIVE
RETELLINGS BY SIXTH GRADE STUDENTS
BY
James Robert Kalmbach
The dissertation is a study of narratives produced
by sixth grade students when retelling a short story which
they have read. Labov has suggested that such narrative
retellings are typically unevaluated by narrators, that
there is no indication in the retelling as to the signi-
ficance of events or the point of the story (1972).
A sample of twenty retellings were drawn from Reading
Miscue Inventories which had been collected from sixth
grade students at Sturgis Middle School, Sturgis, Michigan,
as part of a curriculum development project. The evaluative
devices found in the retellings were inventoried, narrative
structures were analyzed, and the points made in the re-
tellings were isolated.
Results show that the sample of retellings contain
a complete range of syntactic evaluative devices, intensi-
fiers, comparators, correlatives and explicatives.
Orientation sections and codas appear in eighty percent
of the retellings; evaluation sections which separate
the complicating action from the resolving action appear
in all twenty of the retellings. In all of the retellings,
the evaluation section presents what the narrator perceives
as the point of the story. It is concluded that in this
sample, the retellings were fully formed narratives in the
sense that Labov has defined them (p. 369).
The evaluation found in the retellings is then compared
to the evaluation found in the two original stories. Some
evaluative devices are used in retellings which are never
used in the original stories. Some devices are used in
retellings in different scenes to make different points.
Other devices, from the original stories, are reproduced
in the retellings but are always used in the same context of
complicating and resolving action as in the original.
The students are sensitive to the function of an evaluation
section in the original story. Devices which present
important evidence for a general proposition or which
indicate a resolution of underlying conflict were recalled
more often than devices in evaluation sections which present
secondary propositions. The students also generally agree
on the general propositions presented in the original
stories and on the events which are evaluated. There is a
great deal of variation, however, in the types of evidence
and the amount of evidence offered to support the general
propositions.
It is concluded that in narrative retelling, students
are not recalling the original; they are instead creating
a new narrative using the original as a blueprint. It is
suggested that the retellings in the sample are evaluated
because the students have made the story part of their
experience through reading, through the process of "evoking
the poem" as presented by Rosenblatt (1978). Evaluation,
in a narrative retelling, is taken as evidence that the
reader has taken an aesthetic stance towards the story and
has had a successful transaction with the text. Retellings
are defined as a representation of the experience of reading
and it is suggested thattflmaways a narrative retelling is
evaluated provide clues to the nature of that reading
experience.
For my family
ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
An undertaking of this sort is impossible without
the support of many people. James Stalker, who directed my
dissertation, must be acknowledged because without him the
project could not have become a reality. Thanks are also
due to Nancy Ainsworth, Ruth Brand, and Linda Wagner,
the other members of my committee for their advice and
encouragement.
A special thanks also to Alan Hollingsworth, Jay
Ludwig, Marilyn Wilson, Joanne Devine, Wendy Neininger,
Lois Rosen, and to others associated with the reading
program in the Department of English at Michigan State
University. Their enthusiasm and love of learning make the
study of reading a joy.
iii
Section
List of Tables
Introduction
Chapter One:
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Background of the Study
1.1 Introduction
1.2 A Review of the Uses of Retellings in Research
1.2.1
1.
l.
2.2
2.3
1.2.4
1.
1.
2.5
2.6
Studies of Language Variation
Miscue Analysis Research
Studies of Story Recall
Studies of Narrative Production
Studies of Retelling
Conclusions
1.3 Studies of Narrative Structure
1.
1.
1.
3.1
3.2
3.3
Semiotic and Structural Studies of
Narrative
Story Grammars
Studies of Narrative Transmission
1.3.3.1 Sociolinguistic Studies of Narrative
1.3.3.1.1 Narrative Structure in Labov's
Theory
1.3.3.1.2 Types of Evaluation
l.3.3.l.2.l Intensifiers
1.3.3.1.2.2 Comparators
iv
10
11
15
18
20
22
29
30
34
36
36
38
42
44
45
Section
1.4
Chapter
2.1
2.2
2.5
Chapter
3.1
3.2
1.3.3.1.2.3 Correlatives
l.3.3.l.2.4 Explicatives
1.3.3.1.3 Summary
1.3.4 Literary Studies of Narrative
Transmission
1.3.5 Conclusions
The Present Study
Two: The Retellings
The Sturgis Project
Collection of Retellings
Analysis of the Retellings
Analysis of the Original Stories
2.4.1 "The Runaway"
2.4.2 "The Parsley Garden"
Summary
Three: Analysis of Evaluation in Retellings
Introduction
The Evaluative Devices in Retellings
3.2.1 External Evaluation
3.2.2 Syntactic Evaluative Devices
3.2.2.1 Intensifiers
3.2.2.2 Comparators
3.2.2.3 Correlatives
3.2.2.4 Explicatives
3.2.3 A Comparison of Evaluative Devices in
Retellings to Devices in Labov’s Fight
Narratives
49
51
52
58
58
59
62
65
67
71
78
81
81
86
87
90
90
92
93
93
94
Section
3.3 Narrative Analysis of Retellings
3.3.1 Transitional Components
3.3.1.1 Orientations
3.3.1.2 Codas
3.3.1.3 Why Do Transitional Components Appear
in Retellings?
3.3.2 Complication, Evaluation, and Resolution
3.3.2.1 Single Narrative Cycle
3.3.2.2 Double Narrative Cycle
3.4 Evaluation and the Point of Retellings
3.5 Summary
Chapter Four: The Relationship of Evaluation in
Retellings and in the Original Stories
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Evaluative Devices Found Only in the Original
Stories
4.3 Evaluative Devices Which Appear Only in
Retellings
4.4 Evaluative Devices Used in Retellings and in
the Original Stories
4.4.1 The Reproduction of Evaluative Devices
4.4.2 The Conversation between A1 and the
Manager
4.5 Summary
Chapter Five: Conclusions, Implications, Directions
5.1 Conclusions
5.2 Implications
5.3 Directions
vi
99
104
108
110
112
115
117
132
135
135
136
140
143
146
160
171
175
175
183
185
Section
Appendix
Bibliography
vii
Table 1:
Table 2:
Table 3:
Table 4:
Table 5:
Table 6:
Table 7:
Table 8:
Table 9:
Table 10:
Table 11:
Table 12:
Table 13:
LIST OF TABLES
Evaluative Devices in Original Stories and
in Retellings
Devices
in Retellings and Fight Narratives
Orientation Sections from "The Runaway" and
Retellings
Orientations of "The Parsley Garden" and
Retellings
Codas
Narrative Structure in Retellings
Evaluations from Retellings of "The Parsley
Garden"
Evaluations from Retellings of "The Runaway"
Evaluative Devices in Both the Retellings
and the
Devices
Without
Devices
Original Stories
Which Are Reproduced in Retellings
Paraphrases
That are Reproduced and Paraphrased
Reproduced Devices with Major Contexts
Devices
Manager
Used in Dialogue Between Al and the
viii
Page
91
95
101
103
106
111
124
130
145
150
152
153
168
INTRODUCTION
A good deal of work has been done on the nature of
narrative from Propp's Morphology of the Polktale (1958)
to various literary, linguistic, psychological, and socio-
linguistic approaches. There has also been a good deal of
work which uses retellings of narratives as an instrument
to gather data, studies of language variation, of compre—
hension, of narrative production, etc. There has been
very little work, however, on the nature of narrative
retellings. Labov has suggested that vicarious narratives
are typically not evaluated; the material in the story is
not transformed, intensified, compared to show what the
point of the story was (1972a). The retellings of cartoons
and television shows which he examined consisted of a
simple listing of events. Harste and Carey (1979) and
Smith (1979) (m1 the other hand, suggest that a retelling
is a result of a semantic transaction between the reader
and the original text.
The present study explores Labov's assertion that
retellings are, typically, unevaluated. A sample of twenty
retellings are examined, ten each of two stories, drawn
from a group of Reading Miscue Inventories which were
collected by the authoran:Sturgis Middle School, Sturgis,
1
2
Michigan from sixth grade students. Three questions
are explored: (1) What, if any,evaluative devices are
found in these twenty retellings? (2) What is the struc-
ture of the narratives that are created in retelling? Do
they take the.form of orientation, complicating action,
evaluation, resolving action and coda which is typical
of fully-formed narratives or do they take the form of an
unstructured listing of events? (3) Do these students see
a point to the story and do they indicate that point in
the narratives they create? Further, the evaluation
that was found in the retellings is compared to the evalua-
tion used in the original story to attempt to establish if
the evaluation in a retelling is simply the result of
recalling the evaluation of the original story or if it
is a result of a process of narrative construction.
The research is in the form of a case study, examining
in depth these twenty retellings but making no attempt to
extrapolate to the nature of retellings in general or to
the relationship of the retelling to the original story.
I had for many years taught a course in the teaching of
reading at Michigan State University. As part of that
course, students would administer a Reading Miscue Inventory
to a problem reader. The Reading Miscue Inventory involves
reading a story orally and then telling the researcher
everything that can be remembered about it. These retellings
proved endlessly fascinating to me and my students. A
reader who might not be able to complete a standardized
3
reading test was often able to create a vivid and gripping
narrative when retelling a story without interference and
was often able to retell much more of the story then was
thought possible by the student, the teacher, or even, on
occasion, the reader himself. Yet we were frustrated by the
analytic tools available to study these retellings. It
was clear that a great deal of information about these
readers and about reading was being lost because we did
not know how to ask the right questions. We could only
read the retellings intuitively, as budding literary
critics and compare them in a crude way to the original
story. I became aware, however, that before you could study
retellings formally, you had to establish their status as
narratives. If Labov is correct and most retellings are
not evaluated narratives but a confusing, uninteresting
list of events (a possibility which I intuitively rejected
from the beginning), or, if he is incorrect, but this
fact is never documented, then any study on the nature of
retellings could be met with the withering rejoinder, "So
what, these are just retellings!" Research on retellings
could not be founded on the common sense belief that
retellings were like narratives. This common sense notion
had to be demonstrated.
The present study deliberately ignores a number of
fascinating questions about the nature of retellings to
focus on the issue of how retellings are like or are not
like narratives of personal experience through the specific
4
question of whether or not these retellings are evaluated.
The case study approach has been adapted to sever the
question of defining retellings from the inferences which
can be drawn and tested from that definition. It is hoped
that in taking this limited first step, the status of
retellings can be resolved and a foundation can be laid
for further research.
CHAPTER ONE
BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
1.1 Introduction
The communication of experience is one of the most fun-
damental functions of language. We establish a link to the
people around us by sharing and evaluating the events of
our lives. As Nancy Martin writes:
Personal "stories" are in fact the basic fabric of
children's conversations, the means by which they
enter into other people's experiences, try them on
for fit and advance into general ideas. It would
seem likely that adults also do this, that we
collectively through anecdotes, build up a shared
representation of life. (1976, p. 43)
As James Britton notes, narrative primarily develops as a
social activity, as one of the ways people communicate
with one another (1970, p. 71). Narrative can also function
as one of the ways of understanding experience. We tell
people about the events of our lives not only to share,
delight or bemoan experiences, but also to try to comprehend
them through language. To put a sequence of events into
words is to come to some sort of an understanding of them.
It is language used in the role of spectator as Britton
has called it (1970). Language used not to get something or
achieve some goal, but rather used to evaluate and interpret
experience. It is the language of gossip and monologues,
the stories told at the end of the day with feet propped up
and a drink in hand.
Just as we are narrative producing, we are also
narrative consuming. We talk to one another about books,
television shows, movies, the ballet in the same ways that
we talk about our own experiences. You see a new movie.
It was good. It made you think. 80 you tell someone about
it. Just as we use narrative to share and to interpret
experience, we also retell narratives we have read or seen
or heard to share and to interpret them. William Labov,
a sociolinguist who has studied the narratives informants
offer during linguistic interviews, calls stories which
have been retold "narratives of vicarious experience" (1972a,
p. 367).
A narrative of personal experience is a mapping of
events, of experiences, of memories of real world happenings
on to a series of narrative clauses. A narrative cannot
represent the events of real life exactly, of course. It
cannot include everything that happened or all of the
remembered or unremembered details. There is a necessary
process of selection at work. Narrators select a sequence
of significant events to include in a particular story, as
a representation of a particular experience. Seymour
Chatman writes about the process of selection in narrative:
But a narrative--any narrative, regardless of the
style--is always a finite choice, represented by
a limited number of discrete statements among a
continuum of actions; no such choice can ever be
totally complete, since the number of possible
statements of the number of possible small actions
or fragments of large actions is infinite. . . .
The author selects those events which he feels are
sufficient to elicit in the mind of his audience
this continuum. (1975b, p. 305)
In a narrative of vicarious experience, or a retelling as
it will be referred to here, the narrator is drawing on
materials which have already been selected. The original
narrative was not an exact representation of reality but
a selected version, controlled and interpreted by the
original author. In retelling, it is necessary to further
select and arrange events from the limited store of events
in the original story.
It cannot be assumed that a retelling, a narrative of
vicarious experience, and a narrative of personal experience
are functionally or structurally equivalent, that the
process of narrating is at work in roughly the same manner
or with the same degree of efficiency. The status of the
retelling as a narrative, i.e., the differences between
narratives of vicarious experience and narratives of per-
sonal experience, form the overarching issue which this
dissertation addresses. We will examine one way in which
a narrative of vicarious experience may or may not be like
a narrative of personal experience using a notion developed
by William Labov of "evaluation" (1972a). Evaluation is a
broad cover term which refers to the various ways narrators
manipulate a narrative to show the audience what the point
of the story is. The thesis is that vicarious narratives
are not evaluated in the same way as are narratives of
personal experience. (The fourth section of this chapter
presents the thesis in detail.) We will test this thesis
using a sample of twenty retellings, ten each of two sepa-
rate stories, and examining the types of evaluative devices
which are found in the retellings, the functions these
devices play in the narrative structure of the retelling,
the points the retellers are making in their retellings, and
the relationship of the evaluation found in retellings to
the evaluation found in the two original stories.
At issue here is more than just a definition of the
differences or similarities between narratives of personal
experience and narratives of vicarious experience.
Retelling, in a variety of forms--paraphrase, discussion,
presentation, etc.--is a central act of communication in
the educational process. The Bullock report on the status
of literacy education in the British Isles notes that:
When he has achieved a grasp of the literal
content the reader is then in a position to
analyse, paraphrase, synthesise and summarise
it in whatever way suits his reading purpose. In
varying degrees of difficulty this capacity for
reorganisation is required of the child throughout
his school work. (1974, p. 94)
In America, the same idea has been expressed by Smith,
Goodman, and Meredith in their text, Language and Thinking
in School (1976). For Smith, Goodman, and Meredith,
"reorganisation" is the third part of a three phase cycle
of learning which they call presenting:
Each individual perceives new objects, events,
or ideas in his own way. He tries to incor-
porate what he perceives into his conceptual
schemes through the process of ideation. Then
he presents them on his own terms to himself
and others by symbolic representation in media
appropriate to his life-style and to the types
of ideas. (P. 96)
The authors conceive presenting as the only way students
can make sense of what they know, as the way‘they construct
their world (p. 116). From class discussions to book
reports, vicarious narratives are part of an intellectual
enterprise which forms the foundation for much of education.
The nature of vicarious narrative and its relationship to
narratives of personal experience have important implica-
tions for the processes of teaching and learning.
Before presenting the thesis of the dissertation,
I will first review the various ways retellings have been
used in research and the assumptions researchers have made
about the retelling process. I will then briefly review
different approaches to the study of narrative structure and
narrative transmission, concluding with a discussion of
Labov's work and of the various studies of literary
narrative transmission.
1.2 A Review of the Uses of Retellings in Research
Retellings have been used in research since at least
the mid-twenties by Piaget (1926), Bartlett (1932), and
others. In these studies, a retelling would be used as an
instrument to gather linguistic data. Typically, a
10
researcher would show a film or give a story to a group of
subjects and then collect either an oral or a written
retelling of the film or story. The retellings would then
be used as data in various experiments or analyses. We
will review five different types of research: (1) studies
of language variation, (2) miscue analysis research,
(3) studies of story recall, (4) studies of narrative
production, and (5) studies which have been done on the
nature of the act of retelling.
1.2.1 Studies of Language Variation
Retellings have been used to gather data for a number
of studies of the relationship of oral language to written
language. Harrell (1957); O'Donnell, Griffin, and Norris
(1967); Buchanan (1973); and Raybern (1974) have each
shown a short, silent film to a group of subjects and .
either had the subject retell the story orally and then in
writing or had half the subjects tell the story and half
write down their retelling. Kalmbach (1977) surveyed
various studies which have been completed in this century
on the relationship of oral language and written language
and argued that retellings appeared to be the best instru-
ment for gathering data for such studies because they
control the topic of the text, the store of experiences
which the retellers draw on, and the context in which data
is collected. It is interesting to note, however, that
these studies of oral language and written language do
11
not consider the effect of the retelling process on the
quality of their data. For example, O'Donnell, Griffin,
and Norris have no discussion of the possible contamination
of their data by the retelling process or by the narrative
form of the data (1967). A number of the syntactic
transformations for which O'Donnell, Griffin, and Norris
found a significant overall increase in use from kinder-
garten to grade seven, most notably nominals and adverbials,
are the types of syntactic transformations which would
normally only be found in the evaluation sections of a
narrative (p. 78). Labov has found that a narrator's
ability to use complex evaluative devices such as nominals
or adverbials increases with maturity (1972a, p. 393).
The findings of O'Donnell, Griffin, and Norris may well be
attributable to development in the ability to retell a
story rather than to growth in general linguistic ability.
There is no way, at present, to assess the effect of the
task of retelling on the different variables studied.
1.2.2 Miscue Analysis Research
The study of the ways in which an oral reading of a
text varies from the original text--"error analysis"
as it was first called or "miscue analysis" as it is now
generally referred to--was developed independently by
several different researchers in the late sixties, most
notably Marie Clay (1967), Rose-Marie Weber (1968), and
Yetta Goodman (1968). Since that time, the approach
12
developed jointly by Yetta Goodman and her husband Kenneth
Goodman which they call miscue analysis has become the
dominant methodology.1 As part of the data base for
miscue analysis, researchers have subjects retell the story
which has just been read orally. They elicit the retelling
with a question of the form: "Now, would you please tell
me everything you can remember about the story you have just
read?" (Allen and Watson 1976, p. 243). After the subject's
unaided recall, the researcher asks a series of open-ended
questions to see if the subject can recall any other
information about the story. The questions are of the
form: "Can you tell me anything else about X?" rather
than: "What color were X's shoes?" They explore what
the subject recalls without suggesting what the researcher
feels is important. The data for the present study was
collected using a version of this procedure developed
by Yetta Goodman and Carolyn Burke in 1972. The process
of data collection is described in the second chapter of
the dissertation.
After a retelling is collected, it is then scored
according to how much of the original story was recalled
using an outline such as the one presented in Allen and
Watson (1976, p. 244).
Story Outline
A content outline should be developed
for each piece of reading material with one
hundred points being distributed across the
items within each of the categories.
13
(Narrative Outline)
Character recall (list character) 15
Character development (modifying statements) 15
Theme 20
Plot 20
Events (list occurences) 30
(Information Outline, for nonfiction)
Major concept(s) 30
Generalization(s) 30
Specific points or examples 40
Recently, Y. Goodman and Burke* have modified the retelling
outline for narratives. Points for plot and theme were
eliminated as too arbitrary and instead character recall
was assigned twenty points; character development, twenty
points; and events, sixty points.
The original retelling scoring system (and to a
lesser extent, the modified system), because it confounded
different sorts of information: plot, theme, character
and event recall, etc., was not of much value in comparing
one reader with another. It was not possible to determine
,the significance of, for instance, a sixty versus a seventy
retelling score. Retellings could, however, be more
profitably compared to other measures of comprehension
for the same subject. Thus Y. Goodman and Burke discuss
how a retelling score complements or does not complement
*Yetta Goodman 1978: personal communication.
14
the miscue patterns found in an oral reading and the insights
into reading strategies which can be gained from these
different relationships (1972, pp. 115-116). K. Goodman
and Burke have found that the retelling score correlates
well with the comprehending score for a subject (i.e.,
the percentage of sentences with miscues which are either
corrected or semantically acceptable) (1973, p. 68).
Similarly, Rousch has compared retelling scores to compre-
hending scores and to cloze scores (1976, p. 135).
Rousch found that for students with high comprehending
scores, the retelling score was significantly higher than
the cloze score; while for students with low comprehending
scores, the cloze score in“; consistently higher than the
retelling score. Rousch suggests that a cloze test may
not be an accurate measure of comprehension (p. 134).
Retelling scores are generally recognized as limited,
unsatisfactory measures by researchers studying miscue
patterns. They are used because no better alternative
system is available and because an open-ended recall,
regardless of how it is scored, yields richer and more
reliable information about comprehension than a standard-
ized measure. Perhaps the most serious flaw of a story
outline--whether the original or Y. Goodman and Burke's
revised version--is that it is forced to treat each event
and each character more or less equally. It is possible to
assign more points to a more important character or event,
of course, but such assignment must be done intuitively
15
and cannot be reconstructed from the score. Consequently,
a retelling score does not yield insight into the nature
of the narrative the subject has created. It only
measures that narrative against the original story.
1.2.3 Studies of Story Recall
Retellings of stories have been used in psychology
since Piaget (1926) and especially by Bartlett (1932)
where the notion that subjects use a "schema" to organize
Astory information was first prOposed. With the increased
interest in discourse-level phenomena in psycholinguistics
and cognitive psychology, however, studies of story recall
have increased dramatically. A recent issue of Poetics
(vol. 9, May 1980) is devoted entirely to articles about
story comprehension. It includes a bibliography by Perry
Thorndike of sixty-seven different studies (pp. 329-332) and
a valuable review by Thorndike and Yekovich of the concept
of schema (pp. 23-50).
Studies such as those in the Poetics issue and by
Stein and Glenn (1979), Thorndike (1977), Mandler and
Johnson (1977), and Bower (1976) use retellings as an
instrument to collect data about story recall. They begin
with a short fairy tale or fable, often constructed by the
researcher. The story is presented to a group of subjects
(e.g., undergraduate psychology students or elementary
school children) either visually or orally. No researcher
reports a significant difference between a visual or an
16
oral mode of presentation. The subjects then write a
retelling or give an oral retelling of the story. The
researchers have previously prepared a structural and a
propositional analysis of the target story using a "story
grammar" of some sort. The concept of story grammar is
reviewed in the third section of this chapter. The research-
ers then divide the retellings of the target story into
propositions. A proposition is a clause, a sentence, or an
embedded sentence which has an action or a stative verb.
For example, Thorndike notes that "There once was a farmer"
would be a single proposition as would be "who owned a very
stubborn donkey" (1977, p. 87). Paraphrases and minor dele-
tions are generally included when identifying the proposi-
tions from the original story which are included in the re-
telling. Inferences are then drawn about the relationship
of narrative structure, as defined by the story grammar, to
story recall in terms of number of propositions included in
a retelling. Thorndike examined the effect of plot structure
on recall. He prepared four versions of a single story, each
with different amounts of narrative structure ranging from
what was hoped to be normal story structure to a version where
the theme statement was moved from the beginning to the end
of the story and theme-directing plot structure was removed,
to a version where the theme statement was removed entirely,
to a descriptive version with all temporal sequencing
removed. Thorndike found that the greater the amount of
narrative structure in the original story, the greater
17
the number of propositions recalled in the retelling (1977,
p. 88). The existence of identifiable organizational struc-
ture was found to be a significant factor for memory of
narrative discourse (p. 95).
Studies of story comprehension such as Thorndike's,
however, generally assume that the act of retelling is
simply a form of recall with no particular theoretical
interest in itself. Rather, what is found interesting are
the inferences which can be made about the relationship
of narrative structure and memory. The story grammars of
these studies are never used to examine the retellings
which subjects offer. The retelling is viewed as a simple
trace of the original; hence there is no need to analyze
its narrative structure. Only Stein and Glenn discuss
the types of new material which subjects may include in a
retelling (1979). Stein and Glenn found that their subjects
tended to add new internal responses (affective responses,
goals, thoughts) and more initiations of actions (p. 95).
Interestingly, internal responses and initiations of actions
were among the least well-recalled featurescmfthe original
text. Stein and Glenn, however, do not go beyond the stage
of inventorying the differences between the original story
and the retelling of that story. They do not attempt to
analyze retellings as narratives with their own narrative
structures.
18
1.2.4 Studies of Narrative Production
A recent series of articles collected in The Pear
Stories have studied the structure of a series of retellings
of a silent film (Chafe, 1980a). Chafe and his associates
had received a grant "to look for evidence that knowledge
is stored in the mind in part analogically, and not only
propositionally" (p. xi). From this initial question, they
came to focus on, among other questions, how peOple talk
about things they have experienced and later recall. To
capture an experience that could be shared by speakers of
different languages from different cultures, they prepared,
with the help of a professional filmmaker, a 16mm color
and sound film, "Pear Film." The film was a short narrative
with no dialogue but appropriate sound effects. They then
showed the film to and collected retellings of it from
speakers of English, German, Chinese, Malay, Thai, Persian,
Greek, Japanese, Haitian Creole, and Sacapultec, a Mayan
language spoken in Guatemala.
The Pear Stories consists of a series of fascinating
articles on various aspects of narrative production each
of which draws on retellings of the "Pear Film" for data.
Chafe studies the nature of consciousness by attempting to
relate the "idea units" found in spontaneous narratives to
the focusing and refocusing of consciousness (1980b).
Tannen compares retelling of the "Pear Film" by Greeks
with those by Americans and argues that fundamentally
different narrative strategies are used by the Greeks and
19
and Americans. She relates the two different strategies
to the differences between oral and literate traditions
(p. 85). Downing studies the factors influencing lexical
choices in retellings of the "Pear Film;" Clancy, the
ways characters were referred to in English and Japanese
narratives; and Du Bois, the ways narrators trace the
identity of characters through a narrative.
With the partial exception of Tannen's paper which
considers the effect of the film as a film on the retellings,
each of these very interesting studies assumes that the
retelling of a film is the same sort of narrative as the
telling of a narrative of personal experience. Chafe
does recognize that a film is different from ordinary
experience and that the editing of the film and the various
camera angles used may influence interpretation (p. xvii).
There is, however, little consideration of the effect of
the film as a narrative on the shape of the retellings as
narratives. Where studies of story recall analyze the
original story and take the retelling of that story for
granted, studies of the "Pear Film" appear to take the
original narrative for granted while analyzing the struc-
ture of the retellings of the film.
The assumption in The Pear Stories, of course, is that
a nonverbal narrative is enough like real experience to
make the retelling of a film like a narrative of personal
experience. This assumption may or may not be true. The
fact remains that a nonverbal narrative is still a narrative
20
and has undergone the same process of selection of events
and details that a linguistic narrative undergoes. The
authors of the papers in The Pear Stories consistently
confound experience with representations of experience
assuming that they are indistinguishable. The original
question, however, remains. What is the status of a
retelling as a narrative? In the studies so far reviewed,
this question has not been asked, much less answered.
1.2.5 Studies of Retelling
In contrast to studies where the act of retelling is
assumed and retellings are collected as data for various
experiments or analyses, researchers at the University of
Indiana, working within the tradition of miscue analysis,
have begun investigating the nature of the act of retelling.
Harste and Carey (1979) write about their attempts to
replicate Anderson et a1. (1976). Harste and Carey took
two ambiguous passages, one which could be interpreted as
either a prison break or a wrestling match and one which
could be interpreted as either practicing music or playing
cards. They had undergraduates with apprOpriate backgrounds
for one of the interpretations, physical education majors
and music education majors, read and then give a retelling
of the appropriate passage to see if they would select the
interpretation of the passage related to their background.
Harste and Carey did not, however, find any simple set of
major themes which they could score:
21
Upon completing our first round of data collec-
tion (essentially an effort to replicate the
original study) we sat down to code written
retellings by major themes: playing music/
playing cards or wrestling/prison. The coding
of themes was projected as a one-night task by
each of us so that we could determine inter-
rater reliability, proved excruciatingly complex.
Themes identified from the written retellings
of the music/card playing passage, rather than
falling into two nice categories, ranged from
playing music to listening 39 music to playing
games to playing cards to talking to having
sexual relationships to combinatins of these
themes being the hallmark of any given retelling
rather than the exception. (P. 15)
They go on to argue that what distinguished their retellings
was not their similarities but their striking differences:
"What occurred was not a poor rendition of the text, but
a unique event-—in essence a new text as original and
distinctive as the author's" (p. 17). They suggest that
a retelling is the result of a "semantic transaction"
between the text and the reader, "a fluid give and take
between mental setting and print setting in an effort to
make sense of the story" (p. 17). They relate this concept
to Rosenblatt's conception of the transactional nature of
the reading process (1978).
In a related article, Smith has analyzed retellings
of nonnarrative text book materials (1979). Smith argues
that an Open response such as a retelling provides the
best evidence of a reader's interaction with the text and
that:
The analysis of the retelling, then, should not
emphasize recall in the form of repetitions or
paraphrases, although these will be of interest
in the analysis. The focus here is on the reader
22
as author of his own version of the content,
which will indicate the nature of his own
active structuring processes. The analysis, then,
should attempt to reveal how the reader is breaking
meaning out of the text's language and then
reconstructing it in language of his own.
(P. 90)
As Smith notes, "learning involves change, not reproduction,"
that which is interesting about a retelling is not the
degree to which it has reproduced the original text but
rather the process by which the original text and the reader
work together to produce a new text. Smith, like Harste and
Carey, argues for an approach to the study of retelling
which takes into consideration both the contributions of
the original story and of the reader in the creation of a
narrative which may or may not be like the story it is
based on but in either case will have its own unique
structure.
1.2.6 Conclusions
We have reviewed various studies which have used
retellings to collect data for studies of language varia-
tion, story comprehension, story production, and for
studies of the act of retelling. We have argued that each
of the first three neglects a feature of the retelling
process. Studies of language variations have ignored the
effect of retelling and of narrative discourse on the
variables studies. Studies of story comprehension, both
in miscue analysis and story recall experiments, have
neglected the stories subjects create in retelling and have
23
simply measured retellings against the original story.
Studies of narrative production, on the other hand, have
neglected the original narrative which the retelling was
based on and have treated retellings as if they were
narratives of personal experience. Finally, studies of
the act of retelling have argued for the necessity of
examining a retelling as the result of a transaction between
the reader and the text in which both the reader and the
text contribute to the shaping of a new narrative.
Underlying these different approaches to retellings
are different implicit or explicit conceptions of the
comprehending process, of the relationship between the reader
and the text, the perceiver and the object perceived.
First, in studies of language variation and narrative
production, where sutï¬ects view silent films and then
retell them, the act of comprehending is assumed. Analysis
of linguistic variables or of narrative structures is
performed on retellings after, presumably, comprehension
has taken place. Although significant differences in
interpretation may, of course, occur, as well as cultural
misconceptions or idiosyncratic variation, nonetheless,
it is assumed that each subject understood the film
equally well. Further, in studies of story comprehension
(both studies of story recall and miscue analysis), the
underlying model of comprehension is analogous to that
which is at work in oral reading, as it has been sketched
by K. Goodman (1976) and others.2 It is a complex and a
24
sophisticated model, a psycholinguistic guessing game
using minimal language cues from the text to sample,
predict, and then confirm/disconfirm in the text and to
correct as needed to retain meaning. Thus Stein and
Glenn (1979) give a sort of taxonomy of transformation of
story materials which is remarkably like the taxonomy of
miscues which the Goodmans have developed.3 Repetitions,
substitutions, deletions, insertions, inversions, the basic
categories of miscues (Y. Goodman and Burke 1972, p. 28),
are each mentioned in Stein and Glenn as types of trans-
formations of story material found in retellings (p. 93).
A reteller, of course, does not have a story to sample from,
only a memory of a story. Studies of story comprehension
supply the original story and then analyze retellings as
if the original were present in the same way that it is in
oral reading. Finally, Smith (1979) and Harste and Carey
(1979) have explicitly related their conceptions of
retelling to a transactional model of comprehension in the
sense of Rosenblatt (1978). They argue that a retelling
is the result of a transaction between a text and a reader
or listener and is essentially a new and unique text, a
fusion of the original text and the reader's response to
it.
I do not mean to say that the researchers cited
necessarily subscribe to the model of comprehension which
I have suggested underlies their approach to retellings.
Rather, I would suggest that the approach to retellings
25
which these researchers have adopted necessarily entails a
particular model of the process of comprehension. The
close relationship of retelling to comprehension is a
reflection of the fundamental nature of narrative. To
tell a story, whether a narrative of personal experience
or a narrative of vicarious experience, is necessarily an
act of comprehension. The narrator must select and segment
from the continuum of experience only those experiences
which effectively communicate the point of the story. The
process of selection is a process of comprehension; to
tell others of your experiences is to understand them in
some way. Similarly, to retell a story or a movie is to
come to an understanding of some sort of that story or
movie. It is impossible to study narratives without
studying comprehension, to study or to use retellings
without committing yourself explicitly or implicitly to a
conception of the comprehending process.
The present study is not an inquiry into the nature of
comprehension. Yet, to the extent that it examines the
nature of retellings as narratives, it also studies
comprehension. The model of comprehension used in the
present study is that of Rosenblatt (1978) and Neisser
(1976). While the primary focus of the dissertation is
the nature of retellings as narratives, or, how do
narratives of personal experience differ from narratives
of vicarious experience; a recurring secondary theme will
26
be what the data tell us about the process of compre-
hending.
Neisser (1976) and Rosenblatt (1978), from the
different fields of cognitive psycholoqy and literary
criticism, propose similar solutions to similar problems.
Neisser is interested in the nature of perception, i.e.,
how we perceive, process, and make use of information from
the world. He reviews two opposing theories of perception.
The first, information processing, begins with the retinal
image and focuses on the ways these images are detected
and processed by the brain and finally enter consciousness
(p. 16). Gibson has reacted against the information
processing model by arguing that perception begins not
with the retinal image but with the pattern of light
reflecting off the object of perception (1966). The
optic array samples from these patterns as the object
or perceiver moves and "picks up" the invariances which
stay constant in movement. Neisser argues that the
information processing theory is inadequate because it
cannot account for the contribution of the object perceived.
It is centered totally in the mind of the perceiver. He
also argues that Gibson's theory is inadequate because
it does not account for the contribution of the perceiver
but rather is centered totally in the object perceived
(1976, p. 18).
Rosenblatt is concerned with the role the reader
plays in literary theory. The new critics of the twentieth
27
century focused on "the work itself" as a self—contained
pattern of words, an autonomous structure of literary
devices effectively excluding the reader from literary
study by focusing only on the text (1978, p. 3). Recent
reactions against the new criticism have led to an alterna-
tive approach which sees "the text as empty, awaiting
the content brought by the reader" and which focuses on
the reader to the exclusion of the text (p. 4). Reading,
of course, is a form of perception and the approaches of
Gibson and the new critics are remarkably similar, focusing
on the object of perception, on the text. On the other
hand, the information-processing theory and the reading-
response-oriented critics are also remarkably similar,
focusing on the processing in the head of the perceiver.
In the present study, we see a similar division between
studies of story recall which focus only on the structure
of the original story and studies of narrative production
which focus only on the structure of the retellings of the
original story.
Neisser and Rosenblatt propose similar resolutions
to this split, although Rosenblatt, who first wrote about
the role of the reader in 1938, effectively predates
both the new critics and the more recent reactions against
them. Both Neisser and Rosenblatt argue that perception
and reading are an active, creative transaction between the
perceiver and the object perceived in which both the
perceiver and the object/text have a role. Neisser argues
28
that perception is controlled by "anticipatory schemata that
prepare the perceiver to accept certain kinds of information
rather than others" (1976, p. 20). Schemata both control the
types of things we look for, expect to see in the environment,
and are modified by what is actually seen in a continuing
cycle of directing, sampling, and modifying. Writing about
the act of reading, Rosenblatt seems to evoke a concept very
similar to Neisser's notion of schemata:
The reader's attention to the text activates cer-
tain elements in his past experience--external
reference, internal response--that have become
linked with the verbal symbols. Meaning will
emerge from a network of relationships among the
things symbolized as he senses them. The symbols
point to these sensations, images, objects, ideas,
relationships, with the particular associations
of feeling-tones created by his past experience
with them in actual life or in literature. The
selection and organization of responses to some
degree hinge on the assumptions, the expectations,
or sense of possible structures, that he brings
out of the stream of his life. Thus built into
the raw materials of the literary process itself
is the particular world of the reader. (1979,
p. 11)
Just as schemata guide our perception but are modified
by the information of the senses, so too, the text, in
Rosenblatt's theory, functions as a blueprint, "a guide
for selecting, rejecting, and ordering of what is being
called forth" (p. 11). Rosenblatt also makes a distinction
between "the text" and "the poem." The text is the
actual words which are read, the poem is created in the act
of reading the text. The poem is a coming together of
the reader and words on the page by the process described
above. The concept of evoking a poem appears to be
29
remarkably similar to that of building a schemata, although
they cannot be taken as identical. Any number of different
schemata might be needed to evoke a long novel or a short
intense lyrical poem.
The work of Neisser and Rosenblatt offers a theory of
comprehension in which both the reader and the text play a
role. The analysis which follows focuses primarily on
the structure of retellings as narratives. It does not,
however, neglect the contribution of the original story or
the responses which students brought to the reading of a
story. In identifying both the contributions of the reader
and the text to the retelling process, it provides further
support for Neisser's and for Rosenblatt's conception of
the comprehending process.
1.3 Studies of Narrative Structure
The structural study of narrative in many ways mirrors
the study of language in general. For each competing
theoretical stance or methodological approach to language
study, it is possible to find a comparable approach to
the study of narrative. Similarly, as different theories
of language are best seen as complementing one another,
as providing slightly different answers and different tools
to study different problems with, different approaches to
narrative are best seen as complementing one another and
providing different tools to study different aspects of
narrative. The question is not which theory is best but
30
which theory is most appropriate for the question at hand?
There are three approaches that are of special interest in
the present study: (1) semiotic and structural studies
of narrative, (2) story grammars developed for studies of
story recall, and (3) studies of narrative transmission,
both sociolinguistic studies of personal narratives, and
extensions of speech act theory to the study of literary
fictions.
1.3.1 Semiotic and Structural Studies of Narrative
Structural studies of narrative date back to the work
of the Russian formalists (Matejka and Domorska, 1971) and
especially to Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1958). The
formalist tradition resurfaced in narrative study in a
number of forms through various attempts to adapt the
methodology of linguistics to narrative analysis. See,
for example, Todorov (1969), Van Dijk (1972), Hendricks
(1973), and Chatman (1969). These approaches share a
number of characteristics. They examine narrative texts
in isolation from speakers and hearer, stressing analysis
of the structure of the text just as the new critics
focused on "the poem itself." They attempt to define a
minimal narrative, to identify the characteristics which
distinguish a narrative text from a nonnarrative text:
"the 'de-finition' of the set of texts having the property
'narrative' can only be satisfactory when we have a previous
knowledge of the properties of non-narrative texts"
(Van Dijk 1972, p. 284). Finally, they tend to be
31
interested in the abstract episodic structure of narrative,
the sequence of events in a story, and the relationship of
one event to another, rather than in the ways narratives
are encoded in language, in their surface structure, or
in the role they play in communication.
Narrative, of course, is not restricted to stories
told through language. Stories can also be presented
nonverbally through film, mime, cartoon sequences, ballet,
etc. Interest in the structure of narrative leads quite
naturally to considerations of the essential "semiotic"
nature of narrative. Questions such as, What are the
essential defining characteristics of a narrative? or
What is the nature of the abstract episodic structure of
stories? ultimately are best answered at the semiotic, not
the linguistic,leve1 of structure as definitions of narra-
tive and the episodic structure of narratives must
necessarily transcend the linguistic encoding of a story.
Chatman presents a semiotic-based theory of the nature
of narrative (1975b). He reasserts the importance of the
distinction between story, i.e., the content, the chain of
events in a narrative, and discourse, i.e., "the means by
which the content is communicated, the set of narrative
'statements'" (p. 295). It is essentially the same
distinction as story versus plot, as the abstract chrono-
lOgical sequence of events and the actual order of events
in the story. Chatman, however, is after a more subtle
distinction. By "story" he means those aspects of
32
narrative which are not bound by language: events,
characters, settings, etc. By narrative "discourse," he
intends the actual encoding of narrative structure into a
specific media--verba1, cinematic, etc.--and also, the
process of narrative transmission, of communicating a
narrative to an audience (p. 296). Story is "the continuum
of events presupposing the total set of all conceivable
details, that is, those that can be projected by the normal
laws of the physical universe" (p. 303). In the process of
narrative transmission, the narrator selects and orders
events from this continuum and the reader must infer its
existence from those selected events. The audience then
must fill in the gaps in the story. Narrative "discourse"
is concerned with aspects of narrative transmission, with
narrative as a communicative act between a speaker and a
listener. "Story" is concerned with the continuum of
events that a narrative draws on as it exists independent
of the act of transmission.
Chatman goes on to argue that the essential defining
characteristic of narrative is temporal sequence:
Regardless of the medium in which it appears,
it is clear that the fundamental dimension of
narrative is time, or, more precisely, successi-
vity, that is, time as seen as the compass in
which successive events occur. (P. 313)
Chatman distinguishes between the discourse or outer time
it takes to actually read a story (as Opposed to the
simultaneity of looking at a painting) and the inner time
of the content of a story, time as it is represented in a
33
story, and argues that it is this time within the story
that distinguishes narrative from other discoursive
structures (p. 315). A number of researchers have noted
that non-Indo-European languages are not necessarily
bound to a temporal sequence of events. Polanyi reviews
this research (1979). Chatman does not address the issue
of cross-cultural narratives. It might be argued that it
is the existence of story-time, not necessarily temporal
sequencing,that distinguishes narrative discourse, or that
narrative is defined by the "story" which underlies
narrative transmission and the temporal sequencing which
exists in the "story." In any case, the existence of
story-time, of temporal sequence, can be taken as defining
narratives in English.
Chatman's distinction between "story" and "discourse"
is particularly valuable in making sense of different
approaches to narrative analysis. As we will see, so-called
"story grammars" and other structural approaches to
narrative are primarily concerned with "story," with the
abstract structure of narratives, independent of narrative
transmission or reception, with the role of events, charac-
ters, settings, etc. Researchers studying the structure
of narrative will, on occasion, use constructed narratives
to focus on a particular feature of narrative structure,
narratives which would never actually be told and which
intuitively seem quite dreadful as stories. On the other
hand, sociolinguistic approaches, such as Labov (1972a),
34
which are based on speech act theory are primarily
concerned with narrative discourse and with the process of
narrative transmission, with the ways speakers tell stories
and listeners understand them.
1.3.2 Story Grammars
The notion of a story grammar in cognitive psychology
was first presented by Rumelhart (1975) and later developed
by Mandler and Johnson (1977), Thorndike (1977), and
Stein and Glenn (1979). The goal of a story grammar is to
develop a "grammar" of story structure in the same ways that
linguists have developed a grammar of sentence structure
(Stein and Glenn 1979, p. 58). As noted earlier, an analysis
of the probe story was needed for experiments on story
recall in order to study the relationship of the original
story to the retelling of that story, and to manipulate the
story to study the effect of different structures on recall.
Story grammars are generally in the form of a series of
rewriting rules similar to those developed in Fillmore
(1968). Thus Stein and Glenn's first rule of narrative
structure (p. 59):
Rule 1: Story——-) ALLOW(Setting, Episode System)
is read as: a story consists of (or may be rewritten as)
a setting and an episode system connected by an allow
relationship. The setting establishes the context for the
story: characters, locations, behavioral situation, etc.
Thus it "allows" the story to take place by establishing
the necessary preconditions for a narrative.
35
There then follows, in Stein and Glenn's story grammar,
a series of rewriting rules which define what can occur in
a setting, the relationships that can obtain between
episodes--simultaneity, sequential, and causal--and the
structure of episodes. The structures which Stein and Glenn
pr0pose seem almost obsessively dualistic and remind one
more than anything else of a stimulus-response structure.
Thus an episode consists of an initiating event and a
response; a response consists of an internal response and a
plan sequence; a plan sequence consists of an attempt and
a resolution; etc. It is a series of actions and reactions
bouncing against one another like billiard balls.
The apparent hidden behavioral bias is unfortunate
only to the extent that it is unrecoqnized. The predicate
calculus of their rule system requires a series of binary
choices and the particular bifucturations of narrative
structure which they propose may be quite useful in examining
the causal relationships between events. Their approach,
however, is not appropriate here. It abstracts a story out
of the process of narrative transmission, out of the
context of speaker and listener. Even though story grammars
are used in studies of story recall; it is not the recall of
narrative transmission, but rather the recall, in isolation,
of narrative structure.
36
1.3.3 Studies of Narrative Transmission
There are two approaches to the study of narrative
transmission which are important here: sociolinguistic
studies by Labov and his associates (Labov 1972a, Labov and
Fanshel 1977, Labov and Waletzky 1967), and literary studies,
(Chatman 1975b, Ohmann 1971a, 1971b, Searle 1975). Both
approaches derive from the philosophic study of ordinary
language that has come to be know as speech act theory
developed by Austin (1962), Searle (1969), and others.
Speech act theory is the study, not of the structure of
language, but of the things people do with words, the actions
performed when speaking: the assertions, commands, requests,
denials, etc. It is a theory of action and of the rules that
govern those actions which has stimulated a wide range of
work in a number of different fields. The sociolinguistic
and literary approaches to narrative through speech acts
began independently, each unaware of the other. Only
recently has Pratt argued that there is a fundamental
connection between the two (1977). We will review each
separately.
1.3.3.1 Sociolinguistic Studies of Narrative
Sociolinguistics, to the extent that it is concerned
with the way people talk to one another, is concerned with
the nature of speech acts (see, for example, Hymes 1972).
To study the nature of social interaction through language
and the ways society affects language use leads, inevitably,
37
to considerations of the actions speakers perform when
communicating to one another, to the nature of linguistic
interaction. Also, the collection of samples of actual
language use requires researchers to go out into the world
and talk to real speakers, to interact with people and
to collect samples of their talk. The collection of suCh
data posed certain methodological problems, most notably,
how to collect extended samples of relatively natural,
unmonitored speech. Labov and his associates solved
this problem by asking informants if they had ever been in
situations where they were close to death, where they said
to themselves, "This is it." If the informant said yes,
the interviewer would pause and then ask, "What happened?"
The informant was now under an obligation to show that
the experience was in fact dangerous, that death was
imminent, and he or she would often begin to relive the
experience, reverting to vernacular speech patterns
(1972b, p. 73). Having collected a number of narratives
about brushes with death, notable fights, etc., Labov
has collaborated with several people, developing what is
best understood as a speech act theory of narrative
(Labov and Waletzky 1967, Labov and Fanshel 1977, Labov
1972a).
Labov defines narrative as "one method of recapitu-
lating past experience by matching a verbal sequence of
clauses to the sequence of events which (it is inferred)
actually occured" (1972a, p. 359). These clauses are
38
generally ordered in the sequence in which they actually
occurred, although, again, temporal sequencing is a
constraint only on Indo-European narratives. Labov
defines a minimal narrative as "a sequence of two clauses
‘which are temporally ordered; that is, a change in their
order will result in a change in the temporal sequence of
the original semantic interpretation" (p. 360). It is,
essentially, the same definition of narrative offered by
Chatman (1975b).
1.3.3.1.1 Narrative Structure in Labov's Theory
Labov, however, is not much interested in minimal
narratives, in what distinguishes narrative discourse from
nonnarrative discourse or in the abstract structure of
narrative. Except for the general functions of complica-
tion and resolution, there is no discussion in his articles
about the different relationships which one event can have
with another or of the relationship of the abstract "story"
to narrative "discourse." Instead, Labov focuses on
narrative transmission, on how and why a story is told.
From a brief definition of minimal narrative, he goes on
to focus on what constitutes a full-formed narrative, a
narrative which is heard as "complete" or as appropriate
'by an audience.
Such a fully-formed narrative, Labov argues, may
have the following components: (1) abstract, (2) orienta-
tion, (3) complicating action, (4) evaluation, (5) result
M
V.
.-
ll)
()
39
or resolution, and (6) coda (1972a, p. 363). An abstract,
the first element of a narrative is optional. It is usually
a brief summary of the story, encapsulating the main point
of the story:
I talked a man out of--Old Doc Simon, I talked
him out of pulling the trigger. (P. 363)
The abstract alerts the listener that a narrative is about
to follow and orients the listener to the point of the
narrative. Abstracts tend to be used by more skillful
storytellers as the narrator must have a firm grasp of the
point of the story at the onset in order to orient the
listener to it.
The orientation section begins the narrative by
introducing the time, the place, the persons, and their
activity or behavioral situation (p. 364). All narratives
must orient the listener to the fact that a narrative is
beginning, either in an orientation section or in the
first narrative clause of the story. Labov has given
long examples of orientations which introduce the story
and elaborate at length about the characters:
Well, in the business I was associated
at the time, the Doc was an old man. . . .
He had killed one man, or--had done time.
But he had a--young wife, and those days I
dressed well. And seemingly she was trying
to make me.
I never noticed it. Fact is, I didn't
like her very well because she had--she was
a nice looking girl until you saw her feet.
She had big feet. Jesus God, she had big
feet! (Labov and Waletzky 1967, p. 14)
40
The narrator goes on to tell how Doc Simon nearly killed
him because of needless jealousy. The reason for that
jealousy and its lack of justification are developed in
the orientation section. On the other hand, orientation
sections can also be relatively simple and straightforward:
When I was in fourth grade--no--it was third
grade--there was this boy, he stole my glove.
(Labov and Waletzky 1967, p. 14)
Here the narrator simply introduces the time, the characters,
and the reason for the fight. The vile character of the
antagonist is developed as the story unfolds.
The coda, like the abstract and the orientation, also
has an orienting function. Where the abstract and the
orientation are the two opening sections of a story and
orient the listener to what is about to occur, the coda
comes at the end of the narrative and orients the listener
to the fact that the narrative has been completed, that the
events after that point in time are not significant:
And that was that.
And that--that was it, you know. (Labov 1972a,
p. 365)
Codas also return the conversation from the narrative time
of the story to the real time of the interaction. They
announce the narrator's turn to talk is finished and signal
that someone else may now take the floor.
If abstracts, orientations, and codas can be seen as
-functioning primarily, though not exclusively, to orient the
Idistener, to establish and maintain the channel of
41
communication between speaker and listener, then the
remaining categories of complicating action, evaluation, and
resolution (or, as it will be referred to here, resolving
action) can be seen as presenting the primary content of
the narrative, what the story is about. Complicating action
and resolving action take the form of a series of temporally
ordered narrative clauses. A minimal narrative can consist
of two temporally ordered clauses of complicating action,
or perhaps more accurately, a clause of complication and a
clause of resolution. Only complicating action is needed
to distinguish narrative discourse from nonnarrative
discourse. A simple series of complicating and resolving
actions, however, do not, in themselves, constitute a
fully-formed narrative, a narrative which is perceived
as complete or as successful by a listener, as none of the
events in the series are evaluated. A sequence of
complicating narrative clauses gives no indication of what
the point of the narrative is, of what relative significance
the events of the narration have. It is the notion of
evaluation that distinguishes Labov's approach to Indo-
European narratives from the others so far reviewed.
Evaluation can be thought of most broadly as the ways
narrators communicate the point of their story to an
audience, the ways in which they ward off the question,
"So what?" by showing that the events in the narrative are
I'ejportable, the ways they justify keeping the floor for
tï¬le amount of time it takes to relate a story. Although
"a.
OF
'1
If'
v.“
w.
‘0
(I)
(D
()I
42
evaluation can occur anywhere in a story, it is primarily
concentrated in an evaluation section which is found
between the complicating and the resolving action and
which suspends the action of the narrative while the point
of the story is given. Evaluation then has two separate
functions in narrative. First, it functions to show the
listener what the narrator feels is the point of the story,
why the events in the story are reportable. Secondly,
it functions within the narrative structure to signal that
the complicating action has been completed and that the
resolving action is about to begin.
1.3.3.1.2 Types of Evaluation
Labov has documented the wide range of different devices
which can function as evaluation in a story (1972a).
In general, any particular feature of a narrative that is
unordinary, that stands out, that is foregrounded, functions
as evaluation, functions to select out a particular event
and announce that it is important. Labov distinguishes two
general types of evaluation, external and internal (p. 371).
Narrators frequently step outside of the narrative and
simply tell the listener what the point of the story is
instead of showing it through the story. Such external
evaluation is quite frequent in middle class narratives.
Labov cites a long story told by a secretary about a trip
from.Mexico City where the plane almost didn't make it
éuud in which the narrator steps outside the action to
43
make the following comment:
gg. and it was the strangest feeling
because you couldn't tell
if they were really gonna make it. (P. 371)
External evaluations can also be embedded into a narrative
in various ways. The narrator can attribute an evaluative
remark to himself, “'Well,‘ I said to myself, 'this is
it!‘" or the remark can be attributed to a third party who
is commenting on the significance of the events in the
story.
Internal evaluation takes the form of various mani-
pulations of basic narrative syntax. As Labov points out,
the surface structure of narrative clauses is, for the most
part, very simple and related in straightforward ways to
simple deep structures (p. 376). He suggests that the
normal narrative clause consists of an eight slot structure:
(1) conjunctions, (2) simple subjects, (3) the underlying
auxilary, usually a past tense marker, (4) preterit verbs
with adverbial particles, (5) direct and indirect objects,
(6) manner and instrumental adverbials, (7) locative
adverbials, and (8) temporal adverbials and comitative
clauses (p. 376). Syntactic complexity is rare in
narratives. When it occurs, it carries evaluative force;
it functions to evaluate the material in the story.
Following Labov, we will call these different complications
<3f narrative syntax "evaluative devices." They are, of
CCNarse, more accurately,grammatical devices which may carry
GEVEiluative force, which may fulfill an evaluative function
44
within a particular narrative. Labov identifies four types
of departures from normal narrative syntax: (1) intensi-
fiers, (2) comparators, (3) correlatives, and (4) explica-
tives. As these categories of evaluative devices play an
important role in the analysis that follows, each will be
discussed individually.
l.3.3.1.2.l Intensifiers
Intensifiers are the simplest, most straightforward,
evaluative device. They do not significantly alter narra-
tive syntax, but select a particular event and strengthen
or intensify it. Intensifiers include gestures (which
were not recorded in the present study) and expressive
phonology: "And we were fightin' for a lo—o-ong ti-i-me,
buddy"(p. 379); quantifiers such as "all," "just," and
"meekly," which are one of the most common means of
intensifying a clause; and lexical items which intensify
through lexical choice, e.g., if someone makes you wait
for a while, that is bad; if you wait fifteen minutes or an
hour, that's especially bad. Other intensifiers include
repetitions, repeating a word, a phrase, or a clause
to give it emphasis and suspend the action; and ritual
utterances which vary from subculture to subculture and
Which may appear relatively unmarked on the surface and
Yet carry clear evaluative force within the subculture.
1Labov has also referred to two other intensifiers:
“ï¬r-exclamations and foregrounding without definition.
45
Wh—exclamations seem relatively straightforward, "Whatl",
"Well!" and the like. Foregrounding is more elusive.
For this study, I defined foregrounding, somewhat arbi-
trarily, as the various grammatical transformations which
move and feature a particular part of a clause or a sentence
--clefts and pseudo-clefts--but not passives which did not
seem to me to carry evaluative force in the narratives I
examined. For example, "It was not his nature to steal"
is evaluative both because of the foregrounding and the
negative. A paraphrase such as, "He was an honest person,"
would not carry the same evaluative force.
1.3.3.1.2.2 Comparators
Comparators evaluate events by comparing those events
to events which did not occur or which could occur (p. 381).
They include negatives, futures, modals, quasimodals (such
as "had to"), and explicit comparators. Comparators also
include questions and imperatives when questions and
imperatives are understood as requests for action with an
implied threat of consequences if the request is not
carried out. Labov mentions one other comparator, gr-
clauses, without definition. I defined or-clauses as
clauses which mention hypothetical events using an either/or
or if/then construction: "Either you do it, or you will be
Sorry," "If I let you go, will you promise never to steal
from this store again?"
46
Comparators are, in many ways, the most interesting
and significant form of syntactic evaluation. Intensifiers
simply add intensification to the events of a story,
correlatives as we will see, manipulate the temporal
sequence of events, and explicatives offer various exposi-
tory background information to evaluate an event. Each
manipulates what happened in the story. Comparators,
however, compare the events which happened in a story to
events which didn't happen or which could happen. It is not
a manipulation of the continuum of events that a narrative
draws on but a comparison of that continuum to other
possible ones. It enters the realm of the imagination, of
all the possible worlds and possible outcomes which a
particular event sequence could be part of. The hypothetical
events which a narrator compares a story to can potentially
tell us something about the story and also something about
the narrator's view of himself and his world.
1.3.3.1.2.3 Correlatives
Correlatives evaluate by bringing together events so
that they are conjoined in a single independent clause
and are understood as occurring simultaneously. Correlatives
include past progressives, represented as be...ing in
various tables, when the progressive indicates simultaneity;
appended particles, two or more clauses with -ing verbs,
represented as double...ing: "She saw her son working in
tile garden, nailing pieces of box wood together;" double
mositives, "a knife, a long one, a dagger" (Labov 1972a,
47
p. 389); and double attributives such as "an unsavory-
1ooking passenger" or "She was a big burly-looking, a dark
type sort of girl" (p. 390). Correlatives also include
various nominalizations, and both right-embedded and left-
embedded particles. Both "the sound of breaking glass"
and "the sound of glass breaking" carry evaluative force.
l.3.3.l.2.4 Explicatives
Explicatives are various types of subordinating
devices which embed clauses with conjunctions such as
"while," "though," "since," "because," "as," etc.
Explicatives evaluate events either by qualifying the
action with other details, referred to as qualifications:
"A1 had to stand there for fifteen minutes while the manager
did paperwork," or by establishing various causal links
between events and other events or motives: "Al didn't
take the job because he hated the two men." Labov
identifies three types of embedding for both qualifications
and causal explicatives: simple, one clause embedded into
the matrix sentence; complex, the explicative is itself
embedded into a clause which in turn is embedded into the
matrix sentence; and compound, two clauses which are
embedded at the same point in the matrix sentence (p. 391).
Where correlatives delete tense markers and present events
as occurring simultaneously, explicatives can refer
backwards or forwards in time to bring in important back-
ground information.
48
1.3.3.1.3 Summary
Labov has argued that when a narrator tells a story,
he or she usually, but not always, evaluates that story to
show the listener what the point of the story is. Evalua-
tion distinguishes minimal narratives from fully-formed
narratives. It distinguishes a text which is understood
as a narrative, however uninteresting, from one that makes
a point and holds our attention. Evaluation can be external,
a direct or indirect statement by the narrator of what the
point of the story is, or it can be internal, a set of
grammatical devices which complicate narrative syntax and
which can carry evaluative force in a narrative. These
complications are of four types: intensifiers, comparators,
correlatives, and explicatives. Evaluation is generally
focused in the evaluation section of the narrative and
suspends the action of the story between the complicating
action and the resolving action. Evaluation, however, can
be found throughout a narrative, and evaluative devices are
usually used in constructing abstracts, orientations, and
codas.
The concept of evaluation rarely appears in structural
studies of narrative, and, if it does, there is only a
Laassing reference. Evaluation is part of the process of
.zrarrative transmission. It presumes a narrator who has a
jpc>int to make and an audience who is interested in the story
aridinay agree or disagree that the narrator's point is
nagrratable or is the point the story makes. Labov's
49
approach to narrative is particularly valuable to the
current study. It offers a methodology by identification
of evaluative devices for analyzing the reteller's percep-
tion of the point of a story. It also conceptualizes
the process of telling a story as a narrator telling a
story to an audience, in the same way that a reteller
retells a story to an audience. To use Labov's theory,
however, it is necessary to make a final connection
between a speech act theory of the production of narratives
of personal experience and the body of literary narratives.
1.3.4 Literary Studies of Narrative Transmission
Parrallel to Labov's work and largely independent of
it, literary critics and language philos0phers have been
applying speech act theory to the study of literary texts.
Ohmann (1971a, 1971b) first proposed the connection between
literature and the actions performed with words, followed by
Chatman (1975a), Searle (1975), and most recently, Pratt
(1977). Pratt was the first scholar to recognize the
relationship of Labov's work to literary studies. In her
book, she reviews Labov's work at length and argues that
novels and short stories can be analyzed as narratives
containing abstracts, orientations, complicating actions,
eevaluation sections, resolving actions and codas as can
Ilarratives of personal experience, "because they are members
CXE'some more general category of speech acts" (p. 69).
50
Narratives of personal experience and novels and short
stories are for Pratt different examples of the same funda-
mental speech act which she terms "displaying," presenting
a text to an audience for examination:
In making an assertion whose relevance is
tellability, a speaker is not only reporting
but also verbally displaying a state of affairs,
inviting his addressee(s) to join him in con-
templating it, evaluating it, and responding
to it. . . . Ultimately, it would seem, what he
is after is an interpretation of the problematic
event, an assignment of meaning and value
supported by the consensus of himself and his
hearers. (P. 136)
Ohmann, on the other hand, argues that to tell a
fictional story is a separate individual speech act
(1971a, p. 251). It is an act that consists of pretending
to perform speech acts, of imitating a series of speech
acts which have no actual force in the world (1971b,
p. 14). Chatman accepts Ohmann's position without comment
(1975a). Searle, however, takes a slightly different
approach (1975). Searle, unlike Pratt, is interested in
the difference between fictive and nonfictive uses of
language; he does not attempt to distinguish literary from
nonliterary fictions. Nor does he address the nature of
narrative as a speech act. Instead, he rejects the notion
that there is such an act as telling a fictional story
‘while accepting the notion that an author, in writing
:fiction, is pretending to assert, or command, or request:
The identifying criterion for whether or not a
text is a work of fiction must of necessity lie
in the illocutionary intentions of the author.
There is no textual property, syntactic or
51
semantic that will identify a text as a work
of fiction. What makes it a work of fiction is,
so to speak, the illocutionary stand that the
author takes toward it, and that stance is a
matter of the complex illocutionary intentions
that the author has when he writes or other-
wise composes it. (P. 325)
The difference between a fictional or a nonfictional
narrative rests solely in the author's intentions. Searle
suggests that fiction is possible because of a set of
"extralinguistic nonsemantic conventions" which severs
the connection between words and their actions in the world
(p. 326). A fictive and a nonfictive discourse begin
with the same illocutionary acts but the conventions of
fiction suspend the normal operations of the rules
relating illocutionary acts and the world.
It is, then, appropriate to apply Labov's narrative
theory to fictive and to literary narrative as they result
from the same speech act of displaying. Whether the extra-
linguistic nonsemantic conventions which sever the
connection between fiction and the world affects the
structure of retellings in significant ways is, of course,
an open question.
1.3.5 Conclusions
We have reviewed in this section three distinct
approaches to the study of narrative structure: (1)
semiotic studies such as Chatman (1975b), (2) story
grammars such as Stein and Glenn (1979), and (3) studies of
:narrative transmission, both in sociolinguistics and
.literary studies. It was argued that the relative
52
rightness and wrongness of a particular theory of narrative
was not at issue, but rather the question was which approach
to narrative provided the best tool for studying the
differences between narratives of vicarious experience and
narratives of personal experience. We suggested that the
concept of narrative transmission and especially Labov's
theory of narrative with extensions by Pratt and Searle to
literary and fictive materials provides the best approach to
the study of retellings of short stories. The differences
between narratives of personal experience and narratives
of vicarious experience are likely to lie not at the
abstract level of story, in semiotic organization or
abstract episodic structure, but in the process of
narrative transmission, in the ways narrators understand
and then tell about experiences and about narratives.
1.4 The Present Study
At the beginning of the chapter, we argued that a
narrative of vicarious experience can not be assumed to be
the same sort of narrative as a narrative of personal
experience. A narrative of personal experience draws on a
continuum of actual experiences and selects from those
experiences to construct a story. A retelling of a
narrative, on the other hand, draws on an already selected
sequence of events in creating its story.
We then reviewed different studies which have used
retellings to gather data, data about language variation,
53
story comprehension, narrative production, and about the
act of retelling. It was argued that the different concep-
tions of the retelling process in these studies were
related to different implicit or explicit conceptions of
the comprehending process. Finally we reviewed different
approaches to the study of narrative: semiotic, story
grammars, and studies of narrative transmission and suggested
that Labov's speech act-based approach to narrative provided
the most promising analytic framework.
Labov, however, has also written about the nature of
narratives of vicarious experience. When collecting samples
of uninterrupted natural speech, he and his associates
have asked informants to give an account of a favorite
television show or a recently seen cartoon. The narratives
his informants produced were typically in the form of
this retelling of an episode of "The Man from U.N.C.L.E.:"
This kid--Napoleon got shot
and he had to go on a mission.
And so this kid, he went with Solo.
So they went
and this guy--they went through this window,
and they caught him.
And then he beat up them other people.
And they went
and then he said
that this old lady was his mother
and then he--and at the end he say
that he was that guy's friend.
(1972a, p. 367)
Labov suggests that the meaningless and disoriented effect
of the story, the sense of not knowing what is going on or
why it is going on is because "none of the remarkable
events that occur is evaluated" (p. 367). In the retelling,
54
there is no sense of the relative significance of the
events mentioned, no sense of what the point of the
retelling is. There appears to be no point; they asked
about a television show and received a retelling. Labov
does not state unequivocally that all retellings are
unevaluated narratives. He does, however, suggest that
most of the vicarious narratives which he has collected
are,like the one just quoted, lacking a sense of what the
significant events are, what the point is.
Is Labov correct? Are retellings, for the most part,
narratives which are unevaluated by the reteller? There
are, of course, a number of alternative explanations for
the vicarious narratives he quotes. Watson suggests that
the lack of evaluative devices in Labov's retellings may
reflect a particular style of retelling among the informants
in his sample (1973, p. 255). Perhaps it is another example
of the well-documented reticence of young black speakers
4 The lack of evaluation could also
in interview settings.
be a result of the collection procedure, the television
shows and cartoons retold might have been relatively uninter-
esting to the subjects but the most recently recalled. If
the subjects saw no point to the original narrative, they
would be unlikely to include one in a retelling of it.
The lack of evaluation could also be a result of trans—
lating primarily nonverbal narratives such as cartoons or
television shows into primarily verbal narratives.
55
If, on the other hand, most retellings are in fact
pointless, unevaluated stories, it would provide evidence
that the act of retelling is significantly different from
the act of telling a narrative of personal experience and
would raise serious questions about the use of retellings
in research and in education.
Clearly, regardless of what the particular data of
this study reveals, you would expect to find some retellings
which are evaluated. If a friend comes up to you and says,
"Let me tell you about this great movie I just saw," you
would reasonably expect there to be a point to the
retelling. Your friend has put himself under an obligation
to show you why it was such a great movie, to justify
taking up your time telling you about it. In everyday
conversation, retellings are offered, undoubtably, with the
illocutionary intent to display. Similarly, Wilson has
found that sixth grade students evaluate retellings of
fairy tales (1980). In a school setting, however, and in
the research studies reviewed in the second part of this
chapter, retellings are generally not offered. Rather they
are e1icited--elicited by the teacher, elicited by the
researcher. In this context, the reteller is no longer
under an obligation to justify keeping the floor. He or she
no longer has to show that the events of a story are
reportable. Do students in such a setting evaluate their
narrative retellings?
56
The study that follows explores this research question:
Are elicited narrative retellings produced by sixth grade
students evaluated by those students? We will examine
twenty retellings, ten each of two stories. The data were
collected in 1976 and 1977 at Sturgis Middle School,
Sturgis, Michigan. The second chapter of the dissertation
describes the data collection procedures. The third
chapter reports the types of evaluative devices that were
found in these twenty retellings, analyzes how they function
in the narratives the students construct, and isolates
the points the students are making in their retellings.
The fourth chapter compares the evaluation that was found
in the student retellings to the evaluation that was found
in the original stories and attempts to identify the process
at work in retelling, whether these sixth grade students
are simply reshuffling, or paraphrasing the events and
evaluation of the original story, or whether they are
utilizing evaluative devices to evaluate the narratives
they have created. In the fifth chapter, having resolved
the research question, we will return to the overarching
issue: how narratives of vicarious experience are related
to narratives of personal experience and examine implica-
tions for the classroom and for research.
57
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER ONE
1. See Allen and Watson 1976, pp. 245-247 for a
bibliography of miscue studies.
2. Note especially K. Goodman's model of the reading
process, 1976, p. 383. ‘
3. See Allen and Watson 1976, pp. 157-245 for an
extensive explication of the Goodman Taxonomy of Reading
Miscues.
4. See Labov 1972a, Chapter Five.
CHAPTER TWO
THE RETELLINGS
2.1 The Sturgis Project
The source of the data for this study of narrative
retelling is part of evaluation materials collected for
the Department of English, Michigan State University,
Sturgis Middle School Professional Development, Inservice
Project in Language Arts, titled: "Beyond Basics."
The materials were collected from September 1976 through
May 1977 at Sturgis Middle School in Sturgis, Michigan,
a small rural community in the southwestern corner of
Michigan.
The "Beyond Basics" project had five components:
(1) a ten week graduate course focusing on theories and
practice of reading and writing instruction, English 847,
taught by a member of the Michigan State University
JDepartment of English in the spring of 1976; (2) a one
vveek commitment workshop in June of 1976 where members of
1:he Michigan State University Department of English and
time Sturgis Middle School Lanugage Arts staff met to
58
59
determine the advisability of continuing the project;
(3) a two week curriculum workshop in which the sixth
grade teachers developed a new language arts curriculum, and
the seventh and eighth grade teachers developed two new
required courses within a preestablished curriculum of six,
six-week required and elective language arts courses;
(4) continuing inservice meetings every six weeks throughout
the school year as the new curricula were implemented; and
(5) an evaluation of the project completed by the author
and submitted to the Michigan Department of Education.1
2.2 Collection of Retellings
The project evaluation covered three areas: (1)
measurement of change in types of methodologies used in
language arts instruction, (2) measurement of change in
teachers' confidence in teaching reading and writing and in
their conceptions of the reading and the writing processes,
and (3) measurement of growth in reading comprehension by
the students of Sturgis Middle School.
We measured growth in comprehension with two instru-
ments: the Stanford Achievement Test, administered in
September 1976 and again in May 1977 to all sixth, seventh,
and eighth grade students, and the Reading Miscue Inventory
(hereafter RMI) also administered in September 1976 and
éagain in May 1977. Because the participants in the project
vvorked on the entire curriculum of the sixth grade language
éLrts program but only two required courses within the seventh
60
and eighth grade curriculum, we collected RMIs only from
sixth grade students.
As Project Evaluator, I recruited a team of six
undergraduate English majors from Michigan State University
in the summer of 1976. Each of these undergraduates had
taken at least one of the department's reading courses and
had given the RMI to a problem reader as part of their
course work. Each member of the team went through a series
of training sessions to ensure that RMIs were collected in
as similar a manner as possible. In the training sessions,
each undergraduate would administer an RMI to a volunteer
subject using one of the stories that would be used in the
actual collection of RMIs at Sturgis. I would then critique
the line of questioning used by the undergraduate. No
attempt was made to control the actual questions used during
the RMI collection, except for the original request for a
retelling which was to take the form, "Please tell me every-
thing you can remember about the story you've just read."
Any retelling which was not elicited with this question or
with a minor variant of it (for example, "Tell me everything
you remember") was discarded. We had found, in pilot studies,
that requests for retellings of the form, "Tell me what the
story was about," were usually understood as requests for a
summary of the story rather than a complete retelling and
that students generally responded with a summary.
With the help of the school's administrators, we
located six stations within the school building: a
61
janitor's closet, an A-V storage closet, an unused class-
room, a conference room, a teachers' office and a room above
the gymnasium. The collection of RMIs followed a standard
procedure. The researcher would go to the designated sixth
grade classroom, get a student, bring the student back to
the station, and ask the student to read a 1,000 word
story aloud and without assistance and then to recall the
story. At the conclusion of the student's unaided recall,
the researcher would ask a series of open-ended questions to
probe for any additional recall. When finished, the
researcher would walk the student back to the classroom,
get another student, and repeat the procedure.
In September 1976 we traveled to Sturgis, Michigan,
and, in one week, collected 219 RMIs, one from each member
of the sixth grade. We used two stories, "Anita's Gift"
and "The Runaway," which had been extensively edited and
rewritten so that the two stories had similar readability,
length, sentence structure, and narrative structure.
Both stories are about preadolescents who break the law,
but who are basically good people who, in the end, do the
right thing. In the winter of 1977, I assembled a second
team of Michigan State University undergraduate English
majors who had also taken at least one of the department's
reading courses and who had administered the RMI to a
problem reader and trained them in an identical manner as
I had the September team. I drew a random sample of forty—
eight sixth grade students, six from each of the eight
62
sixth grade home rooms, and selected and rewrote a third
story, "The Parsley Garden," to be given to all forty-
eight students. We collected the RMIs on May 23 and 24,
1977 at Sturgis Middle School using the same stations and
procedures as in September.
The September and May RMIs for the forty-eight
students provide the pre- and postevaluations for the
instrument, a total of ninety—six RMIs, seventeen readings
and retellings of "Anita's Gift" and thirty-one of "The
Runaway" from the fall, and forty-eight readings and
retellings of "The Parsley Garden" from the spring. Having
collected these RMIs, however, we encountered financial
limitations and time restrictions in completing the evalua-
tion of the project and the final report. Consequently,
the data from the ninety-six RMIs were not used in the
final evaluation.
2.3 Analysis of the Retellings
For the present study of narrative retelling, I
returned to these RMIs which I collected but never analyzed.
After completing a preliminary analysis of retellings of
â€Anita's Gift," I drew a random sample of ten students from
the thirty-one remaining students who had read both "The
Runaway" and "The Parsley Garden."
The twenty retellings have been analyzed using the
theory of narrative developed by William Labov and reviewed
in the first chapter. The twenty retellings are reproduced
63
in full in the Appendix. All of the names given Sturgis
students are fictional. Each retelling has been divided
into the components of: abstract, orientation, compli-
cating action, evaluation, resolving action, and coda, and
the various evaluative devices found in the retellings have
been inventoried. In the Appendix each independent clause
and associate subordinate clause(s) of a retelling is
placed on a single line and treated as a single unit for
analysis. The convention is adapted from Labov's work and
is, to the best of my knowledge, used by no other researcher.
In addition to independent clauses, each coordinated verb
which is understood as occurring sequentially is treated as
a separate narrative clause, even when subordinated to a
verb of saying or telling. "We were running, walking, and
then creeping down the road" would be separated into three
clauses. "I said, 'You get back there and get that duck'"
would also be separated. "You try and get it," however,
would not be separated as the two verbs cannot be understood
as occurring sequentially (Labov and Waletzky 1967, p. 42).
To aid the reader, the hierarchical narrative structure
of each retelling, the complicating action, evaluation, re-
solving action, etc., is diagrammed to the left of the re-
telling in the Appendix and in the third chapter. The major
components of a retelling: orientation, complicating action,
evaluation, resolving action, and coda are separated from each
other by double spacing,and the two independent narrative cy-
cles found in some retellings are separated by triple spacing.
64
Embedded narratives, however, are not separated in this
manner. Billy's retelling of "The Parsley Garden," for
example, has an embedded narrative in the complicating action,
no orientation, an evaluation section, resolving action,
and a coda, so it can be diagrammed as follows:
‘ 1 A1 went into a store
C[::2 and saw a hammer
E-——3 and didn't have any money.
C r-—4 So he went
5 and put it in his overhalls
R 6 and walked out.
7 But the manager's worker caught him
L—~8 and took him up to the manager's office.
' w
9 And he said. . . Al was waiting there
for a few minutes 'til the manager
B said something,
10 that he was going to take him to the police.
, 11 But A1 didn't say nuthin.
12 And then Al, the next day, A1 went to the
store
13 and worked for Mr. Clemmers and, for an
R hour
14 and got the hammer.
‘ 15 And Mr. Clemmer asked him if he wanted
to work for a dollar a day.
CE::::16 And he said no because he hated them both.
When diagramming retellings, the following abbreviations
will be used: 0 = orientation, C = complicating action,
E = evaluation, R = resolving action, and c = coda. In
Billy's retelling, there is no orientation section. The
narrative begins with the complicating actions (clauses 1-8),
describing the events leading up to the conversation between
A1 and the manager of the store. That conversation
(clauses 9-11) is the evaluation of the narrative. It
suspends the action of the story, especially in clause 11
with an unspecified period of silence, separating the
65
complicating action of the first day from the resolving
action of the second day. It also presents the two
proposals which for Billy are the point of the story: Al
was wrong in taking the hammer and Al was ashamed of what
he had done. Clauses 12-15 are the resolving action. A1
goes back the next day to the store, works for the hammer
and is offered a job. Clause 16 is a dramatic evaluative
coda. It restates the point of the story by expanding
Billy's second proposal, Al was ashamed and he hated the
men. The complicating action of Billy's retelling is also
a narrative. Clauses 1-2 are its internal complication,
Al goes to the store and sees the hammer. Clause 3 is its
evaluation, explaining why he took the hammer. He didn't
have any money. Finally, clauses 4-8 resolve the embedded
narrative. Al tries to steal the hammer, is caught, and
taken to the manager's office.
2.4 Analysis of the Original Stories
Labov and Waletzky note several times that they are
studying simple narratives, narratives with a single cycle
of complicating action, evaluation, and resolving action,
but that narratives which contain several embedded narrative
subcycles clearly exist (1967). Although the study of
complex, embedded narratives was not within the scope of
their study and "must be postponed to a later study,"
they argue that the analysis of complex embedded narratives
must derive from an analysis of simple narratives such as
they present (p. 43).
66
The study of complex narratives, however, can no
longer be postponed. Both the edited, rewritten versions
of "The Runaway" and "The Parsley Garden" used here are
long stories, approximately 1,000 words each, with a
number of narratives embedded in both the complicating and
the resolving action. Many of the retellings are quite
long also with as many as five separate narratives embedded
in a retelling. After inventorying the syntactic evaluative
devices which appear in both the original stories and in
the retellings, I have attempted to identify the orientations,
evaluation sections, and codas of all the narrative cycles
and subcycles in "The Runaway," "The Parsley Garden," and
in the retellings. I have isolated thirteen embedded
narratives in "The Runaway" and ten in "The Parsley
Garden." There are likely to be others that I have missed
for lack of a solid definition of what constitutes an
embedded narrative. The focus of the present study is the
evaluation of narrative retellings rather than the general
structure of narrative. The analysis is offered only as a
guide in identifying the evaluation sections and the
evaluative devices in the stories and retellings studied
here. Since the analysis is modelled on Labov's, however,
I am confident that a future formal theory of complex
narrative will, in general, support these analyses, although
the specific details and narrative subcycles may differ.
The role of the text in the transaction of reading
should never be underestimated. Still, the two original
67
stories, "The Runaway" and "The Parsley Garden," do not
play a central role in the analysis of retellings that
follows. For this reason, a detailed narrative analysis
of the original stories is not offered here. Both "The
Runaway" and "The Parsley Garden" are reproduced in the
Appendix along with an informal tree-structure style
diagram of the narrative structures I have isolated in
the two stories. The reader may wish to examine both
closely before going on to the analysis of retellings.
At this point, I will, instead, briefly summarize and
discuss each story.
2.4.1 "The Runaway"
"The Runaway" was adapted from a story by Warren
J. Halliburton. The narrative structure of the original
version was kept intact but the language of the story was
extensively rewritten to achieve a closer fit with the
experiences of preadolescents from rural Michigan. "The
Runaway" is the story of three boys, Larry, Charlie and
Roger. The story centers on Larry, an adolescent in the
midst of a crisis of values. Larry is torn between the
world of the juvenile delinquent, of getting in trouble, of
getting bad grades, and not caring anyway on the one hand;
and the world of society on the other, of taking girls to
dances, of getting good grades. When Larry had run away
from home because of a bad report card, his father had
made fun of him, "all talk and no guts." Larry cannot
decide which set of values to accept. Similarly, at the
68
church dance, when Tough Ralph cuts in on his date and then
won't let Larry dance with her again, Larry is paralyzed,
unable to act one way or another, frozen between two
worlds:
But he was desparate, as much to get away as to
relieve the tension that he felt.
Even when he convinced Charlie and Roger, who had
gone stag, to leave with him, he wanted badly
to remain.
But if he stayed there would be trouble
and he wanted no part of that.
He imagined what Beth must be thinking of him
and he felt sick. (Clauses 29-34)
Charlie has no such crisis of identity. He affirms the
values of the juvenile delinquent and calls Larry chicken
twice when Larry fails to match up to Charlie's code of
action. Charlie creates the trouble at the store, when they
first refuse to pay for the things they have ordered and
then push the storekeeper against the shelves when he chases
them. Charlie shows no remorse over the incident and
realizes that it was a petty act. There is no hope held
out for Charlie throughout the story.
Roger is a curious contrast to Larry and Charlie. He
does not, as you might expect, affirm the opposite set of
values to Charlie. He appears to be more of a follower,
a hanger-on. Both he and Charlie have gone to the dance
stag; Roger follows Charlie's lead when they go to the store
and again when they leave the ferry. Yet Roger seems bliss-
fully unaware of what Charlie has been getting them into:
Charlie turned
and shoved Roger.
"Stupid!"
69
Now you tell us.
That's great."
He eyed Larry.
"They won't look for us for long.
What we did is petty stuff."
Roger cried, "We!"
"Yeah, we!" Charlie snapped. (Clauses 75-84)
The conflict in this scene is between Larry and Charlie,
Roger is a spectator, seemingly unaware of the tensions
beneath their words or the significance of their actions.
Roger appears to function almost as a spectator in the
story, as a chorus, as a third person, standing slightly
to the rear, commenting on the action. When the boys
leave the dance, Roger tells Larry, "I know you weren't
scared of Ralph" (c1. 39). Later, on board the ferry, he
defends Larry to Charlie and when Charlie and Roger are
captured by the police, Roger looks back at the ferry and
smiles at Larry, as if to say, "I know you are doing the
right thing."
The story begins on board a ferry, after the events
of that evening have already taken place. It is nearly
dawn. Larry sees a policeman on board the ship and the
boys split up. Larry goes to the railing, stares at the
water, and remembers the events of that evening. His
reverie forms a long, complex narrative. First there are
the events at the dance. Tough Ralph cuts in and won't let
Larry dance with his date, Beth, anymore. Larry mopes
around for a while, but he doesn't know what to do. Again,
he is caught between two sets of values. Should he confront
Ralph, or perhaps get help from a chaperone, or just leave.
70
His indecision leaves him filled with tension. He convinces
Charlie and Roger to go, and they leave the dance. Charlie
sees a store that is open and they go in and ask for item
after item until the counter is packed. Then a lady
customer gets impatient and the storekeeper tells them to
pay. Charlie, with Eddie Haskell-like innocence, responds,
"Pay?" The storekeeper angrily moves towards the boys,
Charlie flings open the door, hitting the man in the face.
Charlie then pushes the storekeeper back into the shelves
behind the counter and the three boys flee into the night.
The scene then returns to the ferry, concluding the
complicating action of the story. The evaluation section
that follows is quite short, just two clauses:
Through the long night of running and hiding
Larry had not permitted himself to think
about what they had done
not until now as he looked hard at the approaching
shoreline and wondered. (Clauses 71-72)
This evaluation suspends the action for an unspecified
time as Larry stares into the water. It shows Larry trying
to sort out the two systems of values which he is torn
between. During this unspecified time of staring into the
water, Larry decides what to do. We do not, however, learn
of his decision until later in the story.
The resolving action of "The Runaway" begins with the
dialogue between the three boys on board the ferry.
Roger has an aunt they can stay with. Charlie thinks that
is great and comments that what they have done is petty
stuff. Roger is surprised that Charlie has included
71
everyone, but Larry argues that they are all to blame.
Charlie, however, had meant that they should stick together;
he is affirming the values of the juvenile delinquent,
of the street, and he challenges Larry and calls him a
chicken. As the argument heats up, the ferry lands.
Charlie shrugs, believing the case is closed, turns, and
leaves the ferry with Roger. Whey they are on land, however,
they realize that Larry isn't with them. They spin around
and see Larry still on board the ferry.
It appears that Larry has solved his problems. He has
chosen the values of society and is going back to take what
is coming to him. Charlie and Roger's problems, however,
are just beginning. Right after they realize that Larry is
still on board the ferry, they see the policeman who was on
board the ship. Charlie and Roger panic and start running.
The policeman, who has no particular interest in them, calls
to them out of curiosity. The boys keep running so the
policeman summons two other policemen and together they trap
Charlie and Roger. As the boys are being taken into custody,
the whistle signals the return trip of the ferry. Charlie
looks back and sees Larry and calls him a chicken. Roger
only smiles. He knows Larry has done the right thing.
2.4.2 "The Parsley Garden"
"The Parsley Garden" was adapted from a story by
William Saroyan. The story was extensively edited for the
project. It was cut from approximately 2,500 to 1,000 words
72
and the complicating action was rewritten in the form of a
flashback to parallel the structure of "The Runaway."
"The Parsley Garden" is the story of a young boy, Al,
probably younger than the boys in "The Runaway," who lives
alone with his mother. The mother is probably foreign,
although no specifics are given. Like the boys in "The
Runaway," Al does something wrong and gets in trouble; he
tries to steal a hammer at Woolworth's. Both "The Runaway"
and "The Parsley Garden" are coming—of-age stories, stories
of boys learning about themselves. The conflict in the two
stories, however, is quite different. Larry is torn between
two value systems, unable to choose one or the other. A1
is never confused about his values. He is trying to be or
to become a responsible person, an adult, but everything is
conspiring against him. While the events at the store in
"The Runaway" were a pointless and a needless act of
violence, A1 has a legitimate desire for a hammer in "The
Parsley Garden." The story goes to great length to establish
that Al has collected some box wood and some nails but that
he has no hammer to pound them together with. Al needs a
hammer, but he has no money. So he tries to steal a hammer
and gets caught. But even then, the manager of the store
does not treat A1 like a responsible person who has broken
the law and been caught. Instead, he makes him wait for
fifteen minutes before talking to him, then he destroys
Al's rationalizations, then he humiliates him by asking
him if he should send Al to the police, and then the manager
73
just lets him go like an irresponsible child who can't be
held accountable for his actions. A1, of course, is happy
to be free but deeply humiliated. When Al gets home, his
mother also treats him like a child. She tries to gig;
him money to go back and buy the hammer. Al refuses to
take her money. The next day, he goes back to the store and
works all day, moving boxes from counter to counter. The
manager gives him the hammer after Al has worked an hour,
but he keeps working. At the end of the day, the manager
symbolically concedes that Al is indeed a responsible person
by offering him a silver dollar and a job at the store for
a dollar a day. But A1 goes one step further, and proves
to himself that he is an adult by refusing the job and the
money and walking out with his hammer. Adults have freedom
of choice; children do not. Adults can refuse to work
for people they do not like, for people they hate. Adults,
of course, can also choose to work for people they don't
like because they need the money to support their family,
but that is their choice. A1 goes home and builds a bench
with his new hammer and doesn't feel humiliated anymore.
The story opens as A1 comes home and goes to his
mother's parsley garden. The garden is a small garden his
mother plants each year filled with "okra, bell peppers,
tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, garlic, mint, eggplant, and
parsley," a cool place to sit and think on a hot, muggy day.
Al has a drink of water and then sits, dejectedly, thinking
about the events of the day, how the hammer at Woolworth's
74
had been just what he needed, a real hammer, not a toy,
something he could use to build stuff with his box wood
and nails. So Al had slipped the hammer into his pocket,
but a clerk had caught him and dragged him silently back to
the manager's office. The clerk and the manager had talked
about Al for a while, then the clerk left. The manager
made Al wait for fifteen minutes while he did paperwork,
finally looking up at Al and saying, "Well?" as if to say,
go ahead, try to justify yourself. Al argued that he didn't
mean to steal, but that he needed a hammer and didn't have
any money. The manager pointed out that not having
money was not a justification for stealing. Then the
manager suggested sending A1 to the police. A1 didn't say
anything; he was quiet and fearful. Instead, the manager
let Al go, making him promise to never steal from Ehap
store again. He let Al out the back way, scurrying down an
alley.
The story returns to the parsley garden. Al chews
on some parsley and thinks about what he has done. He is
deeply ashamed. Finally, he goes in and tells his mother
about the events at the store. She doesn't want him to
steal and tries to give him the fifty cents to go back and
buy the hammer. His mother, too, treats him like a child,
like someone who isn't responsible for his actions. Al
refuses to take her money for something he doesn't really
need. His mother insists, but he refuses again. So his
mother tells him to shut up. It is what she always says
75
when she doesn't know what else to say. She is foreign—
born and finds it especially difficult to raise a young boy
alone, communicating through a second language. Al goes
outside while his mother makes a salad for supper. But Al
isn't hungry, so he wanders along the railroad tracks to
Foley's Packing House. He watches them nail boxes together
in the last light, then he walks to Woolworth's and stares
angrily into the closed store. Then he goes to the library
and looks at the books but doesn't like any of them. Al is
not a juvenile delinquent. He watches and admires people
who work for a living. He reads books. He is a boy strug-
gling to establish his identity, trying to prove that he can
be an adult, a responsible member of society. Finally he
mopes around town, looking without luck for some money and
eventually goes home and goes to bed.
All of the action so far described, the flashback to
the events at the store, the conversation with the mother,
the aimless wandering after dinner, make up the complicating
actions of "The Parsley Garden." The complicating action
is a long and a complex narrative. It is followed by a
short evaluation section. Al lies in bed and thinks about
what he has done:
His mother had already gone to bed because she had
to be up early to go to work.
Al didn't sleep much that night.
He couldn't get over what had happened,
and he realized that he would have to do some-
thing about it. (Clauses 84-87)
76
The evaluation section is signaled by a reference to an
event which has already happened: Al's mother has gone to
bed. It suspends the action of the story for an unspecified
length of time that night as Al tosses and turns and thinks
about his problem. It presents the basic conflict Of the
story. Al wants to be a responsible person, but, by trying
to steal the hammer, he has given up any claim he had to
that role. He has to do something. The evaluation also
captures the moment of decision, when A1 decides what to do,
just as does the evaluation section in "The Runaway;"
although, as in "The Runaway," we do not learn what that
decision is until much later in the story.
The resolving action of "The Parsley Garden," like the
resolving action of "The Runaway," is a long complex
narrative with a number of narratives embedded within it.
The embedding of narratives into a story is a fascinating
process that needs to be studied further. Each new narra-
tive means a new evaluation section, an Opportunity to bring
in new points, new propositions, to produce new evidence
to support a previous point, to develop characters and their
motives. Building one narrative inside of another is one of
the basic resources we have in telling and in complicating
a story. The resolving action of "The Parsley Garden"
begins the next morning when the mother gets up at five to
go to work. A1 has already been up and left the house.
His mother packs her lunch, goes to work, stays to work
overtime, and doesn't get home until nine o'clock that
77
night. When she gets home, she sees her son working in
the parsley garden building a bench with a hammer. Al's
mother calmly makes her supper and eats it in silence by
the garden. Only after she is done does she ask A1 how
he got the hammer. The events of that day are then revealed
through the story A1 tells. A representation of an oral
narrative is embedded into the story. It is a section of
special interest in narrative analysis as Al and his mother
go through a process of negotiation in telling the story,
a series of questions and answers which structure the
narrative (see Polanyi 1979). First Al and his mother
negotiate the orientation to the story:
When she was done she said, "Where did you get
it, that hammer, A1?"
"I got it at Woolworth's."
"How you get it?
You steal it?"
"No, I worked for it.
I carried stuff to different counters in the
store."
"How long you work for that little hammer?"
"I worked all day," A1 said.
"Mr. Clemmer, the manager, gave me the hammer
after I had worked one hour
but I went right on working." (Clauses 102-112)
In response to his mother's questions, A1 establishes the
place, the time, the characters, and the behavioral situa—
tion of his narrative. The story proper does not begin
until after A1 has worked for the day and the clerk takes him
back to the manager's office, and tells the manager that
Al has worked hard all day and that Al should get a dollar.
The manager then puts a silver dollar on the table and the
clerk says that they need a boy to work every day for a
78
dollar a day and the manager offers A1 a job. Al and his
mother then negotiate the point of his story:
"That's good," the woman said.
"You can make a little money for yourself."
"I left the dollar on Mr. Clemmer's desk," the
boy said,
"and I told them both I didn't want the job."
"Why you say that?" the woman said.
"Dollar a day for an eleven-year-old boy is good
money.
Why you not take the job, A1?"
"Because I hate them both," the boy said.
"I would never work for people like that."
(Clauses 119-127)
The mother says that what Al has done is good, and that
the job paid good money for an eleven-year-old boy. He
has done well, but he is still a child. Al disputes her
interpretation, and tells her that he turned down the job,
that he is capable of assuming an adult's role in society
with an adult's freedom to choose not to work for peOple
he hates. A1 finishes his story by explaining that he just
took the hammer, walked out, came home, and built a bench.
His mother concedes his point, tells him to shut up, and
goes inside to bed. But Al just sits in the garden, on his
bench, smelling the parsley, and doesn't feel humilated any
more.
2.5 Summary
In this chapter, we have reviewed the sources of the
data for the present study of narrative retelling, the method
of data collection, and the system of analysis that was
adapted from Labov's work on narrative and applied to
complex stories with multiple embedded narratives. We also
79
reviewed the two original stories and discussed their main
themes. "The Runaway" is a story about an adolescent boy
caught between two sets of values: Charlie's values, the
values of the juvenile delinquent, of the street on the one
hand; and the values of society, of a good boy who faces up
to his mistakes on the other. "The Parsley Garden" is about
a boy, Al, probably younger than Larry, who is struggling
to assume an adult role in society. In the next chapter,
we will analyze the retellings of "The Runaway" and "The
Parsley Garden." In the fourth chapter, we will compare the
evaluative devices found in the retellings to those found in
the original story and attempt to identify the process
which produced these retellings.
80
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER TWO
1. The final report of the "Beyond Basics" project
is available on request from the Department of English,
Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan.
CHAPTER THREE
ANALYSIS OF EVALUATION IN RETELLINGS
3.1 Introduction
In reading over the seventy-nine retellings of
"The Runaway" and "The Parsley Garden," I have found
some retellings which seem similar to the examples of
vicarious narrative which Labov has reported (1972a),
stories without orientations or codas which jump right into
the middle of the action with a confused and disorienting
list of unevaluated events. No such retellings occur in
the retellings selected for this study, in part because
there is only one example in the thirty-one retellings of
"The Runaway" and two in the forty-eight retellings of "The
Parsley Garden:"
Ran away with some friends
and they hurt the man in the store.
and a. . . police caught him.
(Cathy, "The Runaway")
He stole a hammer.
His mother had a garden.
He made a bench.
The manager Of the--the manager of the store was
Mr. Clemmer.
He offered the boy a job.
I can't think of anything.
(Dave, "The Parsley Garden")
81
82
Al's mom had gone.
And Al stole a hammer
and got caught.
And he bought the h. . . his mom bought the hammer
and he made a little bench.
(Rita, "The Parsley Garden")
None of the events in these three retellings are evaluated.
There is none of the complexity of syntax, the modals,
negatives or intensifiers found in narratives of personal
experience. The action is unclear and the references Often
confused. These are vicarious narratives as Labov
discusses them (1972a).
It is remarkable, however, how few retellings actually
look like Labov's vicarious narratives. The three examples
just quoted are the only retellings from the Sturgis
readings of "The Runaway" and "The Parsley Garden" without
any evaluation of the narrative. A casual reading of these
retellings reveals a rich array of evaluative devices. Even
the most minimal narratives normally take the form of
complicating action, evaluation, and resolving action:
These boys went in a store
and they got in a fight.
The cops were after them so they got in a ferry
boat.
And they took off
and the COps caught Roger
and took him some place.
(Tim, "The Runaway")
Tim's retelling is not part of the twenty retellings
of the sample, but it is typical of a number of the
retellings we will examine. The first two clauses form the
complicating action, reporting the events at the store that
83
forced the boys to run away. The third clause is the
evaluation of the narrative. It suspends the action by
explaining why the boys were on the ferry and separates the
complicating action from the resolving action. The fourth,
fifth, and sixth clauses are the resolving action. The
ferry takes off and the cops catch Roger. Tim's retelling,
to be sure, loses much of the detail of the original story;
it is a summary, almost an abstract. It is difficult to
tell what Tim feels is the point of the story other than
that the boys were being chased by the police. Still,
Tim's retelling is a fully-formed narrative. There is
complicating action, an evaluation section which suspends
the action and separates the complicating action from the
resolving action, and, finally, there is resolving action.
On the other hand, many of the retellings are quite
complex, utilizing a variety of evaluative devices and
creating a complex story with embedded narrative subcycles.
Micky's retelling of "The Parsley Garden" has perhaps the
most sophisticated narrative structure of the retellings I
have examined, although it is not the most highly evaluated.
Micky's long retelling has five narratives embedded in it,
two in the complicating action and three in the resolving
action. It is remarkably similar to the original story.
Micky suspends the action of his narrative at the same point
as the original, at the end of the first day, when Al
couldn't get much sleep. He also uses the same form of
embedded flashback in the resolving action as Al tells his
E-—21
22
R 23
24
L__:=25
FIIF326
27
29
r-30
32
34
35
h—36
84
Parsley Garden" retold by Micky
Well, first Al came home
and he wanted a hammer
and he didn't have any money.
And his mother gave him the money to go
buy it. . . no he went to the store
and stole it.
And he. . . a man took him back to Mr.
Clemmers' office.
And Al stood there for fifteen minutes.
And Mr. Clemmers said, "Why did you steal
it?"
And he said, "I didn't have any money."
And then Mr. Clemmers told him not to
steal it again if he let him go.
Al went home,
he didn't feel good,
he walked around town.
then he went and then he went home,
a little supper,
went to bed.
And
and
and
And
ate
and
He didn't sleep much.
And then his mother went to work at
five o'clock in the morning.
And then she seen that Al was up but
already out of the house.
When she came home. . . she came home at
nine o'clock that night
and she seen Al working out in the back in
the parsley garden working on a bench.
Al's mother went inside
ate her supper
sat out by the table,
on a table by the parsley garden.
Al's mother said, "Where did you get
that hammer?--and he said, "I worked--
Did you steal it?"
And
and
and
sat
And
And Al said, "No, I didn't. I worked for
it. "
And then his mother said, "What did you
do?"
And he said, "I worked all day today,
and they gave me this, ‘
after one hour, they gave me this hammer.
And I worked the rest of the day."
And the young man brought me back to Mr.
Clemmers' office
and said, said that I should deserve a dollar
and work here every day.
85
E——37 And I turned it down because I hated them."
R—-38 And then Al's mother said, "All right,
shut up."
39 And he went back to bed.
R[:::::40 He went inside
c 441 and didn't feel humiliated any more.
mother of the events of that day. Micky uses twenty
distinct evaluative devices from ten different categories
in his retelling. There are intensifiers: "And A1 stood
there for fifteen minutes;" comparators: "and he didn't
have any money;" correlatives: "and she seen Al working out
in back;" and explicatives: "'and I turned them down because
I hated them.'" Micky's retelling is complex and skill-
fully structured. It is clear; it is interesting. Most of
the retellings we will be examining fall between the
extremes Of Micky's retelling of "The Parsley Garden" and
Tim's retelling of "The Runaway."
In this chapter, we will first describe the types of
external and internal evaluative devices which were found in
the twenty retellings. It is possible to identify narrative
clauses and nonnarrative clauses as well as the various
grammatical devices which are used evaluatively in a
narrative purely on formal grounds without reference to how
the clauses and the devices function in the narrative. A
narrative clause can have an evaluative function if it is
highlighted in a narrative. Similarly, syntactic evaluative
devices can appear in contexts where they carry no evalua-
tive force. Each, however, can be grammatically identified
regardless of its function.
86
After identifying the types of evaluative devices which
occur in the sample of retellings, we will examine how these
devices function in forming the narrative structures of
retellings: the orientations, codas, and evaluation
sections of simple and complex narratives. We will identify
two major types of narrative structures in retellings:
single cycle narratives which consist of a single cycle of
complication, evaluation, and resolution with various
embedded narratives, and double cycle narratives which
consist Of two independent cycles of complication, evalua-
tion, and resolution also with various embedded narratives.
Finally, after identifying the evaluative devices and
narrative structures in retellings, we will isolate the major
points these students are making in their narratives.
3.2 The Evaluative Devices in Retellings
In this section, we will summarize, with little comment,
the various evaluative devices which were found in the
sample of retellings. We will first look at external
evaluation and then at the four categories of syntactic
devices: intensifiers, comparators, correlatives, and
explicatives. The research question raised in the first
chapter, Are retellings evaluated? can be answered in a
significant way, if the various grammatical devices which
can carry evaluative forceanxafound in retelling regardless
Of their function, as there are almost no syntactic evalua-
tive devices in the various vicarious narratives which Labov
has cited in his articles.
87
3.2.1 External Evaluation
There is only one clear example of external evaluation
in the retellings. It is found in Betty's retelling of
"The Runaway." Betty is one of the more skilled story-
tellers of the ten students:
And Charlie goes, "Are you crazy?"
And Roger goes. . .
You know, he's kind of scared and everything.
And he says, "We should do it."
(Betty, "The Runaway")
Betty's comment, "You know, he's kind of scared and
everything," is an accurate assessment of Roger's character.
Neither Charlie nor Larry are openly frightened in "The
Runaway." Charlie is brash, confident, Larry, remorseful.
Charlie wants to run; Larry wants to go back and take what's
coming to them. Neither appears particularly afraid. It
is left to ROger, caught between the two of them, to
articulate the fear they all feel. There is, however, no
good way to show Roger's role in the story, no embedded
narratives or event sequences that focus on Roger. Betty
solves this problem by stepping out of the narrative and
commenting about Roger. But Betty's is the only example of
external evaluation that I have found. I believe that the
lack of external evaluation is a reflection of the relative
immaturity of sixth grade retellers as storytellers,
rather than a result of the retelling process. Betty is
one of the more skilled narrators and there are other, less
clear cut examples in other retellings which appear to be
functioning as external evaluation.
88
In three of the retellings, the students interrupt
themselves to mention that there is something which they
have forgotten:
I can't remember that one's name
but he went to a church dance with a girl named
Beth.
(Sally, "The Runaway")
Well, Charlie and Roger were, they were running away
and Charlie or Roger, one of them was. . . ran away
once.
I can't remember where he was at.
They went to a. . . all three of them went to a store.
(Terry, "The Runaway")
and so they went to a drugstore.
And they. . . and this Charlie beat up this Old man
because of Roger and things, I don't know really why,
so they did.
(Betty, "The Runaway“)
Sally appears to be using her lapse of memory as an orienta-
tion to her retelling. Terry and Betty, though, appear to
be referring to events or motivations which they feel are
important but which they can't remember. You would normally
think that a statement about forgetting something would
not carry evaluative force. There are any number of "I
can't remembers" in the question and answer sessions which
follow the unaided retellings. They function there either
as a sincere response or as an avoidance strategy. But
there are only these three references to unremembered
material in the unaided retellings. In administering the
RMI, researchers ask students to tell them everything they
can remember about the story. The students are under no
Obligation to refer to what they can't remember. When they
do, it stands out. It carries evaluative force.
89
There are also two examples where the reteller
appears to embed an evaluative comment into the narrative:
And the manager finally asked him if he was going to
steal from that store any more.
A1 said, "No-o-O."
And so the manager let him walk out.
And that's why he was humiliated.
(Elliot, "The Parsley Garden")
and then he asked him if he would steal any more if
he didn't let him have the hammer.
And he said he wouldn't steal any more at that store.
But he didn't like them any more because he picked
him up and stuff.
(Leslie, "The Parsley Garden")
Elliot, in his retelling of "The Parsley Garden," recreates
the flashback to the events at the store when Al tried to
steal the hammer. As a coda to his embedded narrative,
Elliot tells you why this information is important to the
retelling, "And that's why he was humiliatedJ' Interestingly,
Leslie's external evaluation is of the same events. After
Al agrees not to steal any more from that store, Leslie
explains how he was really feeling inside, "But he didn't
like them any more because he picked him up and stuff."
The fact that Al hated the men is not revealed until later
in the story. Leslie moves it to the conversation between
A1 and the manager and embeds it as an evaluative remark
attributed to the narrator.
Although there are only these few examples of external
evaluation, the variety of external devices, comments,
references to forgotten materials, and embedded evaluations
suggests that these sixth graders are just beginning to
learn to control these devices.
90
3.2.2 Syntactic Evaluative Devices
Table 1 summarizes the syntactic evaluative devices
which were found in the ten retellings of "The Runaway,"
the ten retellings of "The Parsley Garden" and in the two
original stories. The numbers in parentheses after each
total is the number of devices divided by the total number
of clauses in each sample of narrative(s). We will consider
the relationship of the evaluation found in the retellings
to the evaluation found in the original stories in the
next chapter. We are not here concerned with the similari-
ties and differences in the two original stories or in the
differences and similarities between the two groups of
retellings or in the possible developmental implications.
We are only concerned, here, with documenting the types of
evaluative devices which appear in these retellings. As
you can see from Table 1, all types of syntactic evaluative
devices are found in these samples of retellings: intensi-
fiers, comparators, correlatives, and explicatives. In all,
twenty-two of the twenty-nine individual categories of
devices are represented with no examples of gestures, ritual
utterances, double appositives, left-branching particles,
nominalizations, compound qualification and compound causation.
3.2.2.1 Intensifiers
Intensifiers evaluate events by selecting one event
and strengthening or intensifying it. Intensifiers are the
simplest of the various syntactic devices and are used
frequently in retellings. There are examples of expressive
91
Table l: Evaluative Devices in Original Stories and in
Retellings
“The Runawayï¬ï¬ ï¬The Parsley Garden?
Rtlg. Org. Rtlg. Org.
Devices T = 186 T = 127 T = 280 T = 137
Gestures 0 O 0
Expressive
Phonology 4 0 0 0
Quantifiers 15 19 18 24
Repetition 2 0 2 O
Ritual Utterances O l 0 0
Lexical Items 4 3 7 4
Foregrounding l 1 0 4
Wh-Exclamations _1 _l _l _3
TOTAL 27(.l4) 25(.l9) 33( 12) 33( 25)
Imperatives 3 5 3 7
Questions 2 2 14 12
Negatives 10 8 40 23
Futures 2 2 6 1
Modals 5 4 9 7
Quasimodals 0 2 6 4
Or-clauses O 3 5 3
Comparators _1 _5 _g _3
TOTAL 23(.12) 3l(.24) 73(.30) 60(.43)
Be...ing 18 8 8 3
Double...ing l l 3 2
Double
Appositives 0 l O 3
Double
Attributives 0 0 1 0
Participle Right 1 7 6 4
Participle Left 0 3 0 O
Nominalizations _0 _5 _g _9
TOTAL 0( 10) 25( 19) 8( 06) 12( 08)
Simple
Qualification 5 l4 6 8
Simple Causation 6 3 12 4
Complex
Qualification 0 0 l 1
Complex
Causation 0 l l 0
Compound
Qualification 0 0 0 0
Compound
Causation _g _1 _g _g
TOTAL ll(.06) 9( 15) 20( 07) 13(.09)
Total 81 100 154 120
92
phonology: "Al said, 'No-o-o'" (said with an overlay of
insolence); quantifiers: "He didn't want the job at all;"
lexical items: "Charlie told Larry, 'Chicken';" repetition:
"(the policeman) out of curiosity said, 'Halt! Halt!‘ and
they didn't do it, and so he did it, he commanded them that.
And they still didn't do it;" wh-exclamations: "He yelled,
lHey! I n
3.2.2.2 Comparators
Comparators evaluate the events of a narrative by
comparing events which actually happened to events which did
not happen, or which could have happened. Comparators are
the most frequently used type of device in the original
stories and in the retellings of "The Parsley Garden."
These sixth grade retellers seem to have little difficulty
using imperatives: "And he said, 'Look! Don't turn me in to
the police';" questions: "And then Mr. Clemmer said, 'Why
did you steal it?'"; negatives: "And he didn't get to
dance with her anymore;" futures: "that he was going to
take him to the police;" modals: "And then he wouldn't give
her back to him;" quasimodals: "She had to get up early
the next morning;" and or-clauses: "And they'd pay him a
dollar a day if he did that." There is even one complex
comparator: "More as an exclamation of surprise than of an
order."
93
3.2.2.3 Correlatives
Correlatives evaluate events by bringing together two
or more events which could have happened sequentially so
that they are understood as happening simultaneously. The
evaluative force of correlatives lies primarily in the
suspension of action; the forward movement of the narrative
must necessarily be suspended, however briefly, while
simultaneous events are reported. Most of the correlatives
found in the retellings of "The Runaway" are past progres-
sives (be...ipg): "Then Roger was smiling at Larry." In
the retellings of "The Parsley Garden," there are also
double...ing: "And she seen Al working out in the back
in the parsley garden, working on a bench;" and right
embedded participles: "And he saw people nailing boxes
together."
3.2.2.4 Explicatives
Explicatives evaluate events with various subordinate
clauses which either qualify one event with another using
conjunctions such as "when" or "while" or which explain an
event by referring to another event or to a state of being
using conjunctions such as "since" or "because." In the
retellings, simple qualifications: "So. . . when his mother
went to bed, he just sat there" and simple causations: "And
he said no because he hated them both" are by far the most
frequently used types of explicatives.
94
3.2.3 A Comparison of Evaluative Devices in Retellings
to Devices in Labov's Fight Narratives
In Table 2, the total number of intensifiers, com-
parators, correlatives, and explicatives found in the
retellings of "The Runaway" and "The Parsley Garden" as
well as the totals divided by the average number of clauses
in each group of retellings is compared to similar data
from Labov's analysis of ten fight narratives told by
preadolescents of approximately the same age as the Sturgis
sixth graders (1972a, p. 393). The original stories are
not included. The comparison must be approached carefully.
You cannot make valid inferences on the basis of these data
about statistical differences between the evaluation of
narratives of personal experience and narratives of
vicarious experience, or about the differences between
white, semi-rural middle class preadolescent narrators and
black, inner-city preadolescent narrators. The instruments
used and the contexts in which the datawere collected are
just too dissimilar. It would be incorrect to conclude that
retellings are more highly evaluated than narratives of
personal experience. It would also be wrong and grossly
unfair to conclude that white preadolescent narrators
evaluate their narratives more highly than black preadoles-
cent narrators do. Such a comparison between black and
white retellers or narrators might be interesting, but would
require carefully controlled data collection.
95
Table 2: Devices in Retellings and Fight Narratives
ï¬The Parsley
"The Runaway" Garden" Labov's Fight
Retellings Retellings Narratives
Tot. Tot./L Tot. Tot./L Tot. Tot./L
(L = 18.6) (L = 28) (L = 9.6)
Intensifiers 27 1.45 33 1.18 12 1.23
Comparators 23 1.24 83 2.96 12 1.23
Correlatives 20 1.08 18 .64 l .12
Explicatives ll .59 _20 .71 _1 .12
TOTAL 81 4.36 154 5.50 26 2.70
Note: L is-the average number of clauses per narrative
Despite these important qualifications, several inter-
esting observations can be made about the data in Table 2.
Both the fight narratives and the retellings use intensifiers
and comparators more frequently than correlatives or expli-
catives. Referring back to Table 1, it is clear that
intensifiers and comparators are used more frequently than
correlatives or explicatives in the original stories also.
It would appear that though the frequency with which dif-
ferent types of evaluative devices are used may vary, the
pattern of usage remains fairly constant. Although the
evidence is quite sketchy, it may very well be the case
that all narrators in all contexts tend to use intensifiers
and comparators more often than correlatives or explicatives.
Unfortunately, the significance of this pattern of usage
cannot be determined at this time.
It is also interesting to note in Table 2 that the
frequency of intensifiers for "The Runaway" retellings,
"The Parsley Garden" retellings, and the fight narratives
is approximately the same as is the frequency of comparators
96
in the retellings of "The Runaway" and the fight narratives.
The frequency of comparators in the retellings of "The
Parsley Garden" is quite a bit higher than the others, but
this is due to the large number of negatives (forty) in
the retellings of "The Parsley Garden." Apparently, the
use of intensifiers, and, at least for the retellings of
"The Runaway," comparators, is relatively unaffected by the
retelling process. On the other hand, correlatives and
explicatives may very well be affected by the retelling
process. They appear more frequently in the retellings,
perhaps because they were used more frequently in the
original story.
Labov has suggested that "some of the more complex
comparators and correlatives are outside of the linguistic
capacities of the preadolescents" (1972a, p. 394). It seems
probable that reading makes these devices available to
retellers in the same way that sentence combining has been
shown to result in students writing longer, more heavily
embedded sentences (O'Hare 1973). The use of more complex
evaluative devices, however, does not necessarily result in
more effective or better focused evaluations of stories
any more than longer, more complex sentences necessarily
result in a better or more effective writing style.1 As
Labov notes:
In reporting their own experience, adults have
developed the ability to evaluate their own
behavior with more complex linguistic devices.
In middle-class speakers, this process often
gets out of hand, and many narrators can lose
97
the point of their story entirely in an excess
of external and syntactic elaboration. (1972a,
p. 396)
The tendency of middle class narrators to lose the
point of their story in an excess of complex evaluation is
likely a result of their education. It is one of the
consequences of literacy, of training in reading and in
writing. Narrators, through reading, are exposed to a
range of complex evaluative devices which they never learn
how to control in their own stories. It is further evi-
dence of the danger of isolating reading from writing in
education, of not encouraging written expression in all
courses where reading is required.
3.3 Narrative Analysis of Retellings
Thus far we have shown that virtually all of the
various syntactic evaluative devices which occur in narra-
tives of personal experience also occur in this sample of
narrative retellings. We have also seen that intensifiers
and comparators occur more frequently than do correlatives
and explicatives, and that intensifiers and comparators may
be relatively unaffected by the retelling process while
correlatives and explicatives may appear more frequently in
retellings because of the influence of the original text.
Evaluative devices, then, are found in at least this sample
of retellings. DO these devices function as evaluation in
the narratives the students have created? Do they form
abstracts, orientations, codas, and evaluation sections? Do
they suspend the action and separate the complicating action
98
from the resolving action? This section analyzes the types
of narrative structures that were found in the retellings.
We will first examine the transitional components of narra-
tive: abstracts, orientations, codas, and then the cycle
of complication, evaluation, and resolution.
3.3.1 Transitional Components
It was argued in the first chapter that the transitional
components of narrative--abstracts, orientations, and codas--
function primarily to establish and to maintain the channel
of communication between a speaker and a listener; to orient
the listener to the point of the story in the abstract, to
the persons, time, place, and behavioral situation of the
story in the orientation, and then to signal that the story
is finished in the coda. Syntactic evaluative devices are
generally used in constructing abstracts, orientations, and
codas. They help to separate the transitional components
from the narrative proper and also frequently carry evalua-
tive force in the story. There are no examples of abstracts
in the sample of retellings studied here, although Leslie
summarizes the point of her story in her orientation:
There were these three boys
and they weren't very good.
(Leslie, "The Runaway")
Abstracts are probably used by more skilled narrators and
in stories where the narrator has a firm grasp of what the
point is. On the other hand, it is possible that retellers
do not offer abstracts because they assume the researcher
already knows what the point of the story is, having given
99
the story to the student to read and then listened to the
oral reading. Retellers do, however, generally include an
orientation section and a coda in their retelling. It is
difficult to say why orientations and codas appear but not
abstracts. Abstracts may very well play a significantly
different role in a narrative.
3.3.1.1 Orientations
In describing the characteristics of vicarious
narratives, Labov has observed that: "We begin in the
middle of things without any orientation section" (1972a,
p. 367). Just as it is possible to find retellings without
any evaluation, there are also retellings which do in fact
begin in the middle of things without an orientation section:
Well, he went to Woolworth's
and he stole a hammer.
(Terry, "The Parsley Garden")
A1 went into a store
and saw a hammer.
(Billy, "The Parsley Garden")
Both of these Openings jump right into the action. There is
no explanation as to why Al wants a hammer; the retelling
begins with the first reportable event of the story and goes
from there, assuming perhaps that both the reteller and the
researcher are familiar with the story and do not need to be
oriented to it. Retellings without orientations are,
however, in the minority in the sample. Nine of the ten
retellings of "The Runaway" have orientations and seven of
the ten retellings of "The Parsley Garden" have orientations.
100
Table 3 summarizes the orientation sections found in
"The Runaway" and in its retellings. Five of the nine
orientations begin with the same situation as the original,
with the boys running away, though only two of the retellings
begin on board the ferry as the story does. There is no
explanation in the original orientation of why the boys are
running away; that information is not revealed until much
later in the story. Yet, in four of the five retellings that
begin with the boys running away, the students provide a
reason why the boys were running away. Only Louise is
content to begin "Charlie and some friends. . . were. . .
ran" without further comment. The reasons the boys are
running away are quite diverse: because of a bad report card,
because of what happened at the store, because of the dance,
or because they weren't very good. These explanations
may well serve the function of an abstract, orienting the
listener to the fact that the story has a point, that there
is a reason for the boys' actions. The fact that retellers
Offer an explanation as to why the boys are running away
in their Openings when none is Offered in the original
orientation suggests that these students are creating their
own stories with their own sets of expectations and narra-
tive strategies, and drawing on the original for material
rather than trying to recreate the original or produce a
carbon copy.
Table 4 summarizes the orientation sections which
were found in "The Parsley Garden" and its retellings. Only
101
Table 3: Orientation Sections from "The Runaway" and
Retellings
Larry was running away again.
Only this time he felt no satisfaction even as the
ferry boat pulled clear of the pier.
It was early morning
and the light of day was beginning to grow in the
east.
Crowds of workers milled about the boat.
("The Runaway")
Well, Charlie and Roger were, they were running away
and Charlie or Roger, one of them, was. . . ran away
once.
(Terry, "The Runaway")
This one kid, he ran away because he had a bad report
card.
And the cops were after him.
(Darrell, "The Runaway")
At the start of the story, Larry and Roger and Charlie
were on the ferry boat.
And Larry told them to split up because of the policeman
nearby.
(Elliot, "The Runaway")
Well, these boys are gonna run away because Charlie
hit this man into the counters.
(Don, "The Runaway")
Charlie and some Of his friends . . . were. . . ran
(Louise, "The Runaway")
Charlie and Roger and Larry were in a store
(Billy, "The Runaway")
Larry was running away because one kid had butted
him out from a dance.
(Micky, "The Runaway")
First Of all, Larry was on the boat
and he was looking over the pier
and he was remembering things like what they did the
night before.
(Betty, "The Runaway")
There were these three boys
and they weren't very good.
(Leslie, "The Runaway")
102
two of the seven orientations begin at the same point as
the original, with Al in the parsley garden. The remainder
begin with A1 at the store, stealing or about to steal the
hammer. Although neither the hammer or its theft are
mentioned in the original orientation, six of the seven
orientations in the retellings explain why he took the hammer.
Remarkably, all six of these retellings agree on the reason
Al took the hammer. He took the hammer because he wanted
it, because he needed it. Two of the orientations also men-
tion that he wanted to build something and two mention that
he didn't have any money. The fact that Al wanted the hammer
is an important feature of his character. A1 could have
taken the hammer on a whim, just because it was there, or
on a dare, or to spite someone in the store. Al was not,
however, a juvenile delinquent, a bad kid. He took the
hammer because he wanted it, because he needed it and had
no money to buy it. In retelling the story, these students
could have been focusing on the orientation to the embedded
flashback which appears shortly after the opening of the
story in clauses 11-14:
That fifty-cent hammer at Woolworth's had been just
what he needed, he thought bitterly.
It was a real hammer, not a toy.
He had already gathered some first-class nails from
the floor of Foley's Packing House and some old
box wood;
with a hammer he could make something, perhaps a
table or a small bench.
("The Parsley Garden")
This second orientation goes to great lengths to establish
why Al took the hammer. He had some nails, some wood, but
103
Table 4: Orientations of "The Parsley Garden" and Retellings
When Al got home he was too ashamed to go inside.
SO he had a long drink of water from the faucet in
the backyard.
The faucet was used by his mother to water the stuff
she planted every year: okra, bell peppers,
tomatoes, cucumbers, onion, garlic, mint, eggplant,
and parsley.
His mother called the whole business the parsley
garden.
Every night in the summer she would bring chairs out
of the house
and put them around the table
and she would sit and enjoy the cool of the garden.
("The Parsley Garden")
First of all, Al went inside this Woolworth's
and he wanted this hammer.
(Betty, "The Parsley Garden")
Okay, his mother had a garden of parsley, garlic,
onion, tomatoes,
and she called the garden. . . a parsley garden.
And when Al was in that Woolworth's store, he tried to
steal a hammer.
(Don, "The Parsley Garden")
This boy, he went by the Woolworth's store to
and he saw people nailing boxes together
and he wanted to do that same thing so
but he needed a hammer.
(Darrell, "The Parsley Garden")
This boy Al--they had a parsley garden
and one day he was sitting by the garden
he was eating parsley
and he wanted,
if he had time, he wanted to make something out of
some old box wood and with his nails
but he didn't have a hammer
and somehow he wanted to get the hammer.
(Leslie, "The Parsley Garden")
Okay, Al stole a. . . didn't have any money so
and he wanted a hammer
(Louise,"The Parsley Garden")
Well, first Al came home
and he wanted a hammer
and he didn't have any money.
(Micky, "The Parsley Garden")
Well, he wanted a hammer.
(Sally, "The Parsley Garden")
104
nothing to pound them together with. In "The Runaway,"
the reasons the boys are running away does not appear until
clause 41 when they go into the store. The orientation
sections to the retellings of "The Runaway" may disagree
on the reasons the boys are running away because those
reasons are so deeply embedded in the story. Indeed, the
reasons Larry was running away seem quite complex. It is
not simply that they pushed the storekeeper into the shelves.
Larry is also running away from the events at the dance;
he is running away from his father, and ultimately from him-
self. The diversity of explanations for Larry's behavior is
a reflection of the diversity in the original story. It is
important not to lose sight of the role of the text in the
retelling process.
3.3.1.2 Codas
Nine of the retellings of "The Runaway" and seven of
the retellings of "The Parsley Garden" have codas at the
conclusion of the narrative. As can be seen in Table 5, two
distinct types of codas are found. Dramatic, evaluative
codas provide a final comment on the story which sums up,
reinforces, or restates the evaluative point of the story.
Both of the original stories, of course, have dramatic codas.
Turn-returning codas are not related to the narrative; they
are a comment in the real time of the conversation which
signals that the speaker has completed his or her turn and
it is now the researcher's turn to talk. The most common
form of turn-returning coda was: "That's all I remember."
105
A statement, interestingly, that was rarely true, students
almost always elaborated on their stories in the question
and answer session that followed the unaided retelling.
It more commonly meant, "Is that enough?" or "Please let
me go back to my class." Two of the retellings of "The
Parsley Garden," Don's and Elliot's, have both a dramatic
coda and a turn-returning coda.
While many of the dramatic codas from the retellings
appear to be just an extension or intensification of the
last event of the narrative, others create a skillful
discontinuity with the story, note especially, the coda from
Darrell's retelling of "The Runaway:" "And now they are in
custody." Darrell shifts from the past tense of the narrative
to the present. It effectively ends his story and seals
off the events; nothing else that happened matters because
now they are in custody.
The differences in the material which the dramatic coda
selects in the original stories and in the retellings appears
to depend on the nature of the structure of the resolving
action in the retelling. In both "The Runaway" and "The
Parsley Garden," there are a number of embedded narratives
in the resolving action. The dramatic coda of a retelling
is created from whichever of these narratives the reteller
chooses to end the story on. Thus in the retellings of "The
Runaway," two end with the police on the pier as the original
does, two end with Charlie and Roger looking at Larry, and
one ends with Larry still on the ferry. Similarly, in the
106
Table 5: Codas
T'The Runaway:"
Original-~Dramatic Coda
The officers took Roger's smile for arrogance because
they felt that juvenile delinquents were such a
hopeless lot.
Retellings--Dramatic Codas
and the policeman thought that they were just kind of
dumb.
(Betty)
Then Roger was smiling at Larry
(Don)
And Charlie looked at Roger, saw Roger
and said, disgustingly, "Chicken!"
and spat on the ground!
(Elliot)
and Larry was still on the boat.
(Micky)
and now they are in custody.
(Darrell)
Retellingpe-Turn-Returning Codas
That's all I remember.
(Billy)
That's all I remember.
(Leslie)
I don't know.
(Louise)
That's all I remember.
(Terry)
"The Parsley Gardenz"
Original--Dramatic Coda
(But Al just sat on the bench he made and smelled the
parsley)
and didn't feel humiliated any more.
Retellingsé-Dramatic Codas
and he said no because he hated them both.
(Billy)
And Al sat outside, sitting on the bench that he made
with that hammer and nails and that box that he got.
That's all I remember.
(Don)
107
Table 5 (cont.)
And he didn't want the job because he didn't like them
both.
(Darrell)
Let's see, and then after he got done telling his
mother that and everything, she finally, they talked
a little more
and finally she goes, "All right, shut up."
And that was the end of that.
(Elliot)
But he didn't, he didn't cause he hated them.
(Louise)
and didn't feel humiliated any more.
(Micky)
And. . . so, when his mom went to bed, he just sat
there.
(Terry)
108
retellings of "The Parsley Garden," three end with Al alone
in the garden as does the original story, one ends with the
mother telling Al to shut up, and three end in the store
when Al refuses to take the job.
3.3.1.3 Why DO Transitional Components Appear in Retellings?
We should not be surprised to find codas in retellings.
The retellings were collected in a transactional situation
where it was necessary to signal that a turn had been com-
pleted, either with a coda or with silence or with eye
contact or some other gesture. Orientation sections, how-
ever, are more puzzling. The researcher asks the student
to read a story aloud and tells the student that "when you
are done, I want you to tell me everything you can remember
about the story." The researcher then sits and listens to
the story. At the completion of the oral reading, the
researcher then repeats the request for a retelling, giving
the floor to the student. The student knows that the
researcher knows the story; after all, he just listened to
it. What need is there for an orientation section? The
reteller has no obligation to justify keeping the floor, and
no need to fill the researcher in on background information,
and yet, orientation sections are the rule not the exception
in my retellings. An orientation section appears to be more
than a transition between conversation and narrative; it is
part of what these students feel constitutes a fully-formed
narrative. Notice how Louise and Darrell keep interrupting
109
themselves to expand on their orientations:
Okay, Al stole. . .
didn't have any money so. . .
and he wanted a hammer
(Louise, "The Parsley Garden")
This boy, he went by the Woolworth's store to. . .
and he saw people nailing boxes together
and he wanted to do that same thing so. . .
but he needed a hammer.
(Darrell, "The Parsley Garden")
Louise tries to begin her narrative with Al stealing the
hammer but she interrupts herself to explain why he had to
steal it--he didn't have any money-~and then she interrupts
herself again to expand on that explanation-~he wanted a
hammer. Now she can begin with the first action of her
narrative: "So he went to a store." Darrell does the same
thing, he begins by locating A1 by the store but immediately
interrupts himself to explain why Al wanted the hammer.
Darrell finally begins his narrative proper by returning to
the action at the store: "So. . . he went to a store."
These narrators apparently feel under some sort of Obliga-
tion to orient their story. The orientation function, of
course, can be filled in a number of ways. A simple refer-
ence to an event in the past is sufficient to signal that a
narrative is beginning (Labov and Fanshel 1977, p. 106).
Elliot's and Terry's retellings begin with the first
reportable event of their story and so, technically, do not
have orientation sections. Yet each seems to orient his
narrative effectively:
110
Okay, Al came home
and he was really humiliated!
And then he started daydreaming
and remembered why he was.
(Elliot, "The Parsley Garden")
Well, he went to Woolworth's
and he stole a hammer
and they caught him
(Terry, "The Parsley Garden")
Elliot uses expressive phonology on "really" to orient the
reader to the behavioral situation in the beginning of his
story. Terry seems to be using the wh-exclamation, "Well!"
as an orienting device, moving right in to the first
reportable event from there. Just as all stories must have
an explicit or implicit signal that the story has ended,
all stories need to signal that the narrative has begun.
Yet there can be a great deal of variation in the types of
openings possible. Even sixth graders know how a story
should begin and they will interrupt themselves to include
needed background information before beginning their
narrative. The role of the storyteller is a powerful
structuring force in a retelling.
3.3.2 Complication, Evaluation, and Resolution
Table 6 summarizes the types of narrative structures
found in the retellings in my sample. All twenty of the
retellings display the structural sequence of complicating
action, evaluation and resolving action. In all twenty of
the retellings, there is an evaluation section, however
short, which separates the complicating action from the
resolving action. These retellings conform to Labov's
111
model of narrative (1972a, p. 369). While it is possible
to find unevaluated retellings, it is not possible to find
retellings where evaluation is random, where it does not
minimally separate complicating action from resolving action.
Even sixth graders know how narratives are structured and
this knowledge is reflected in their retellings.
Table 6: Narrative Structure in Retellings
fwThe Parsley
"The Runaway" Garden"
Narrative Structure Retelling Retelling
Single Narrative Cycle 3 2
One Embedded Narrative 2 2
Two Embedded Narratives 0 1
Three Embedded Narratives 0 1
Four Embedded Narratives l 0
Five Embedded Narratives 0 1
Double Narrative Cycle 3 1
One Embedded Narrative 0 1
Two Embedded Narratives l 1
Two basic types of narrative structure are identified
in Table 6: (1) retellings which form a single cycle of
complicating action, evaluation, and resolving action with
one to five narrative subcycles embedded into it, and (2)
retellings which form two independent narrative cycles of
complicating action, evaluation, and resolving action with
one or two narrative subcycles embedded into them. Each of
these two types of narrative structures will be discussed
separately.
112
3.3.2.1 Single Narrative Cycle
Narratives which consist of a single cycle of compli-
cating action, evaluation, and resolving action are, as
was noted earlier, the basic data for Labov's model of
narrative.
Seventy percent of the retellings examined here
follow this structure. Louise's retelling of "The Parsley
Garden" is an example of a retelling with a single cycle of
complicating action, evaluation, and resolving action with
no narratives embedded in it:
Okay, A1 stole a. . . or he didn't have any
money so. . .
and he wanted a hammer.
So he went to the store
and he took the hammer.
And then a guy caught him
and he turned him into the manager.
And the manager was going to turn him over
to the police.
And . . . they, guy. . . or, Mr. . . . Okay,
and then they were going to turn him over
to the police
and he didn't want them to.
And he worked for an hour
and they gave him the hammer.
But he kept on working.
And they wanted him to stay for the job.
But he didn't, he didn't cause he hated them
both.
(Louise, "The Parsley Garden")
Louise creates her simple narrative by eliminating the
mother from the story. Without the mother or the details of
Al's life at home, there is no need to take A1 out of the
store and the story can proceed in a direct and straight-
forward manner.
113
Louise's retelling of "The Parsley Garden" is an
interesting example Of the way the narrative a student
tells can shape and limit her comprehension, her ability
to organize and to utilize information from a story.
Louise tells a short and a tightly structured story. But,
to do this, she must eliminate the mother from the story.
Much of the complication in the original story is a result
of Al's relationship to his mother and his conversations
with her. It would be incorrect, however, to infer that
Louise failed to realize or to comprehend that there was
a mother in the story. In the question and answer session
that followed Louise's unaided retelling, we find the
following exchange:
Res.: Can you tell me anything else? Tell me
something else about the boy? Do you
remember his name?
Louise: Al.
Res.: Okay.
Louise: He used to go out every day, his mom used to put
out chairs and she used to smell the garden,
the parsley garden, and he used to pick a
little bit of parsley and start chewing it.
Res.: Okay, tell me something about, tell me something
about his mother.
Louise: She would. . . I don't. . . can't remember any-
thing.
Res.: How did she feel about him taking the hammer?
Louise: She just, she wanted to know why he took it and
everything and she wanted him and after he
took it, after he got caught and he left it
there and stuff, his mom wanted him to go,
she gave him a silver dollar and told him to
go back and buy it. But he wouldn't and. . .
and everything you know. When she got, when
114
she couldn't think of anything else to say
she would always say, "Shut up!"
Res.: hmhm
Louise: I don't think I can remember anything else.
Louise clearly recalls a number of narrative and evaluative
details about the mother. She is struggling to integrate
those details into the narrative she has created. When she
finally gives up, she isn't so much saying that she can't
remember anything else as she can't make sense of what she
does remember; she can't integrate it into the story she
has created. Louise and the researcher are negotiating her
retelling in the sense of Polanyi (1979). They are negoti-
ating whether the retelling accurately represents what
Louise remembers and they are negotiating what Louise sees
as the point of the story. Statements such as "I don't
think I can remember anything else" are best seen as
negotiating ploys rather than statements of fact. Only
Louise can know what she does and does not remember. A
researcher cannot directly challenge this knowledge; he can
only ask another question. They should also be seen as
statements about the nature of the narrative retold which
can be paraphrased as, "I've told you my story, no other
details are relevant." When a researcher asks a question,
it may elicit new details which cause the student to try and
restructure her narrative to include them. Louise tries,
but cannot find a place for the mother in her story so she
gives up.
115
As well as illustrating the subtleties of the negotiation
process that follows an unaided retelling, retellings such
as Louise's offer evidence for the common sense notion that
it is impossible to separate production from reception,
reading from writing, speaking from listening. What we
understand is at least partially shaped and controlled by
our ability to put that understanding into words. It is
evidence for the importance Of teaching literacy in the
context of reading and writing together.
3.3.2.2 Double Narrative Cycle
Thirty percent of the retellings in the sample are in
the form of two independent cycles of complication, evalua-
tion, and resolution. Sally's retelling of "The Parsley
Garden" is an example of a double narrative cycle retelling.
Both "The Runaway" and "The Parsley Garden" are stories
with long complex narratives in both the complicating action
and the resolving action. The evaluation sections of both
stories are quite short and easily missed. None of the
retellings of "The Runaway" include the moment when Larry
stares into the water and thinks about what he has done, and
only three of the retellings of "The Parsley Garden" include
the fact that Al did not get much sleep that night. For
either story, it is a simple matter to eliminate the evalua-
tion and retell the story as two independent narrative
cycles. In Sally's retelling of "The Parsley Garden," the
events of the first day make up the first narrative cycle
and the events Of the second day make up the second narrative
116
"The Parsley Garden" retold by Sally
Well, he wanted a hammer.
So he stole it at one of the stores.
And he
the
And he
and he
and he
and he
was mad at. . . well. . . two men,
men in the store caught him.
finally went home
sat in the garden
got a drink of water out of the faucet
went in
and told his mom that he stole the hammer.
So she
was going to give him some money to
go back and buy it.
But he
SO she
didn't want to.
just told him to shut up.
So he just started walking around
and then he went home.
And then he got a job at one of the stores.
And he
But he
earned the money to buy the hammer.
didn't want to take the money because
he didn't like the two men.
SO he just took the hammer
and went home.
'cycle. The point of each narrative is tied to Al's refusal
of money. In the first narrative, A1 refuses to take
money from his mother to go buy the hammer. In the second
narrative, A1 refuses to take money from the two men in the
store. In Sally's narrative, Al is a fiercely proud boy.
He does not want a handout, or money from people he doesn't
like. Sally eliminates all of the evaluative details which
are not connected to people trying to give A1 money. In the
complicating action of her first narrative (clauses 2-8), she
completely eliminates the conversation between A1 and the
manager; it is not related to her theme.
117
In retelling "The Parsley Garden," Sally is selecting
from the events of the story and organizing those selected
events into a narrative. Her narrative is the result Of a
unique transaction with the original story. The reasons
Sally has selected and focused on Al refusing money are
forever buried in her biography. Perhaps her parents
begrudge her her allowance. Perhaps she feels her allowance
is too small and it has become a sore point in their
relationship. Perhaps she imagines herself, like Al,
turning down the money to spite them. We see here the
crucial role of comparators in the process of selecting and
creating a retelling. Comparators tell us what didn't
happen--Al didn't take the money. They tell us what could
happen, what might happen. They place the events of the
story in the context of a virtually limitless number of
possible events. The comparators which retellers focus
on, the possible events which they include in their stories,
tell us something about them as human beings.
3.4 Evaluation and the Point of Retellings
We have seen, then, that the narratives which students
create in retelling a story exhibit a complete range of
syntactic evaluative devices. These devices are used by
retellers to form orientations, codas, and evaluation
sections. When evaluation appears in a retelling, it is
systematic; it minimally suspends the action and separates
the complicating action from the resolving action, though
evaluation may be found elsewhere in the retelling.
118
Retellings do not, generally, show the skill in construction
or coherence of narratives of personal experience. Still,
these retellings are fully-formed narratives. Demonstrating
that the structure of narrative retellings is the same as
the structure of narratives of personal experience does not,
however, demonstrate that these students, when retelling,
see a point to the story they have read and that they
communicate that point through the evaluation of their
retelling.
The points which are made in a story are not necessarily
equivalent to the evaluative devices which are found in the
narrative. Several devices may be grouped together as part
of a single point and several points may be made, not all of
equal importance. We will use the term "proposition," as
it has been defined by Labov and Fanshel (1977, pp. 51-56),
to refer to the points that students make in their narratives.
In Louise's retelling of "The Parsley Garden," there are
three distinct propositions. The first is presented in the
orientation to her narrative:
Okay, Al stole a. . . or he didn't have any money
andsï¬e wanted a hammer.
(Louise, "The Parsley Garden")
Louise begins her narrative with the first reportable event
but then realizes that Al's stealing the hammer can be
misinterpreted so she interrupts herself to explain why
he stole the hammer; he didn't have any money and he wanted
a hammer. The general proposition underlying Al's motives
is: Al has reasonable desires that should be met. Wanting
119
a hammer is a reasonable desire for a preadolescent if he
or she can use the hammer and if there is access to the
hammer. It would not be reasonable to desire a hammer if
there was nothing available to pound with it. As is pointed
out in the story, however, Al has collected some used nails
and some old box wood. He could build something if he only
had a hammer. The story also establishes that the hammer
at Woolworth's had been just what he needed, a real hammer,
not a toy. But Al had no money; he did not have access to
the hammer. Louise has to interrupt herself twice because
her first explanation, "he didn't have any money," does not
present her general prOposition, it qualifies it. So, she
interrupts herself again to explain that he wanted a hammer.
Since A1 wants a hammer, he has a legitimate need for
a hammer but no money, he tries to get the hammer another
way; he tries to steal it. The theft leads to Louise's
second proposition: Stealing is wrong which is presented
in the evaluation section of her narrative:
And the manager was going to turn him over to the
police.
And. . . they, guy. . . or, Mr. . . .
Okay, and then they were going to turn him over to
the police
and he didn't want them to.
(Louise, "The Parsley Garden)
Stealing is wrong. If you steal, you should be punished.
You should be turned over to the police. (But, as Louise
points out, A1 didn't want to be turned over to the police.
Louise's confusion here is interesting. Presumably, no one
in this situation would want to be turned over to the
120
police; there appears to be nothing evaluative about the
fact that Al is like everyone else and it causes Louise a
moment of disorientation. The fact that Al doesn't want
to be turned over to the police is included in Louise's
retelling and in the original story to suggest a third
proposition: A1 wants to be a responsible member of
society. As was discussed in the second chapter, it is
this proposition, Al wants to be a responsible member of
society, that causes most of the conflict in "The Parsley
Garden." The men at the store treat Al like an irrespon-
sible child. They sneer at him. They make him wait.
They refuse to recognize his reasonable need for a hammer;
they refuse to let him face the consequences of his act,
instead they send him away out the back. Al's mother also
treats him like a child by trying to give him the money to
go buy the hammer. The third proposition is not well-
developed in Louise's narrative. It is only obliquely
referred to in the evaluation and again, in Louise's
dramatic coda:
But he didn't, he didn't cause he hated them both.
When asked why A1 hated the men, she replied, "Because the
one guy turned him in. He seen him stole the hammer and
the other guy, the manager, Mr. Clemens I think it was,
was going to turn him in to the police." Louise understands
the connection between stealing the hammer, going to the
police and hating the men but she is unable to verbalize
it. Rather than saying that Al was ashamed, or that he was
121
humiliated, she can only repeat the connection between the
events at the store and Al's feelings. When asked by the
researcher why she thought the author wrote the story,
Louise responds:
Um, you shouldn't, you shouldn't take stuff even
though you don't have any money or whatever.
Louise focuses on the second proposition, stealing is wrong,
which was the main point of her evaluation section. She
then qualifies this proposition with her first proposition:
you shouldn't steal even though you have a reasonable desire
for the "stuff" and do not have the means to Obtain it.
Louise does not mention her third proposition and it must
be seen as a secondary theme in her story.
Sally's retelling of "The Parsley Garden" begins by
asserting the general proposition: A1 has reasonable desires
which should be met, by referring to the fact that Al wanted
a hammer in her orientation. Sally, however, does not
qualify her proposition and reports the events at the store
without comment. There is no evaluation in her first
narrative cycle until the conversation between A1 and his
mother:
SO she was going to give him some money to go back
and buy it
but he didn't want to.
(Sally, "The Parsley Garden")
Sally echoes Lori's third proposition: Al wants to be a
responsible member of society. His mother tries to give him
money, but responsible people, adults, do not take handouts
for things they don't really need. She also presents this
122
same proposition in the evaluation section of the second
narrative cycle of her retelling of "The Parsley Garden"
when Al refuses to take money from the men at the store:
But he didn't want to take the money because he
didn't like the two men.
(Sally, "The Parsley Garden")
The men have challenged Al's role as a responsible person,
so Al refuses the money. He has freedom of choice like an
adult. Louise's second proposition, stealing is wrong,
does not, however, appear anywhere in Sally's retelling or
in the question and answer session that followed the retell-
ing. When asked by the researcher why A1 took the hammer,
Sally replied, "Cause he wanted to build a bench." He had
a reasonable desire for a hammer; he had need of a hammer.
When asked why Al walked around, she replied, "Because he
was ashamed because he stole the hammer." Al wants to be
a responsible person, but, by stealing the hammer, he has
given up any claim to that role. Finally, when asked why
she thought the author wrote the story, Sally replied:
That you can still buy things if you work for it and
try to get enough money for something you want,
and again asserts the general proposition: A1 wants to be
(and everyone should be) a responsible person. The point
which Sally focuses on as the reason the author wrote the
story is the point which she presents in the evaluation
section of her narrative, just as it was in Louise's
retelling.
Table 7 summarizes the thirteen primary evaluation
sections from the retellings of "The Parsley Garden." Five
123
of these evaluations are from the conversation between A1
and the manager at the store. They present the propositions
that stealing is wrong and that Al wants to be a responsible
person. Three of the evaluations focus on the fact that Al
didn't get much sleep that night, two on the conversation
between A1 and his mother, and three on Al's refusal of the
job. Each of these presents evidence in different ways for
the general proposition: Al wants to be a responsible
person. These thirteen evaluation sections from the single
and double cycle narrative retellings represent only four
different scenes from the original story and present just
two general propositions: stealing is wrong, and A1 wants
to be a responsible person. Other propositions are, of
course, developed in embedded evaluation sections and in
orientations and dramatic codas. Other events are focused
on in the evaluation sections of complex stories. The fact
remains, however, that in retellings of "The Parsley Garden"
a narrow range of events are selected for evaluation to put
forward a small number of general propositions. We find
that retellers will generally be in close agreement about
the propositions in a story. This is the influence of the
original text. Where there is an enormous amount of varia-
tion is in types of evidence and in the amount of evidence
presented to support a prOposition. This is the influence
of the reader, selecting and reorganizing the events of a
story.
124
Table 7: Evaluations from Retellings of "The Parsley Garden"
And he didn't have a good night because he was thinking
about this.
(Betty)
Al was waiting there for a few minutes, 'til the manager
said something,
that he was going to take him to the police.
But Al didn't say nuthin.
(Billy)
The manager said, told him if he'd like him to call
the police?
And Al didn't say anything.
Then the guy told him he would let him go.
(Don)
And she said, "I don't want you to steal anymore."
(Darrell)
And then A1 had to wait for fifteen minutes.
And then the manager finally asked him if he was
going to steal from the store any more.
Al said, "No-o-o."
***
And he didn't take it.
He didn't want it.
He didn't want a job there.
(Elliot)
But he didn't get much sleep that night because he
was thinking about what happened.
(Leslie)
And the manager was going to turn him over to the
police
and. . . the, guy. . . or, Mr. . . . Okay,
And then they were going to turn him over to the
police
and he didn't want them to.
(Louise)
He didn't sleep much.
(Micky)
So she was going to give him some money to go back
and buy it
but he didn't want to
***
but he didn't want to take the money because he didn't
like the two men.
(Sally)
125
Table 7 (cont.)
And he said, "Look! Don't turn me in to the police!"
***
And he didn't take it.
(Terry)
126
The propositions presented in Louise's and Sally's
retellings<IE"The Parsley Garden" are relatively clear
cut. In other retellings, however, it is less clear what
proposition is being suggested by a particular evaluation
section. Don's retelling of "The Runaway" contains four
evaluative devices: (1) a future and (2) an explicative in
the orientation which suggests some sort of a proposition
that the boys have done something wrong, (3) a past
progressive in the coda: "Roger was smiling at Larry,"
and (4) a lexical item, "Chicken," in clause 9. The ninth
clause is clearly the evaluation section of the narrative.
It separates the complicating action from the resolving
action. The directly quoted "Chicken" is sort of a quasi-
imperative with much more evaluative force than "and he
called him a chicken" would have. But what has Larry done
to deserve the insult? What general proposition is Don
proposing? There is no clue in the unaided retelling.
Don's retelling of "The Runaway" is quite similar to
Louise's retelling of "The Parsley Garden." Don's narrative
is a single cycle of complication, evaluation, and resolution,
a simple and a straightforward story. To achieve this
simplicity, Don eliminates everything that happened in the
original story up to the events on the pier after the boat
has landed and the boys have gotten off and he reduces the
action on the pier to a single narrative. The explanation
in the orientation section of why the boys are running away
is the only reference to anything that happened earlier.
127
"The Runaway" retold by Don
0| 1 Well, these boys are gonna run away because
Charlie hit this man into the counters.
2 Then they looked back for Roger, for Larry
3 and the police had him
4 and they started to push their way through
the crowd.
5 Then that officer blew the whistle
6 and two more officers walked the pier.
7 Then they questioned them,
8 then they got on the ferry boat.
IEc::::9 Charlie told Larry, "Chicken!"
12:10 And then the ferry left.
c[:::ll Then Roger was smiling at Larry.
It would be incorrect, however, to infer that Don does not
remember any of the earlier action of the story or that he
does not know why Larry was a chicken. In the question and
answer session that followed Don's unaided retelling, there
is the following exchange:
Res.: Why was he smiling at Larry?
Don: Because he was happy?
Res.: Can you tell me anything else about Charlie?
Don: N0.
Res.: Do you know why they were running away?
Don: Cause Larry was dancing with this girl and
this boy came and cutted in. . . and Larry
was getting mad and they started to run then
they went to Larry's house and the father was
laughing at Larry and then Larry started to
run away and the others started to.
Like Louise, Don's retelling ii; so tightly structured that
it cannot accomodate all that Don knows about the story.
Although he does not seem to have a clear idea how the events
at the dance fit into the narrative he has created, Don
128
integrates these details into his story in a way that Louise
was unable to. He uses the events at the dance to show why
Larry was a chicken. Larry was a chicken because he did
not meet his role obligations. Larry did not confront
the boy when he cut in. To reinforce this evaluative point,
Don has the boys go to Larry's house where Larry's own
father laughs at him; his own father won't stick up for him;
his own father thinks he is a chicken.
When the central prOposition presented in the evalua-
tion section is not clear in the unaided retelling, it
generally, but not always, emerges in the question and
answer session that follows. This might appear to be an
important difference between narratives of personal experience
and narratives of vicarious experience. Perhaps the point
of narratives of personal experience are generally more
clear than the points of narrative retellings. While this
may be true statistically, we encounter any number of nar-
ratives of personal experience in real life whose points are
not clear. Narratives which we question or request clarifi-
cation about, as was noted earlier. Narratives of personal
experience may on the whole need less clarification than
narratives of vicarious experience but the process of nego-
tiation is the same for both.
As was dicussed in the second chapter, the general
proposition presented in "The Runaway" is: Larrypshould
fulfill his role obligations. The conflict in the story
comes from opposing interpretations of what those role
129
obligations are. Should Larry accept the value of the
juvenile delinquent, of Charlie, or should he accept the
values of society? Table 8 summarizes the primary evalua-
tion sections from the single cycle and double cycle
narrative retellings of "The Runaway." As with the
retellings of "The Parsley Garden," these evaluation sections
focus on a narrow range of events. Five of the evaluations
are of the conversation between the boys on board the ferry,
three focus on the events in the store which establish why
the boys are running away and present the general proposi-
tion: what the boys did was wrong, two focus on the events
at the dance, and three on the events on the pier after the
boat has landed. While all of the students assert the
general proposition that Larry should meet his role obliga-
tions in one place or another in their retellings, some feel
that Larry has failed, that he is a chicken, that he does
not measure up to the values Ofaajuvenile delinquent, and
others suggest that he has met his obligations, that he has
affirmed the values of society and is going to go back to
take what is coming to him.
Like the evaluation sections of the retellings of "The
Parsley Garden," only a few events and a small number of
prOpositions are presented in the evaluation sections of
the retellings of "The Runaway." Where retellings differ is
in the types of evidence cited for a proposition and the
amount of evidence given. This variation is the result of a
transaction between the students and the stories through
130
Table 8: Evaluations from Retellings of "The Runaway"
and he goes, "I say we should go back
and face what's coming to us."
And Charlie goes, "Are you crazy?"
And Roger goes,
--you know, he's kind of scared and everything--
he goes, "We should do it."
(Betty)
Later Larry said, "Let's give up."
(Billy)
Charlie told Larry, "Chicken!"
(Don)
And the man said, "Pay."
And they didn't pay.
***
And the policeman was on there
and they tried, and they didn't look back for Larry.
And Larry was on the ferry.
And the policeman was there.
(Darrell)
And then he wouldn't give her back to him.
***
He yelled, "Hey!"
More as an exclamation of surprise than of a . . . order.
(Elliot)
Then one of them wanted to go in his aunt's house
and thought they'd be safe there.
And one of them didn't want to.
He wanted to do it.
(Leslie)
And the man was getting impatient with them.
And that when they got on the boat. . . Charlie.
I think it was Charlie said that they should go
back and tell.
(Louise)
Then a lady said--she was angry, was--didn't like what
they were doing.
***
And then it was going off. (The ferry)
(Micky)
and he didn't get to dance with her any more.
(Sally)
131
Table 8 (cont.)
and kept on asking for item after item.
***
One of the boys was still on the ferry going back
where it started, where it started from.
And it was two of the boys that were on the pier.
(Terry)
132
reading, a fusing of responses, experiences, expectations
with the particulars of a story. The evaluation sections of
retellings do not simply suspend the action and divide
the complicating action from the resolving action. They
present what the student feels is the point of the story.
3.5 Summary
In this chapter, the types of evaluative devices and
narrative structures which were found in the twenty
retellings were presented. We found some examples Of
external evaluation in retellings and a complete range of
syntactic evaluative devices: intensifiers, comparators,
correlatives, and explicatives and most of the specific
subtypes of these four categories. Intensifiers and
comparators appeared more frequently than correlatives and
explicatives in the original stories, in the retellings of
those stories, and in Labov's fight narratives. We found,
however, that correlatives and explicatives appeared more
frequently in narrative retellings than they did in narra-
tives of personal experience and suggested that this may be
a result of the reading process.
The evaluative devices which appeared in retellings
were used to form the orientations, codas, and evaluation
sections of fully-formed narratives. When evaluation
appeared within a retelling, it always functioned, minimally,
to separate the complicating action from the resolving action.
Finally, we found that in the evaluation sections of the
retellings, the students were focusing on a limited number
133
of events and presenting a limited number of propositions.
In the retellings of "The Parsley Garden" the two proposi-
tions were: stealing is wrong, and A1 wants to be a respon-
sible member Of society. In the retellings of "The Runaway,"
the propositions were: what the boys did was wrong, and
Larry should meet his role obligations.
The analysis establishes that most but not all retell-
ings are fully—formed narratives. The action may be vague,
difficult to follow, lacking in supporting detail, even
uninteresting but it is presented in the form of a narrative
and evaluated in the same ways as are narratives of personal
experience. The data suggest that these students retelling
these short stories are assuming the role of a storyteller.
They are creating their own story using the original only
as a blueprint. It could be argued, however, that these
students are not functioning as storytellers; they are simply
repeating what they have read. The evaluation which appears
in the retellings may simply be a result of the evaluation
that appears in the original stories. The process of
selection that appears, while perhaps interesting for
personality analysis, may simply be a result of a reshuffling
of the events of the original story. The next chapter
studies these issues.
134
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER THREE
1. See for example Malmstrom and Weaver's critique
of sentence combining (1976).
CHAPTER FOUR
THE RELATIONSHIP OF EVALUATION IN RETELLINGS
AND IN THE ORIGINAL STORIES
4.1 Introduction
Up to this point in the analysis, retellings have been
studied as if they were independent narratives. Where
comparisons were made to the original story, they were not
central to the argument. If retellings are narratives, then
they must be analyzed as narratives regardless of their
source. Yet, because a retelling is a recreation of an
earlier narrative, an earlier, preselected sequence of
events, the analysis must, ultimately, work back to the
original story, to the sources of the narrative retelling.
Evaluation has been shown to occur in retellings in
the same ways it occurs in narratives of personal experience.
Retellings are fully-formed narratives. What, however, is
the source of the narrative? Is the evaluation that is
found in a retelling simply a recalling of the evaluation
found in the original or is it the result of some more
complex process of narrative construction as was suggested
in the last chapter?
135
136
At issue here, again, are alternative views of the
nature of comprehension. If it can be shown that the evalua-
tion which is found in retellings is generally dependent
on or cued by the evaluation which is found in the original
story, then a model of comprehension that sees retelling
as an analogue to oral reading and the retold narrative as
an imperfect representation of the original text would be
supported. If, on the other hand, it can be demonstrated
that the evaluation found in the retellings is not simply
recalling and reshuffling the evaluation found in the
original story, but is the result of a selective, creative
process of narrative construction, a transactional model
such as that suggested by Rosenblatt or Neisser would be
supported.
The examination of the relationship of the evaluative
devices found in the retellings to the evaluative deVices
found in the original stories is in three parts. The first
part will examine those devices that are found only in the
original story. The second part will examine the devices
found only in the retellings. Finally, the third part
will examine the devices found both in the original stories
and in the retellings of those stories.
4.2 Evaluative Devices Found Only in the Original Stories
The following evaluative devices were found only in
"The Runaway:" or-clauses, double appositives, ritual
utterances, quasimodals, left-branchipg participles,
137
nominalizations, complex causatives, and compound causatives,
in all, seventeen devices from eight categories representing
seventeen percent of the evaluative devices found in "The
Runaway." Foregroundigg, comparators, and double appositives
were found only in "The Parsley Garden," a total of ten
devices or eight percent of the evaluative devices used in
the story.
A number of the evaluative devices which were found only
in "The Runaway" or "The Parsley Garden" are quite complex
and doubtless beyond the linguistic capabilities of most
sixth graders. The explanation of why Larry left the
dance from "The Runaway" for example:
but he was desperate, as much to get away as to
relieve the tension that he felt (Clause 28)
is a compound causation which embeds a complex comparison
into the matrix clause. Similarly, Larry's memories of
the first time he had run away:
"All talk and no guts!" his father had heckled when
Larry came back tired and hungry (Clause 39)
is a simple qualification that qualifies the father's comment
with a ritual utterance, "all talk and no guts," with a
double appositive, "tired and hungry." It is a complex
sentence embedded in a difficult part of the story (the
lengthy evaluation section between the dance and the events
at the store). Only two students even mention a bad report
card in their retellings much less try to reproduce the
passage. Similarly, foregrounding, left—branching parti-
ciples, and nominalizations all appear too complex for most
twelve-year-Olds to use.
138
On the other hand, there are a number of constructions
which seem fairly straightforward, or-clauses such as,
"if he stayed there would be trouble," or quasimodals such
as, "'We don't have to do like Charlie says,'" but which are
not found in the retellings of "The Runaway." There are a
number of comparable comparators in the sample of retellings,
various modals and other hypotheticals which seem equally
complex. Apparently, the evaluative points associated
with these two examples present secondary propositions which
do not connect to more general points in the stories.
Roger's comment that they don't have to hide out is a
reference to a plan of action which is neither discussed
or implemented in the story. Similarly, the suggestion that
Larry might be afraid of trouble (be literally a coward) is
not picked up again anywhere in the story. There are no
other examples of physical cowardice in the story. The
focus is on value systems. Should Larry hide? Should he
run away? Or should he go back and take what is coming to
him?
If a particular evaluative device is part of an impor-
tant evaluation section in a story, however, it will be
recalled in some form regardless of how complex the device
or devices may be. One of the most complex sentences in
"The Runaway" is the evaluative moment in the fight between
Charlie and the storekeeper, after Charlie pushes the store-
keeper into the shelves:
139
There was the sound of breaking glass and crashing
metal as bottles and cans fell to the floor.
(Clause 65)
There is an explicative qualifying how the sound was made,
"as bottles and cans fell to the floor," there is a complex
nominalization, "the sound of breaking glass and crashing
metal," which contains two left-embedded participles, as
well as the pseudo-cleft foregrounding of the existential
"there," five separate devices in all. No student recalls
it in its original form. It is, however, an important part
of the story, suspending the action of the fight--which is
why they are running away--with a vivid image of destruction.
There is some form of clause 65 in three of the retellings
of "The Runaway," though the paraphrases of the clauses are
functioning as narrative clauses:
And glass and stuff fell on him. . . fell, or fell
on to the floor.
(Terry, "The Runaway")
and some glass fell and broke.
(Billy, "The Runaway")
and a bunch of bottles and metal came and hit the
floor.
(Micky, "The Runaway")
In order to recall clause 65, it is necessary to recall the
fight which it suspends. The conflict between Charlie and
the storekeeper forms the context, as we will call it, of
the evaluation. The context of an evaluative device is the
complicating and the resolving action which the evaluation
section it is a part of suspends. The fight between the
storekeeper and the boys appears in seven of the ten
retellings. Clause 65 is retold in three of the seven
140
possible contexts where it could have appeared. It is a
complex and difficult sentence and yet, because it is
important to the story, it appears in some of the retellings.
Thus a certain number of evaluative devices appear in
the original stories which do not appear in the retellings
of those stories. Either a particular device is too complex
for a sixth grader to use or the proposition presented by
the device is not central to the story. If, however, an
evaluation section is important enough to the story, if it
presents essential evidence for a general proposition as the
image of the breaking glass and the crashing metal supports
the proposition that what the boys did was wrong, it will
be recalled, regardless of the complexity of the original
device, in some form.
4.3 Evaluative Devices Which Appear Only in Retellings
Expressive phonology and repetition are found in
retellings of "The Runaway" but not in the original story.
They represent six devices or seven percent of the evalua-
tion of the retellings. Expressive phonology, repetition,
double attributives, and complex causatives appear in the
retellings of "The Parsley Garden" but not in the original
story. They represent nine devices or three percent of the
total evaluation of the retellings. Of the devices, the
double attributive which appears in Betty's retelling of
"The Parsley Garden:" "A dollar a day for an eleven-year-
old boy is pretty good money" elaborates the attributive in the
original clause (123): "Dollar a day for an eleven-year-old
141
boy is good money." Similarly, the complex causative,
also in Betty's retelling of "The Parsley Garden:" "and
he was, you know, really upset about this because he was
the one that had gotten it", appears to be an intensification
and combining of clauses 49 and 50 of "The Parsley Garden:"
"He had been humiliated and he was deeply ashamed."
"He had been humiliated" in the original story would corres-
pond tO Betty's "because he was the one that had gotten it,"
and "he was deeply ashamed" in the original would correspond
to "and he was, you know, really upset about this." It is
a skillful evaluation by Betty.
The examples of expressive phonology and repetition,
however, seem more complex. Expressive phonology can not
literally appear in a written text. It can be implied using
typographical devices, though no such implication was
found in the original stories. There are several examples
of expressive phonology in the oral retellings of the
stories. Elliot in particular uses expressive phonology
skillfully in creating his narratives. In his retelling of
"The Parsley Garden," when the manager asks Al if he is
going to steal from the store anymore, Elliot has Al respond:
"A1 said, 'No-o-o.'" It is a long, low no, a no of insolence,
of arrogance, the no of the juvenile delinquent which Elliot
sees beneath Al's meek exterior. In the original story,
when the manager asks, "If I let you go will you promise
never to steal from this store again?" A1 replies with
prOper respect, "Yes, sir." The mitigation in the original
story, the sense of knowing your place, of playing the game
142
to get out Of trouble is completely stripped away in
Elliot's retelling. In Elliot's story, A1 is insolent and
aggressive.
Betty and Elliot also use repetition, repeating words,
phrases or clauses to create intensification, skillfully
in their narratives:
(referring to the policeman)
and out of curiosity said, "Halt! Halt!"
And they didn't do it.
And so he did it, he commanded them that
and they still didn't do it.
(Betty, "The Runaway")
And he didn't take it,
he didn't want it
he didn't want a job there.
(Elliot, "The Parsley Garden")
These repetitions bring together events which are not
explicitly stated in either story. In "The Runaway" the
original scene is:
"Hey!" he called.
It was more out of curiosity than a command.
but they began running.
The policeman called again
then blew his whistle.
(Clauses 109-113)
There are actually two repetitions in Betty's retelling of
these events. She intensifies the policeman's "Hey" into
"Halt! Halt!" and she picks up two events which are not
explicitly stated in the story to create the repetition,
"They didn't do it. . . and they still didn't do it."
The fact that the policeman called to the boys twice is
part of the original story. The fact that the boys ignored
him the second time must be inferred from the fact that after
the policeman called the second time he blew his whistle.
143
Betty uses the underlying sequence of events in "The Runaway"
to create an effective evaluation of the events on the pier.
Similarly, Elliot's repetition from his retelling of
"The Parsley Garden" brings together two hypothetical events:
he didn't want the dollar and he didn't want the job which
are presented in nonparallel form, one as a narrative
clause, one as a negative, evaluative clause in the
original:
"I left the dollar on Mr. Clemmer's desk," the boy
"Andaldtold them both I didn't want the job."
("The Parsley Garden, clauses 121-122)
Through repetition, by repeating the negative three times,
Elliot,like Betty, creates an intensification of these
events which was possible in the original story but which
the author chose not to utilize. Elliot and Betty are
selecting from the continuum of events to create a story
just as the original authors were. They are drawing on
the same raw materials the authors drewcnmto create new
and unique texts which utilize the potential story in
different but equally valid ways.
4.4 Evaluative Devices Used in Retellings and in the
Original Stories
As Table 9 clearly demonstrates, most of the various
syntactic evaluative devices are found both in the original
stories and in the retellings of those stories; 83 percent
Of the evaluation of "The Runaway" and 92.6 percent of the
evaluation of its retellings are from common categories of
144
devices as are 90.8 percent of.the evaluative devices in "The
Parsley Garden" and 95.4 percent of the devices in its
retellings.
These are not, however, particularly illuminating
statistics. They indicate only and roughly that the
original stories and the retellings of the stories draw on
the same resources in formulating their respective evalua-
tion sections. "The Runaway" and "The Parsley Garden"
are long complex stories; the samples of retellings are
ten shorter, much simpler versions of each story. In order
to compare the evaluation of the retellings to that of the
original stories, a methodology is needed that will decon-
struct the original stories into component narratives and
then compare only those narratives to similar narratives in
the retellings. It would be a sort of variable rule
approach as Labov (1972a) and Sankoff (1978) have developed
it. The particular narrative in which an evaluative device
appeared would form the context or the environment for that
device and the frequency with which it appeared in retellings
would be measured againsttfluatotal number of times its
context or environment appeared in the retellings. A com-
plete statistical analysis of all the evaluative devices
which appear in "The Runaway" and in "The Parsley Garden"
is not possible here. The methodology will be applied to
a small group of devices which appear‘in the original stories
and which are reproduced in identical or near-identical form
in at least one of the retellings.
145
Table 9: Evaluative Devices in Both the Retellings and the
Original Stories
Iï¬The Runaway'T
Original Retellings
H
Foregrounding
Quantifiers
Wh-exclamations
Lexical Items
Questions
Modals
Comparators
Imperatives
Futures
Negatives
Participle Right
Be...ing
Simple Causation
Simple Qualification
Complex Qualification
1"
I'-‘
U1
5...:
(DONONDJI-‘U‘N-bk‘
bwmthUlU'lubNWE-‘KDH
|—‘
I I---'
H
lwcnox
TOTAL
00
Do
\I
U1
Percentage of total devices 83% 92.6%
"The Parsley Garden"
Original Retellings
H
Nmmwmmommwmbqwm
Quantifiers 24
Wh-exclamations 3
Lexical Items
Questions
Modals
Imperatives
Futures
Quasimodals
Negatives 2
Or-clauses
Be...ing
Double...ing
Participle Right
Simple Qualification
Simple Causation
Complex Qualification
1'"
NW
H
11>
HbmbNMWWDl-‘QN
H
IN
TOTAL 10
k0
g...)
.b
\l
KO
U1
4:.
00
Percentage of total devices 90.8%
146
4.4.1 The Reproduction of Evaluative Devices
Cases where an evaluative device used in the original
story is reproduced identically or nearly identically in a
retelling would appear to be likely instances of a retelling
imitating or reshuffling in some sense the devices found in
the original story. It could be argued that such reproduced
devices are evidence of a simple process of recall rather
than the creative process of narrative construction which
was suggested in the last chapter. There are, in fact,
seven devices from "The Runaway" which appear in identical
or near identical form ten times in its retellings, and
seventeen devices from "The Parsley Garden" which are
reproduced twenty-three times in its retellings. For
example, in "The Parsley Garden," during the conversation
between A1 and the manager of the store, the manager asks
A1 if he should be turned over to the police. Al, properly
humble, does not respond: "Al didn't say anything." This
clause appears nearly identically in two of the retellings,
in Don's: "And Al didn't say anything," and Billy's:
"But A1 didn't say nuthin." Both Don and Billy use this
clause in the same part of the story with the same evaluative
force as the original.
If the evaluation which occurs in a retelling is the
result of a process of simple recall and not one of narrative
construction, you would expect at least some of the evalua-
tive devices, like "Al didn't say anything," to be reproduced
in retellings out of context, without the complicating and
147
the resolving action which it separates, offered by the
reteller as something remembered about the story. Of the
thirty-three cases where evaluation is reproduced, there is
only one case where the evaluative device appears to occur
in the retelling outside of the context in which it appears
in the original story. It is "and he worked all day" from
Terry's retelling of "The Parsley Garden:"
and his next, the next, next morning he was up
and he went to Woolworth's, Woolworth's
and he worked all day
and he got the hammer.
And they Offered him a job, a job there
and he didn't take it.
SO he walked out
and he came home
and started working on, he worked on, he made a bench.
His mother asked him where he got the hammer
and he said he worked for it at Woolworth's.
And they, he, they, she, he told, he told her that he
could have got a job there
but he didn't take it. -
And. . . So when his mom went to bed, he just sat
there.
(Terry, "The Parsley Garden")
In the original story, the clause, "I worked all day," is
part of the conversation between A1 and his mother about the
events of that day. His mother asks Al how long he worked
for the hammer and he tells her and then goes on to explain,
"Mr. Clemmer, the manager, gave me the hammer after I had
worked one hour, but I went right on working." This dialogue
between A1 and his mother forms the orientation to Al's
story about what happened at the end of the day. It's
context is the resolving action of the story: first that
the mother gets up, goes to work and comes home and then,
after the conversation that she goes to bed. Although there
148
is no flashback in Terry's retelling, the context for the
device, i.e., the complicating and the resolving action
which it suspends, is clearly part of Terry's narrative
as is the conversation between A1 and his mother. The fact
that Al worked all day is not, however, revealed in that
conversation. Instead, it is reported much earlier, after
A1 goes back to Woolworth's. It is reported at the point
in the chronological sequence that Al actually worked all
day to get the hammer. Terry is responding to the under-
lying sequence of events in the story rather than to the
surface evaluation of those events and in doing so, he
changes the function of the clause from evaluation to narra-
tion. In "The Parsley Garden," "all day" carried evaluative
force because it implied that Al worked longer than he needed
to. He got the hammer after he worked one hour, during the
rest of the day he worked off his humiliation. In Terry's
version, this evaluative force has been lost. There is no
longer any particular significance to working all day for the
hammer; he had to work all day, that was what was required
of him.
In reading and then retelling "The Parsley Garden,"
Terry has gone from the surface structure of the story to
the underlying sequence of events just as Elliot and Betty
did in creating intensification through repetition in their
retellings. Where Betty and Elliot were creating evaluation,
Terry is dismantling evaluation; he reports the events in
such a way that the evaluative force of "all day" is lost.
149
Terry is actively selecting from the resources available to
create a new and an individual narrative.
There are then, no cases, in this sample, of evaluative
devices which are reproduced out of context in a retelling.
The only apparent example proved to be an instance of a
student dismantling the evaluative force of a device and
reporting it as part Of the event sequence in a narrative
clause. Intuitively, it seems unlikely that you would ever
find a retelling where clauses like "Al didn't say anything"
or "I worked all day" just appear out of context as perhaps
random bits of remembered detail. If you assume that the act
of retelling is one of narrative construction, then
evaluative devices which intensify, compare, correlate, and
explain events would generally appear when the events they
evaluate appear in the narrative. If, however, you assume
that a retelling is not a process of narrative construction
but a simple act of recall, then there is no reason why
a device would not simply appear with no supporting context
as one thing remembered about the story. The fact that there
are no examples of devices which are reproduced out Of
context in this sample is further evidence that a process of
narrative construction is at work.
If, however, the evaluation found in retellings gee the
result of simple recall, wee being cued by the evaluation in
the original story, then we would also expect to find a
certain number of evaluative devices which are reproduced in
some retellings and never appear in any other form in the
150
rest of the retellings. This would indicate that the
students were responding to the surface form of the evalua-
tion and not to its function in the story.
We do, in fact, find seven devices which are reproduced
ten times in the retellings and are never paraphrased.
These devices are summarized briefly in Table 10.
Table 10: Devices Which Are Reproduced in Retellings
Without Paraphrases
Original Device Context Reproduction
They were still working. .
nailing. . . (PG, 75) 2 1
It was not his nature. .
(PG, 51) 2 l
I worked all day. (PG, 110) 3 3
I don't want you to steal. . .
(PG, 56) 4 l
and waited meekly (R, 117) 6 1
And I haven't any money. (PG, 33) 9 2
. . . because she had to be up
early. (PG, 75) 10 1
NOte: PG = "The Parsley Garden," R = "The Runaway"
NO particular pattern emerges from Table 10. There are
intensifiers, comparators, correlatives, explicatives. All
types of devices are reproduced at some point without a
paraphrase in other retellings. There are relatively
uncommon devices such as "and waited meekly" which describes
how Charlie and Roger waited for the policemen once they
realized they were trapped, or "it was not his nature," a
rarely used form of foregrounding. Other devices seem
relatively common, "I worked all day," "I haven't any money."
Some appear constrained by the device itself. It is hard to
find an evaluative paraphrase for "I worked all day." The
151
lack of paraphrase of other devices may be due to the
smallness Of the sample. There are a number of evaluative
paraphrases of "and waited meekly" which could be used in
a retelling of "The Runaway."
While there are these ten devices which are reproduced
in some retellings and never paraphrased in others, there
are thirty-three paraphrases of the remaining twenty-three
devices which are reproduced in some of the retellings.
These devices are summarized in Table 11.
As you can see in Table 11, for every instance of a
device which is reproduced without a paraphrase, there is a
similar device which is reproduced in some retellings and
paraphrased in others. There are intensifiers, comparators,
correlatives, explicatives—-uncommon devices and common
devices. There does not appear to be any pattern which
would distinguish the devices in Table 10 from those in
Table 11. There does not appear to be any evidence support-
ing the idea that the devices in Table 10 were the results
of students attending to the surface form of evaluation
rather than to its function in the story. There is, however,
one striking way in which some of the devices in Table 11
are different from some of the devices in Table 10. Table
12 separates out from the two earlier tables, those devices
for which the context appears in six or more of the retellings.
These are contexts which are presumably more important to
the story as they are included in a majority of the retellings.
152
Table 11: Devices That are Reproduced and Paraphrased
Original Device Context Repro. Paraph.
and take what's coming to us.
(R, 95) 3 l 2
When she was done. . . she
said. . . (PG, 102) 3 l 2
"All right," his mother said,
"Shut up" (PG, 133) 3 2 l
and didn't feel humiliated
anymore. (PG, 138) 3 l 1
"Chicken!" he spat sneeringly.
(R, 122) 4 2 1
and told him that I worked
hard all day. (PG, 114) 4 l 1
So Mr. Clemmer put a silver
dollar on his desk. (PG, 116) 4 l 1
She saw. . . her son. . .
working. . . nailing. . . (PG,
97) 4 2 1
"You pay now." the man instructed.
(R, 58) 7 1 1
"Hey," he called. (R, 109) 8 l 1
Mr. Clemmer said I could have the
job. (PG, 118) 8 1 5
And I told them both I didn't
want the job. (PG, 122) 8 2 6
He was still on the ferry.
(R, 105) 9 2 3
Al didn't say anything. (PG, 38) 9 2 1
Al had to wait for fifteen
minutes. (PG, 29) 10 2 1
Al didn't sleep much that night.
(PG, 85) 10 2 1
Note: PG = "The Parsley Garden," R = "The Runaway"
153
Table 12: Reproduced Devices with Major Contexts
Original Device Context Repro. Paraph.
and waited meekly. (R, 113) 6 1 0
"You pay now!" the man instructed.
(R, 56) 7 l 1
"Hey!" he called. (R, 105) 8 l l
and I haven't any money. (PG, 33) 9 2 0
Al didn't say anything. (PG 38) 9 2 1
A1 had to wait for 15 minutes.
(PG, 29) 10 2 1
because she had to be up early.
(PG, 84) 10 l 0
A1 didn't sleep much that night.
(PG, 85) 10 2 1
And I told them both I didn't
want the job. (PG, 121) 8 2 6
Mr. Clemmer said I could have
the job. (PG, 117) 8 1 5
He (Larry) was still on the ferry.
(R, 101) 9 2 3
Note: PG = "The Parsley Garden," R = "The Runaway"
154
None of the eleven devices in Table 12 is reproduced in
more than two of the retellings, three are never para—
phrased, five are paraphrased once. But three of the
devices which are reproduced are also paraphrased by a
number of students. "He was still on the ferry" is
reproduced twice and paraphrased three times. "Mr. Clemmer
said I could have the job" is reproduced once and para-
phrased five times, and "I told them both I didn't want the
job" is reproduced twice and paraphrased six times. It
appears in all of the retellings in which the context for
the device appears.
The following are the reproduced device from Betty's
retelling and the six paraphrases (two of which are from
Terry's retelling) for "and Mr. Clemmer said I could have
the job" from "The Parsley Garden:"
and he said I could have the job.
(Betty)
and Mr. Clemmer asked him if he wanted to work for
a dollar a day.
(Billy)
but they wanted him to work all the time.
(Don)
and they'd pay him a dollar a day if he did that.
(Leslie)
and they wanted him to stay for the job.
(Louise)
and they offered him a job, a job there.
***
and they, he, they, she, he told, he told her that
he could have got a job there.
(Terry)
155
There are a number of different paraphrases here using a
variety of evaluative devices: modals, or-clauses, and
intensifiers. A1 wants to be a responsible person but when
he steals the hammer, he gives up any claim to that role.
SO he works all day for the hammer. When the men offer A1
a job, they are conceding that yes, he is capable of being
a responsible person. It is a very important moment in the
story, a partial resolution of Al's conflict and it is
included in six of the eight retellings where the context
for the device exists. A few clauses later in "The Parsley
Garden," Al tells his mother that he has turned down the
job, and the conflict is completely resolved for now.
Responsible people, adults, have freedom of choice. They can
choose who to work for. Children and thieves have no such
control over their lives. The fact that Al turned down the
job is included in all of the retellings where the context
for that detail exists.
In "The Runaway," as we have seen, Larry is trapped
between two value systems. Should he follow the values of
the juvenile delinquent, Of Charlie? Or, should he follow
the values of society, do the right thing, go back and
take what's coming to him? Larry is almost paralyzed with
indecision. Earlier in "The Runaway" (in the evaluation
section), as Larry stares into the water, he makes up his
mind. We don't learn about his decision until later, though
in the conversation between the three boys on the ferry,
Larry advocates going back. It is not until Charlie and
'156
Roger leave the ferry, and they are on the pier, and they
suddenly realize that Larry is still on the boat, that we
learn what Larry's decision is. It is the moment in "The
Runaway" when Larry's problems are solved and Charlie's and
Roger's are just beginning. It is important to the story,
and it is reproduced twice and paraphrased three times in
the retellings of "The Runaway."
Not all of the evaluative devices and the evaluation
sections of a story are equally important. Some function
to provide supporting evidence for a proposition, others
may present secondary propositions. The importance of a
particular device or evaluation section cannot be determined
by a purely formal analysis, though important scenes will
tend to have a higher density of evaluative devices. There
is nothing in the surface form of clauses such as "I told
them both I didn't want the job," "Mr. Clemmer said I could
have the job," or "He was still on the ferry" that marks
them as particularly significant. They are significant
because of the role they play in the story. They are
significant because they capture the moment of resolution,
the moment when Al and when Larry solve their problems.
These students attend to these significances, to the under-
lying action, conflict and ultimate resolution of the story,
and they select those details in the story which represent,
for them, those significant actions. A model of recall
which suggests that retellers are simply recalling the
evaluation of the original story cannot account for the
157
behavior of these devices in recall as they cannot be
predicted from the formal characteristics of the clauses.
Why, then, do identical or nearly identical evaluative
devices appear in retellings? Other than representing
significant actions, there appear to be three reasons.
First, more skillful storytellers tend to capture and retain
the surface of a narrative. Labov has told of collecting a
duck hunting story from a Martha Vineyard informant again
ten years later and discovering that the transcription was
virtually the same word for word as the original story.
This does not appear to be related to comprehension, but to
relative skill as a narrator, as a teller of stories.
Sixteen of the thirty-three cases of reproduced evaluation
come from the retellings of the two most skillful story-
tellers in the sample, Elliot and Betty. Secondly, certain
types of evaluation have less options for evaluative para—
phrases and hence are more likely to be reproduced.
Intensifiers like "all" or "still," lexical items like
"chicken" or "silver dollar" do not have many effective
paraphrases and are more likely to be reproduced. There
are nine reproductions of intensifiers and eight paraphrases
of those intensifiers while there are twelve reproductions
Of comparators and eighteen paraphrases. Finally, it
appears that as the context in which an evaluative device
narrows, that is when the context is mentioned by fewer
students and is embedded more deeply into the story, the
likelihood of the device being reproduced increases. As
158
students create more complex narrative retellings with
multiple embedded narratives, they are more likely to
reproduce the evaluation in those embedded narratives, which
is, of course, also a result of relative skill in reading
and retelling. Twenty-two of the reproduced devices appear
in contexts which are reported in from one to five of the
retellings while eleven of the reproduced devices appear in
contexts reported in from six to ten of the retellings.
Examining the cases where evaluative devices from the
original stories are reproduced in one or more of the retell-
ings has revealed two things. First,evaluation is always,
in this sample, reproduced in the context of the compli-
cating and the resolving action which it suspended in the
original story. Evaluation and evaluative devices are
never reported at random, as something recalled from the
story. They are always integrated into a narrative.
Secondly, although some devices are only reproduced in some
retellings and never paraphrased in others and could,
arguably, be examples of simple recall, other devices which
are linked to the central prOpositions in the story, or which
resolve underlying conflict in the story are reproduced but
are also paraphrased and appear in almost all of the retell-
ings in which the context for the device appears.
Students are not, for the most part, attending to the
surface form of evaluation, rather they are identifying the
function the evaluation has in the narrative and in the
underlying conflict. The evaluation sections which appear
159
in a retelling cannot be predicted by the evaluation
sections which appear in the original story. It is
necessary to know something about the role that evaluation
sections play in the story. On the basis of these data,
the idea that these students are simply recalling the
evaluation found in the original story, that the evaluation
in "The Runaway" and "The Parsley Garden" is cueing the
evaluation in the retellings of the two stories cannot be
supported. Just as research has shown that the meaning of
sentences not the surface form is stored in memory (Cairns
and Cairns 1976, pp. 178-181), it appears that in reading
and comprehending narratives, we remember the significant
actions, conflicts, and resolutions which reveal the
perceived point of the story, not the form. In retelling
a story, we take those significant actions and create a
unique and individual narrative.
Cases where evaluative devices are reproduced in a
retelling are, however, just a small percentage of the total
number of devices which appear in both the original stories
and in the retellings. A retelling may evaluate different
events in different ways or it may evaluate the same event
using different devices or by paraphrasing devices as well
as reproducing the original. Is the model of narrative
construction proposed here supported by the different trans-
formations of evaluation in retellings? In the next section,
all of the retellings of a fragment from "The Parsley Garden"
will be examined to explore this question.
160
4.4.2 The Conversation between A1 and the Manager
In the beginning of "The Parsley Garden," Al sits in
the garden, eating parsley and thinking about the events of
that day. His reverie, the events at the store when he
was caught stealing the hammer, form a narrative. The
dialogue between A1 and the manager of Woolworth's is the
evaluation section of the narrative. It separates the
complicating action, he steals the hammer, is caught and
taken to the manager's office, from the resolving action
when the manager lets A1 go. The three general propositions
of the story are found in the dialogue: stealing is wrong,
Al has reasonable desires, and Al wants to be a responsible
person, and the conflict Of the story is established. Al
wants to be a responsible person but when he steals the
hammer and is caught he gives up any claim to that role as
the manager demonstrates by systematically stripping A1 of
all his dignity:
29 Al had stood there for fifteen minutes before the
man looked at him again.
30 "Well?" '
31 "I didn't mean to steal it.
32 I just need it
33 and I haven't any money."
34 "Just because you haven't got any money doesn't
mean you've got a right to steal things does
it?"
35 "No, sir," A1 replied.
36 "Well, what am I going to do with you?
37 Turn you over to the police?"
38 Al didn't say anything,
39 but he certainly didn't want to be turned over to
the police.
40 "If I let you go will you promise never to steal from
this store again?"
41 "Yes, sir."
42 "All right."
43 The man shrugged with resignation.
161
44 "Go out this way
45 and don't come back until you have some money to
spend."
This is an important passage in the story and its importance
is reflected in the large number of evaluative devices
that are used. There are five intensifiers, nine negatives,
five questions, two futures, two imperatives, one or-clause,
and three explicatives; a total of twenty-seven devices in
seventeen clauses, almost twice the average density of
evaluation in "The Parsley Garden" as a whole.
The context for the conversation between A1 and the
manager is the events at the store: he takes the hammer,
gets caught, and is eventually let go. The context appears
in all ten of the retellings. The dialogue appears in
eight of the retellings. In Sally's and in Darrell's
narrative, the events at the store are reported without
any dialogue:
Well, he wanted a hammer
and so he stole it at one of the stores.
And he was mad at. . . well. . . two men, the men
in the store caught him
and he finally went home
and he sat in the garden.
(Sally, "The Parsley Garden")
This boy, he went by the Woolworth's store to
and he saw people nailing boxes together
and he wanted to do that same thing so,
but he needed a hammer
so. . . he went to a store
and stole a hammer out of there
and he got caught by Mr. Clingers, the manager
and he took him in there
and he put the hammer back
and they let him go.
And he went home.
(Darrell, "The Parsley Garden")
162
Both Sally and Darrell report the events at the store as
part of the complicating action of their narrative without
evaluation. The evaluation in each narrative comes later,
when Al talks to his mother:
So she was going to give him some money to go back
and buy it.
But he didn't want to.
(Sally, "The Parsley Garden")
And she said, "I don't want you to steal any more."
(Darrell, "The Parsley Garden")
We discussed Sally's retelling at length in the last chapter
and suggested that Sally, in her retelling, was focusing on
Al's refusal of money to the exclusion of other details,
that she did not include the conversation at the store
because it was not relevant to the point she was making.
Similarly, Darrell is focusing on Al's relationship to his
mother, a mother who is concerned about Al, who doesn't want
him to steal. Darrell eliminates the evaluative details
at the store since they are not relevant to Al's relationship
with his mother.
In the eight retellings which include the conversation
between A1 and the manager, four--Billy's, Don's, Louise's,
and Terry's--make the events at the store the center of the
story and either eliminate the mother or place the mother
in the periphery of the action, while four-~Betty's, Leslie's,
Elliot's and Micky's-:manage to integrate both the mother
and the events at the store into their narrative. Although
they are lengthy, it is valuable to examine all eight of the
retellings of the dialogue between A1 and the manager:
163
and he said, "Look, don't turn me in to the police."
(Terry)
And the manager was going to turn him over to the
police
and the guy. . . or, Mr. . . . Okay,
and they were going to turn him over to the police.
And he didn't want them to.
(Louise)
and he said, Al was waiting there for a few minutes,
'til the manager said something
that he was going to take him to the police.
But Al didn't say nuthin.
(Billy)
The manager said--told him if he'd like him to call
the police.
And Al didn't say anything.
Then the guy told him he would let him go.
(Don)
and (he) had to go to the manager's office
and he had to explain a lot.
And after this was done, he was sent home.
(Betty)
And then Al had to wait for fifteen minutes.
And then the manager finally asked him if he was
going to steal from the store any more.
Al said, "No-o-o."
(Elliot)
And, and A1 stood there for fifteen minutes.
And then Mr. Clemmers said, "Why did you steal it?"
And he said, "I didn't have any money."
And then Mr. Clemmers told him not to steal it again
if he let him go.
(Micky)
And he said that he was stealing.
And he asked him why he was stealing.
And he said that he wanted the hammer
and didn't have any money for it.
And he asked him if he had any money why, wait, he
asked him if he didn't have any money, why did he
come for the hammer?
and if he would steal any more.
And he said, um, and they got all done talking.
And then he asked him if he would steal anymore if he
didn't let him have the hammer.
And he said he wouldn't steal any more from that store.
But he didn't like them any more because he picked
him up and stuff.
(Leslie)
164
In these retellings of the dialogue between A1 and the
manager, there are four intensifiers, two imperatives, four
futures, twelve negatives, three quasimodals, four or-clauses,
seven questions,five modals, three past progressives and
three explicatives. In all, there are forty-five devices
in thirty-two clauses, more than three times the average
density of evaluation in the retellings of "The Parsley
Garden." The range of these retellings is remarkable,
from Terry's emphatic "and he said, 'Look, don't turn me
in to the police'" to Leslie's long, elaborate recounting
so filled with mitigation and indirection that she has to
explain Al's real feelings at the end of the scene: "But
he didn't like them any more because he had picked him up
and stuff." The events retold are similar, as are the
propositions put forward, but there is a great diversity
in the process of selection, in the type of evidence and
in the amount of evidence which these different retellers
present.
In "The Parsley Garden," the original dialogue appears
to have three distinct tOpics. The first topic (clauses
29-35) is the discussion of why Al took the hammer and of
the ethics of stealing when you have no money. It establishes
Al's motives for taking the hammer and the questionable
status of those motives as the manager ruthlessly strips
away Al's rationalizations. The second topic (clauses
36-39) focuses on what could happen to Al; the possibility
of a trip to the police is discussed. Al does not say
165
anything. He does not want to go to the police and sits
quietly while the manager holds his fate in his hands,
turning it over and over like some shiny orb. Finally,
the last topic (clauses 40-45) focuses on what they will
do with Al. The manager decides to let Al go if he will
promise to never steal from that store again. A1 agrees
and the manager sends him out the back way. There are no
narrative clauses in this stretch of dialogue. Still, the
conversation between A1 and the manager takes the metaphoric
shape of a narrative. The first section, focusing on Al's
motives, establishing that he needed a hammer, would be
the complicating action. The second section of the
dialogue, the possibility of Al going to the police, would
be the evaluation of the narrative. There is even a moment
when the action is suspended, after the manager asks him if
he should send Al to the police and Al is silent. The
final section, where Al's fate is decided and he is sent
home, would be the resolving action. Interestingly, the
eight retellings of the dialogue appear to be sensitive
to this three part structure. Betty, Elliot, Leslie and
Micky, the four students who successfully integrate the
conflict at the store with Al's relationship to his mother,
include the first section, Al's reasons for taking the
hammer, and the third section, what finally happened to Al.
They do not mention the possibility of A1 going to the
police. On the other hand, the four students who focus on
the events at the store and either eliminate the mother or
166
keep the mother in the periphery of the story all include
the possibility of Al being turned over to the police.
Terry and Louise include only the second section of the
dialogue in their retellings. Billy has a vague reference
to the first section: "Al was waiting there for a few
minutes 'til the manager said something." Don has a clear
reference to Al's fate: "Then the guy told him he would
let him go." Of these four, Don also has the clearest
reference to the mother's role:
And his mother was mad at him.
She told him to shut up.
Then she went to bed.
(Don, "The Parsley Garden")
Each of the three sections of the original dialogue
puts forth one of the general propositions of the story,
though it may also suggest the others. The first section,
wherelfl.tells the manager why he took the hammer, presents
the proposition: A1 has a reasonable desire for a hammer
but does not have the means to obtain the hammer. The
second section, by raising the possibility of Al's being
turned over to the police, presents the proposition:
stealing is wrong. The third section, where Al promises
not to steal again, presents the third proposition: Al-
wants to be a responsible person. There is, of course, a
subtle interplay between the three, they each support the
others and evoke the others. The particular sections of
dialogue which are included in a retelling reflect the
thematic focus of that retelling. The first and the third
propositions, that Al has reasonable desires and he wants
167
to be a responsible person are more easily connected to the
events with the mother. The mother both supports the first
proposition by offering to give Al money for the hammer and
denies the third, she is giving him a handout, money for
something he does not really need. Elliot, Betty, Leslie,
and Micky are focusing on these propositions in their
retellings. The second proposition, stealing is wrong, is
most dramatically presented by reference to the police.
The mother, of course, echoes this proposition when she
tells Al that she doesn't want him to steal any more, but
there are no actions in the story which reinforce her
desires the way the act of offering fifty cents supports
the other two prOpositions. In the discussion of Louise's
retelling of "The Parsley Garden" in the third chapter,
it was argued thattflmamain point of Louise's narrative was
that stealing is wrong and a secondary point was that Al
has reasonable desires. The analysis was based on the entire
retelling and on the question and answer session which
followed the retelling. Here we see those same themes
presented in the way she focuses on the second section of
the dialogue. Terry, Billy, and Don are also focusing,
primarily on the theme stealing is wrong. It would appear
that the structure of complication, evaluation, and resolu-
tion is more than just a formal principle for organizing
the events of a narrative. Rather, it appears to be some
sort of a tool for presenting material at a number of
different levels in the narrative.
168
Table 13 compares the evaluative devices found in
the original dialogue from "The Parsley Garden" to the
devices found in the retellings of that dialogue for each
of the three topics: section one, Al's motives; section
two, Al's possible fates; and section three, resolution of
the situation.
Table 13: Devices Used in Dialogue Between Al and the
Manager
Section One Section Two Section Three
Device Orig. Rtlg. Orig. Rtlg. Orig. Rtlg.
Negatives 5 3 2 4 2 5
Questions 2 3 2 4 l 3
Intensifiers 3 2 l 0 1 2
Futures O 0 2 3 0 l
Modals O 0 0 l 0 4
Explicatives 2 l 0 0 l 2
Or-clauses O l O 0 1 3
Imperatives 0 O 0 2 2 0
Quasimodals 0 3 0 O 0 0
Past
Progressives _g _3 Q _g Q _g
TOTAL 12 16 7 ll 8 20
Negatives and questions are the most frequently used devices
and appear in all three sections in both the original
dialogue and the retellings. Quasimodals, past progressives,
and the modal "would" appear only in the retellings. The
quasimodal, "had to," and the past progressive are all used
to retell the first section of the dialogue. They show
Al's humiliation--he had to wait; he had to go to the
manager's office--by intensification and by suggesting that
he has always been a thief, "And he said he was stealing."
They are used to emphasize the third proposition by showing
169
how the men humiliate Al. In the original story, the
third proposition is evoked through interaction, Al tries
to defend himself by explaining that he needed a hammer,
but the manager relentlessly strips away Al's rationaliza-
tion. In the retellings, Al's humiliation is shown much
more overtly. The modal, "would," with one exception,
appears in the retellings of the third section of dialogue,
as the manager tries to establish what would happen if he
let Al go. It is a paraphrase of the actionixathe original.
The students are using the modal here to make the same
point as the original; they are using quasimodals and past
progressives to make explicit the subtle currents of inter-
action that flow through the first part of the dialogue.
Some of the devices found in the retellings duplicate
the evaluative devices in the original, as was discussed
in the last section. Others paraphrase the original rather
closely. Other devices, however, appear in strikingly
different contexts in the retellings. The two imperatives
used in the original dialogues appear in the third section
as the manager orders A1 out of the office, further humili-
ating him:
"Go out this way
and don't come back until you have some money to
Spend."
("The Parsley Garden," clauses 44-45)
In Terry's retelling, imperatives are instead used in the
second section of the dialgoue as Al argues with the
manager over his fate:
170
Well, he went to Woolworth's
and he stole a hammer
and they caught him.
And he said, "Look, don't turn me in to the police."
And they let him go out the, into the alley.
(Terry, "The Parsley Garden")
Instead of a meek A1 who sits quietly while the manager
speculates about his future, Terry presents a tough,
aggressive Al who orders the manager to let him go. Al's
meekness is completely stripped away. He tells the manager
what to do and the manager immediately agrees and lets him
go. Unlike the original story and unlike real life, Terry
creates a world where children win and grown-ups take their
lumps.
Al's very aggressive attitude is, however, mitigated
immediately when Terry goes back over these events in the
question and answer session:
Res.: Okay, then after you said they, that they
caught him when he stole the hammer, then what
happened?
Terry: Well, they took him into the manager's office
and they were talking about it and one guy,
the manager was talking to him, let, just left
him sit there, sit there silent for a while
and he started talking to him; He said that,
Al said that if you let me go, I won't steal
anything again. And so the manager said, "Okay,"
and let him out the alley door. Al went
home and told his mother.
The imperatives have been dropped from this version, so has
the reference to the police. The manager is now in control.
He makes A1 sit there. Al is no longer cocky and aggressive,
telling the manager what to do, he is meek and humble.
He is begging for his freedom. Al still initiates the
171
conversation and the manager still agrees and lets him
go, but Al's stance has been completely inverted. The
difference between the unaided retelling and this second
version of the conversation has to do with Terry's sense
of how the world works. Kids do not order adults around;
they beg.
The evaluation found in the retellings of a small
fragment of "The Parsley Garden" appears to have the same
relationship to the original evaluation as the examples
examined earlier in the chapter. Students use devices which
aren't part of the passage to emphasize a particular
meaning. They reproduce and they paraphrase devices,
always in context. They are sensitive to the underlying
propositions presented in the original story and they select
details, devices to present what they feel is the main
point of the story. They are sensitive not to the surface
form of the evaluation but its function in the story. They
are creatively and selectively constructing their own unique
narrative. They are not simply recalling the evaluation
of the original or using devices which are cued by the
devices in the original stories.
4.5 Summary
In this chapter, we have compared the evaluative devices
which were found in "The Runaway" and "The Parsley Garden"
to the evaluative devices found in the retellings of those
stories. It was suggested that even though the retellings
172
in the sample are fully-formed, evaluated narratives, it
could still be argued that they were simply a result of
recalling the original evaluation, a simple reshuffling
of the evaluation of the original stories. It could still
be argued that these sixth grade students were not functioning
as storytellers, they were not creating a narrative, they
were simply recalling what they had read.
Four groups of evaluative devices were examined.
First, a certain numbercï¬fevaluative devices were found
which appear in the original stories but which never
appear in the retellings of those stories. Some of these
devices were apparently too complex for sixth graders to
use. Others presented or supported secondary propositions
in the original story. If a particular device presented
important evidence for a general proposition, as for
example, the image of the crashing metal and breaking glass
in "The Runaway" when Charlie pushed the storekeeper into
the shelves which supported the proposition: what the boys
did was wrong, it would be recalled in some form. In
reading and retelling, students are attending to the under-
lying conflict and propositions in a story rather than to
the surface form of the evaluation. Secondly, a certain
number of devices were found which were used in the retell-
ings but not in the original stories. EXpressive phonology
was used to create shades of meaning which were not easily
presentable in a written text, repetition was used to
intensify events by bringing together events in ways which
173
were possible in the original stories but which the
original authors did not use. These students were drawing
on the continuum of events that could be inferred from the
stories to create new and distinctive narratives. Thirdly,
cases Whereéfllevaluation device from the original story was
reproduced in a retelling were examined. Such examples
would be the most likely instances of evaluation which was
recalled rather than produced as part of a process of
narrative construction. We found that reproduced devices
always appeared in the same context in which they appeared
in the original story. A reproduced device suspended the
same complicating and resolving action in a retelling that
it did in the original story. Moreover, no device was
reproduced more than three times, most were reproduced only
once or twice in ten retellings. If, however, a device
presented important evidence for a general proposition of
a story, it would also be paraphrased and would appear in
almost all of the retellings where the context for the
device appeared. Students, in retelling, were constructing
narratives and evaluating narratives. They were attending
to the underlying action and conflict in a story, not to the
surface form of the evaluation.
Finally, we examined all of the retellings of a small
passage from "The Parsley Garden," the dialogue between A1
and the manager after Al is caught stealing the hammer. It
is an important passage in the story and is included in eight
of the ten retellings. We found, again, that students were
174
identifying the major points which they felt were important
in "The Parsley Garden" either that stealing was wrong or
that Al needed a hammer or that Al wanted to be a responsible
person and selecting from the details of the conversation
to provide evidence for that point. Similarly, students
used devices which weren't in the passage, reproduced
devices, paraphrased devices, and used devices in different
ways to present their own view of the story.
Three recurrent themes emerge from these four analyses:
1. Retellers use devices which are not in the origi-
nal narrative or which are used in a different part of the
narrative to evaluate events.
2. Retellers are sensitive to differences in the
function of a device in a story, to the propositions which
devices present evidence for and to the relative importance
of both the proposition and the evidence. These differences
cannot be identified by the surface form of a device.
3. Retellers select from the events in a story to
provide evidence to support what they feel is the major
point(s) of their retelling. The events they evaluate and
the general propositions they present remain fairly constant
but the types of evidence and the amount of evidence they
will include varies a great deal from reteller to reteller.
Clearly, the sixth grade students whose retellings
of "The Runaway" and "The Parsley Garden" were examined here
were functioning as storytellers when giving their retellings.
They were creating essentially new stories, selecting from
and reorganizing the content of the original.
CHAPTER FIVE
CONCLUSIONS, IMPLICATIONS, DIRECTIONS
5.1 Conclusions
At the beginning of the dissertation, it was argued
that a narrative of personal experience draws on a continuum
of experiences and selects from that continuum only those
events and details which are relevant to the particular
story at hand. This act of selection is itself an act of
comprehension. To successfully tell a story is to, in some
way, understand the experience. A narrative of vicarious
experience, however, a retelling of a book, a movie, a
television show, a cartoon, a ballet, etc., draws not on a
continuum of experiences but on a sequence of preselected
representations of experience. It cannot be assumed that a
narrative of vicarious experience is the same sort of a
story as is a narrative of personal experience.
The status of a retelling as a narrative and its
relationship to narratives of personal experience was the
overarching issue which this dissertation addressed.
Within that issue, a specific research question was formu-
lated: are retellings by sixth grade students from Sturgis
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Middle School evaluated? Labov had suggested that narratives
of vicarious experience typically were unevaluated, that
narrators, when retelling a cartoon or a television show,
did not attempt to indicate the relative significance of
the events of the narrative or the point of the narrative
(1972a).
To test Labov's assertion, a sample of twenty retellings
was drawn, ten each of two stories from RMIs which had been
collected in 1976 and 1977 from sixth grade students at
Sturgis Middle School, Sturgis, Michigan. The retellings
represented a severe test. The sixth grade students had been
taken out of their homeroom by a stranger, led to a room,
an often small and crowded room, asked to read a story out
loud and then asked to tell the researcher, who had listened
to the oral reading, everything they could remember about
the story. These students were under no obligation to
demonstrate that the events in the story were narratable;
they did not need to justify keeping the floor. There was
nothing in the speech situation which obligated these
students to evaluate their retellings.
In the third chapter, the narrative structure of these
twenty retellings was analyzed, and the following observa-
tions were made:
1. A complete range of syntactic evaluative devices
as well as external evaluation was found in the retellings.
2. The evaluative devices found in retellings formed
orientation sections, codas, and evaluation sections.
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3. The evaluation sections found in retellings
separated the complicating action from the resolving action.
4. The evaluation section of a retelling presented
what the student felt was the point of the story.
The narrative retellings examined here are fully-
formed narratives, just as most narratives of personal
experience are: they exhibit the same structure of compli-
cation, evaluation, resolution and use the same types of
evaluative devices. It would be incorrect, however, to
infer that Labov was wrong about the vicarious narratives
he examined. There is no reason to doubt that the retellings
of television shows and cartOons which he examined were not,
for the most part, evaluated by his informants. We are left
with two samples of vicarious narratives, one of evaluated,
fully-formed narratives, and one of unevaluated narratives.
To answer the research question--are retellings evaluated?—-
we must account for the differences in the two samples.
In the fourth chapter, we compared the evaluation which
was found in the original stories to the evaluation which
was found in the retellings,attempting to identify the
process involved in producing a retelling. Three observa-
tions were made:
1. Retellers use devices which are not used in the
original story or which are used in different ways in the
original story.
2. Retellers are sensitive to the function of a device
in the original story and to the underlying propositions
which the devices present.
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3. Retellers select from the evaluation and the
events of the original story to give evidence in support
of what they feel is the major point(s) of the story.
This sample of retellings appears to be the result of
an active, creative, selective process of narrative construc-
tion. They appear to be the result of a transaction
between the student and the text. This conclusion, of
course, is the position taken by Harste and Carey (1979)
and Smith (1979),and even by Rosenblatt when she suggests
that a paraphrase is one of the ways of abstracting and
analyzing literary response (1978, p. 136). This disserta-
tion offers further evidence that the transactional approach
is the correct model of the retelling process.
Rosenblatt suggests that there are two very different
stances in reading, the efferent stance and the aesthetic
stance. The act of reading a scientific article or a set
of directions is very different from the act of reading a
poem or a story. The difference between the efferent stance
and the aesthetic stance is the reader's focus of attention
during reading. In nonaesthetic, efferent reading,
such as reading an article in a scientific journal, attention
is primarily focused on the information to be gained from
reading, "the residue after the reading" (p. 23). Rosenblatt
gives the example of a mother whose child has just swallowed
poison. Her attention will be focused completely on reading
the label to learn about the antidote, moreover, the mother
will want that reading to be as accurate and as close to
the author's intent as possible:
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She is interested only in what the words point
to--the objects, ideas, and actions designated.
Her own responses to these concepts or to the
rhythm, sound, or associations of the words
are of no importance to her, and indeed, the more
she ignores these, the more she makes herself
impersonal and transparent, the more efficiently
she reads. Her attention will be concentrated
on what is to be assimilated for use after she
has finished reading. (P. 24)
In contrast to efferent reading, aesthetic reading
is primarily concerned with what happens during reading,
with the experience of reading and the response of the
reader to reading, the memories, emotions, reactions
which the words evoke while they are being read:
In aesthetic reading, the reader's attention
is centered directly on what he is living through
during his relationship with that particular
text. (P. 25)
The same text can be read both aesthetically and efferently.
The mathematician can turn from the efferent consideration
of his symbols to the aesthetic savoring of their elegance.
Literature, for Rosenblatt, whether a poem, a story, a
novel, a play, resides not in the text but in the act of
reading, in the transaction between the text and the reader.
A novel can be read efferently by a sociologist to learn
something of the customs of a particular era, but the
result is sociology, not literature. Literature occurs
only when a reader whose attention is centered on the act
of reading, on the stream of responses when reading,
evokes the poem or the story. The work of literature which
results is not simply the words on the page of the text,
but those words as they have been merged with the reader's
responses to them:
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The poem, then, must be thought of as an event
in time. It is not an object or an ideal
entity. It happens during a coming-together,
a compenetration, of a reader and a text. The
reader brings to the text his past experience
and present personality. Under the magnetism
of the ordered symbols of the text, he marshalls
his resources and crystallizes out from the stuff
of memory, thought and feeling a new order, a
new experience, which he sees as the poem.
This becomes a part of the ongoing stream of
his life experiences, to be reflected on from
any angle of importance to him as a human being.
(1977, p. 12)
The process of giving a retelling, at least for the
narratives examined here, appears to be one of representing,
in language, the "poem" that has been evoked in reading.
The tasks of "selection, synthesis, and interpretation"
which for Rosenblatt (p. 52) are necessary in reading a
poem or a story have been shown here to be at work,
structuring the narratives which the students have created.
Again, this is essentially the position of Harste and
Carey (1979) and Smith (1979). If in fact these retellings
are a reflection or a result of the transaction these
students had with the text, we can now explain why these
stories were evaluated and Labov's vicarious narratives
were not. Rosenblatt suggests that when a reader evokes
a poem, it becomes "part of the ongoing stream of his
life experiencesfl'that the poem "becomes part of the
experience which we bring to our future encounters in
literature and in life," that in reading, we are not re-
living someone else's experiences, we are making them our
own (pp. 12 and 21). The retellings examined here were
evaluated because they had become part of the narrator's
181
experience. These sixth grade students, although they were
in a stressful situation which strongly favored an efferent
reading, successfully adopted an aesthetic stance towards
the reading of the two stories. They successfully "evoked"
the story from the text and retold not the words on the
page but the story which they created through the trans-
action of reading. Betty, Elliot, Terry, Louise, all of
these ten students retold not "The Runaway" or "The Parsley
Garden" but their experience of creating the story. They
told a story drawing on the continuum of experience which
they created through aesthetic reading. Their retellings
are evaluated in the same ways that narratives of personal
experience are because they have become, in effect, narra-
tives about the experience of reading the story. The exis-
tence of evaluation and evaluative devices in a retelling
is evidence that the reader has adapted an aesthetic stance
and has successfully evoked the story from the text through
the transaction of reading.
Labov's informants, black, inner-city preadolescents,
undoubtedly approached the viewing of cartoons and televi-
sion shows like "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." prepared to
adopt an aesthetic stance, prepared to attend to the
experience of perception through time and to their
responses while viewing. "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." is,
however, very far from the interests and the experiences of
Harlem. They adapted an aesthetic stance but they were
probably not able to "evoke" the show. They were not able
182
to make the show part of their experience. They were not
able to have a successful transaction with Napoleon Solo.
The pointlessness and confusion which Labov observes in
his vicarious narratives is the result of their inability
to "evoke" the show, to make the show part of their
experience. It is the confusion of an adolescent trying
to make sense of a white, adult world.
Rosenblatt focuses her discussion on the reading of
literary materials. Yet all narratives, whether of
experience; fictional, great literature, popular literature;
oral or written, probably elicit the aesthetic stance in
the reader/listener. One of the functions of evaluation
in narrative may be as a cue that an aesthetic stance should
be adapted and the perceiver shoud attend to the experience
of perception rather than to the content of the narrative.
Evaluation then would almost be like a series of sign
posts leading the listener through the experience of evoking
the narrative. This would be language in the role of the
spectator (Britton 1970). Evaluation is one of the clues
that that role should be taken. In the retellings, we found
that the events which were evaluated and the general
propositions which were presented were fairly limited. But
the details, the devices, the evidence which were cited
varied enormously and from person to person. Evaluation gives
us a tool to trace the process of evoking a story, for
studying the nature of the transaction a reader has had
with a text. Through the details selected, the hypothetical
183
events, the intensifications given, we can learn something
about the experience created in reading.
5.2 Implications
Narratives of vicarious experience may or may not be
like narratives of personal experience. The findings of
this dissertation suggest that there is no simple or
consistent relationship between the narratives people tell
about their lives and the narratives they tell about the
stories they've read. The retelling of a story which a
person has had a particularly intense and satisfying
experience with is likely to be very much like a narrative
of personal experience. More accurately, it is a narrative
of personal experience; the story has become part of the
reteller's experiences. On the other hand, a retelling
of a story which is perceived as boring and pointless
which the person did not enjoy reading is likely to be very
different from a narrative of personal experience; the
range of retellings will reflect the types of transactions
and the intensity of the transactions which readers have
with texts.
A retelling of a story is not so much representing
a recall of the narrative as it is representing, or
documenting the transaction that has taken place. A major
implication of this study is that researchers who use
retellings of narratives to gather data cannot assume that
subjects succeed in evoking the story, that a successful
transaction takes place, nor can they assume that the nature
184
of the transaction between subject and text does not
affect the data. In different studies, of course, it
will be possible to document the nature of the transaction
and the extent to which the transaction affects the data.
Retelling should not, however, be used in research without
control, as it has been in the past.
A second implication of this study is that retellings
should be used carefully in education. To the extent that
retellings in various activities are used to help children
share, articulate, and understand their individual trans-
actions with stories and poems, they will help form an
effective methodology for the teaching of literature. If,
however, exact recall is stressed and the individual trans-
action is ignored, if retellings are measured only against
the original text and children are taught to value the
words and distrust their responses to them, then the trans-
actions which these retellings represent will be sparse and
guarded. Retellings can be used to help eliminate aesthetic
reading as well as to help nurture it.
Finally, a third implication of this study is that the
receptive and the productive processes of language use--
reading and writing, listening and speaking--should not
be separated in education, in research, or in life
generally. In the third chapter, it was argued that reading
brings the more complex forms of evaluation to the awareness
of narrators. Retellings were found to have significantly
more correlatives and explicatives than narratives of
personal experience have. Reading makes these devices
185
available but it does not ensure that the narrator will ever
learn to control them, to use them effectively in showing
the point of a story. We also saw that retellings fre-
quently did not include everything the student could
remember about the story, that the narrative created in
retelling structured and limited the details which could be
included. Retellings, however, are only a representation
of the underlying transaction between the reader and the
text. Our ability to create a narrative while reading
limits our ability to understand the story being read.
Where reading is encouraged but discussion of reading is
not, where novels or plays are assigned and comprehension
is measured by a multiple choice test, the transaction
between the reader and the text is inhibited. Producing
narratives is one of the best ways of understanding
narratives better.
5.3 Directions
To achieve the focus of this dissertation on the
evaluation of retellings, it was necessary to set aside a
number of interesting questions. The research presented
here hopefully lays the foundation for further research
into the nature of retellings and narrative transmission
generally. Among the interesting questions which the
dissertation ignored are:
1. How and why are narratives embedded into narratives?
What function does embedding of narratives have in narrative
transmission?
186
2. What, if any, relationship is there between the
evaluation found in a short story and the critical discus-
sion of that story?
3. How do stories differ in evaluation? Specifically,
in what ways is "The Parsley Garden" different from "The
Runaway?"
4. Are there any developmental differences in the
process of evaluation of retellings? In what ways are the
retellings of "The Runaway" collected in September of
a school year different from the’retellings of "The Parsley
Garden" collected in May of that year?
5. Is there any relationship between the ways stories
are evaluated in retellings and other measures of comprehen-
sion?
6. Does the density of evaluative devices in a story
or in part of a story affect how it is retold?
7. What is the relationship between oral retellings
and written retellings?
8. How do retellings of a story differ when the
audience knows or does not know the story?
9. What effect does the context of a device have on
its retelling?
10. How are the general propositions of a story, the
themes of the story, presented?
11. What is the relationship of the evaluation found
in stories and retellings to the general themes?
187
12. What is the relationship of the question and
answer session that follows to the unaided retelling?
The major contribution of this study is, however, to
suggest a methodology for the study of aesthetic reading,
a way of tracing and analyzing the transaction involved in
evoking a story through the evaluation of a retelling.
The general propositions which are presented in a retelling
and the events which are evaluated in a retelling are
controlled to a degree by the original story. The type of
evidence and the amount of evidence which is selected to
support those general propositions, which are used to
present the evaluated events, will vary from reteller to
reteller and are the result of each individual transaction
with the story. A retelling is like a window into the
process of selection through reading. By examining the
evaluation and the evaluative devices found in a retelling
we can reconstruct that process of evoking the poem, of
making the story your own, of merging the words on the page
with your own responses, memories, reactions, of selecting
from all the details in the story those particular events
which make it particularly vivid to you.
The aesthetic stance and aesthetic reading are not,
of course, limited to the reading of literature. They are
a fundamental part of life, of the transactions people have
with the world. It is one of the ways that we listen and
communicate with one another. The study of the ways in
which narrators evaluate retellings offers a methodology
188
for studying the aesthetic stance and the process of
aesthetic reading. Moreover, it can provide insight
into one of the ways we define ourselves and our humanity.
APPENDIX
STORIES AND RETELLINGS
The appendix includes: "The Runaway," an informal
tree structure style diagram of the narrative structure
in "The Runaway," the ten retellings of "The Runaway,"
"The Parsley Garden," an informal tree structure style
diagram of the narrative structure in "The Parsley Gar-
den," and the ten retellings of "The Parsley Garden."
The major components of the narratives-~orientation,
complicating action, evaluation, resolving action,
coda--are separated by double spacing. When two indepen-
dent narrative cycles are present in a retelling, they
are separated by triple spacing. Each independent clause
and associated subordinate clause(s) is numbered and
placed on a separate line. The conventions for clause
segmentation are described in the second chapter.
189
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The Runaway
Larry was running away again.
Only this time he felt no satisfaction even as the
ferry boat pulled clear of the pier.
It was early morning
and the light of day was beginning to grow in the east.
Crowds of workers milled about the boat.
Charlie and ROger stepped away from the railing
and moved along the deck.
They looked easily about them so that they wouldn't
draw attention to themselves.
Larry started to follow
but then stopped, feeling the hair rise on the back of
his neck.
A cop!
In a few giant steps he was at the side of his friends.
"We'd better split up," he muttered tensely.
They got the message.
Charlie ducked into a nearby washroom while Roger moved
to the other side of the boat.
Larry went to the rail
and squeezed it as he remembered the long night of
running and the problem he was running from.
Last evening had started so well.
He had finally gotten up enough nerve to ask Beth to
the church dance,
and she had accepted.
He was dancing and having a good time too,
until tough Ralph decided to cut in
and then refused to give Beth back.
"Get lost,"Ralph snapped when Larry insisted.
Larry was stunned
but left
and-moped around the dance floor.
It was easier than defying Ralph.
But he was desperate, as much to get away as to
relieve the tension that he felt.
Even when he convinced Charlie and Roger, who had gone
stag, to leave with him, he wanted badly to remain.
But if he stayed there would be trouble
and he wanted no part of that.
He imagined what Beth must be thinking of him
and he felt sick.
Charlie and Roger were tired of just standing around
and were happy for an excuse to leave.
Charlie would come us with some action;
he always did.
As they left the church hall, Roger told Larry,
"I know you weren't scared of Ralph."
But Larry was remembering the time he had run away from
home because of his bad report card.
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"All talk and no guts! his father had heckled when Larry
came back, tired and hungry.
And he was right, Larry thought bitterly.
The boys walked1u>the street, free of the beat-up
dance and the snooty girls and the rest of the guys.
They said nothing as they walked past the closed shops.
"Let's see how many things we can order, " Charlie
said as he spied a drugstore that was still open.
"Yeah," Roger added, "Before the old guy catches on!"
They asked for item after item until the counter
was packed.
The owner was growing excited about the big sale.
Then a woman customer started complaining about the late
hour and the long wait,
and the old storekeeper grew uneasy.
"All right," he said as if suddenly weary of waiting
on them.
"All right, what?" Charlie demanded.
"All right, already!" he answered.
"It's getting late."
Charlie looked at Larry.
Larry looked at Roger,
and Roger looked back at Charlie.
"You pay now," the man instructed.
"Pay?"
Charlie looked surprised.
The man began inching angrily along the counter to
the door.
Charlie moved with him.
Suddenly Charlie bolted, yanking open the door in time
to hit the old man flush in the face.
He screamed in rage
and lunged towards Charlie.
Charlie pushed him back against the shelves behind the
counter.
There was the sound of breaking glass and crashing metal
as bottles and cans fell to the floor.
Larry and Roger ran out of the store after the fleeing
form of Charlie and away from the storekeeper's
painful cries.
Now Larry, Charlie and Roger leaned against the
railing of the ferry.
and watched the dark water rush by.
Through the long night of running and hiding Larry had
not permitted himself to think about what they had
done
not until now as he looked hard at the approaching
shoreline and wondered.
"I have an aunt we can stay with," Roger offered.
"We don't have to hidecnnzlike Charlie says."
Charlie turned
and shoved Roger.
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"Stupid!
Now you tell us.
That's great."
He eyed Larry.
"They won't look for us for long.
What we did is petty stuff."
Roger cried, "We!"
"Yeah, we!" Charlie snapped.
"We're all to blame," Larry said.
"So, what's that supposed to mean?"
Charlie looked impatient.
"So, what's the use of running?" Larry asked.
Charlie was suddenly angry.
"Look, man!
We know you're chicken
but you ain't that chicken."
"He's not chicken, Roger defended.
Larry insisted, "I say let's go back
and take what's coming to us."
Charlie eyed him in disbelief
and then shrugged, as if realizing the wildness of his
own words.
The ferry had just landed.
"Come on," he growled in disgust, moving in with
the departing passengers.
Roger followed behind him.
Not until they were on land did Charlie stop to look
around.
"Where's Larry?" he cried.
They turned back
and caught a glimpse of him.
He was still on the ferry.
Then they saw the policeman who had been on the boat
standing nearby on the pier.
Charlie and Roger panicked.
and began to push their way through the crowd, drawing
the officer's attention.
"Hey!" he called.
It was more out of curiosity than a command,
but they began running.
The policeman called again,
then blew his whistle.
Two more officers appeared at the head of the pier
blocking the way.
Charlie and Roger spun desperately looking for a way out,
and then stopped in their tracks
and waited meekly.
The officers came up
and questioned them.
As they were being taken into custody, the whistle of
the ferry boat signaled the start of the return trip.
Charlie turned to search among the passengers on the boat
for the familiar figure of Larry.
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"Chicken!" he spat sneeringly.
Roger looked at Charlie
and then at the boat as it steamed away from the pier.
He saw Larry
and smiled.
The officers took Roger's smile for arrogance because
they felt that juvenile delinquents were such a
hopeless lot.
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"The Runaway" retold by Betty
First of all, Larry was on the boat
and he was looking over the pier
and he was remembering things like what they
did the night before.
And then they were in a dr. . . Roger was
saying that in the drugstore. . .
They needed some food
and there was a drugstore.
And so they went to a drugstore.
And they. . . and this Charlie beat up this
old man because of Roger and things you
know.
I don't know really why.
So they did.
And they ran all night.
Finally they got on this ferry.
And Larry's remembering all this stuff,
and he's, he's. . .
These boys are walking
Suddenly they come up
around and everything.
and he goes, "I say we should go back
and face what's coming to us."
And Charlie goes, "Are you crazy?"
And Roger goes. . .
you know, he's kind of scared and everything.
And he says, "We should do it."
And those guys say that he was chicken
and they kept saying that.
And finally, you know, there was a policeman
and everything.
And they were getting off the boat.
And all of a sudden they saw the policeman
and panicked.
Charlie and Roger did this.
And they fled. . .
you know, they ran and everything.
And the policeman, they caught their attention
and out of curiosity said, "Halt! Halt!"
And they didn't do it,
and so he did it, he commanded them that.
And they still didn't do it,
so he blew his whistle.
and two officers came up
and they ran after him
and they caught him
and put him into custody
And Charlie looked back,
and saw Larry on the board as it was going out.
He spat back he was chicken.
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c 44 And the policeman thought they were just
kind of dumb and everything.
197
"The Runaway" retold by Billy
Charlie and Roger and Larry were in a store
and a man asked what they wanted. . .
and he, and Charlie got everything about
. . . on the counters. . . so the counter
was full.
He, uh. . . they didn't buy it.
Then they pushed him against the counter
and some glass fell and broke.
And then they started running toward. .
Later Larry said, "Let's give up."
And so they went,
and they saw an officer on the boat.
And they started running all the way around
the boat.
And two officers were there.
So they stopped
and they questioned them.
And then Larry asked for a familiar face
in the boat.
That's all I remember.
198
"The Runaway" retold by Don
Well, these boys are gonna run away because
Charlie hit this man into the counters.
Then they looked back for Roger, for Larry.
And the police had him.
And they started to push their way through
the crowd.
Then that officer blew the whistle
and two more officers walked the pier.
Then they questioned them,
then they got on the ferry boat.
Charlie told Larry, "Chicken."
And the the ferry left.
Then Roger was smiling at Larry.
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"The Runaway" retold by Darrell
1 This one kid, he ran away because he had a
0 bad report card.
2 And the cops were after him.
3 So they went somewhere.
4 And they called the drugstore,
5 and they went in
6 . . . and took some items.
7 And the man said, "Pay."
8 And they didn't pay.
9 So they got in a fight.
10 Then they ran off.
(:E:::ll Then they went to the ferry
“—-12 and the policeman was on there.
13 And they tried, and they didn't look back
E for Larry.
14 And Larry was on the ferry.
:___15 And the policeman was there,
I 16 and they saw a glimpse at the cop
R 17 and they tried breaking their way through
18 and these other cops blocked the way.
cl 19 And now they are in custody.
of
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"The Runaway" retold by Elliot
At the start of the story, Larry, Roger, and
Charlie were on the ferry boat.
And Larry told them to split up because of the
policeman nearby.
And thenluastarted thinking of what had
made them run away.
And that was at the church dance last night
when. . . big somebody or other asked for
a dance with his date, Beth.
And then he wouldn't give her back to him.
Then he got mad.
And he went over to Charlie and Roger
and convinced them to run away with him.
a H-flppk.l'
And. . . then it takes them back to the
ferry boat.
And let's see. . . and then a little bit later
it gets, the ferry boat docks at the pier
on the other side.
And Charlie and Roger get off,
and they look around,
and they and Charlie sees Larry on the ferry
boat.
And just about that time, they started pushing
and shoving
and drew the officer's attention.
He yelled, "Hey!"
More as an exclamation of surprise than of
a . . . order.
And they started running
and then he blew his whistle
and two more officers started coming on the
scene.
And coming after Charlie and Roger.
They looked around frantically for a place
to get away.
Then they stood still meekly while they were
questioned by the three officers.
And just then, the ferry boat's whistle signaled
its return trip.
And Charlie looked at Roger, saw Roger
and said, disgustingly, "Chicken!"
and spat on the ground!
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"The Runaway" retold by Leslie
There were these three boys
and they weren't very good.
And they went, they went up to this old
man in this store.
They wanted to buy a whole lot of stuff.
And the old man told them to stop cause,
"It's getting late."
And then one of them punched him in the face.
Then they was running away.
Then they wanted to, one of them wanted to
' go in his aunt's house
and thought they'd be safe there.
And one of them didn't want to.
He wanted to do it.
He was going to Em,
and he called him chicken.
That's all I remember.
(Dd O\U'|
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"The Runaway" retold by Louise
That Charlie and some other of his friends
were. . . ran. . .
or they had all this, all the items up on
the counter.
And the man was getting impatient with them.
And that when they got on the boat. . .
Charlie. . . I think it was Charlie said
that they should go back and tell. . .
Well, and then they got off the boat
and the policeman. . . that was on the boat
saw him
and he started running.
And the two policeman blocked-~er--they caught
him at the other end. . .
I don't know.
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"The Runaway" retold by Micky
Larry was running away because this one
kid had butted him out from a dance.
And then they went to a drugstore
and they started ordering a lot of stuff.
Then a lady said, she was angry, was, didn't
like what they were doing,
and then she started complaining.
And then the guy, and then the storekeeper
said it was getting late.
And then the boys, then the one kid slammed
the door in his face.
And he got mad
and then started coming toward him.
And then, and then, he pushed him up against
the shelves,
and a bunch of bottles and metal came and
hit the floor.
And then they started running.
And then they got to the ferry boat.
And then it was going off
and two policeman came
and caught Charlie and Roger.
And Larry was still on the boat.
1 â€In-“
‘ .
204
"The Runaway" retold by Sally
I can't remember that one's name,
but he went to a church dance with a girl
named Beth.
And somebody cut in
and was dancing with her
and he didn't.get to dance with her anymore.
And then they went in this drugstore
and they bought all this stuff
and it was piled up on the counter
and. . .
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"The Runaway" retold by Terry
Well, Charlie and Roger were, they were
running away
and Charlie or Roger, one of them was. . .
ran away once, I can't remember where he
was at.
They went to a. . . all three of them went
to a store
and kept on asking for item after item.
And the storekeeper started getting mad.
And Roger threw Charlie. . . or, whatever,
and into shovels in the back of a counter.
And glass and stuff fell on him. . . fell,
bri. . . fell onto the floor.
Then they went onto the ferry boat.
And they hid.
Then they went to a. . . and they went along
and then they got to the next pier.
And two of the boys jumped off
and a policeman. . . he saw them,
he blew his whistle.
Two more policemen blocked the deck. . .
blocked the way
and the boys stopped.
One of the boys was still on the ferry going
back where it started, where it started
from.
And it was two of the boys that were on the
pier,
they had . . . they were, took 'em to a police
station.
That's all I remember.
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"The Parsley Garden"
When Al got home he was too ashamed to go inside.
So he had a long drink of water from the faucet in
the backyard.
The faucet was used by his mother to water the stuff
she planted every year: okra, bell peppers,
tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, garlic, mint, eggplant,
and parsley.
His mother called the whole business the parsley
garden.
Every night in the summer she would bring chairs out
of the house
and put them around the table,
and she would sit and enjoy the cool of the evening.
After the long drink of water, Al dejectedly sat
down where the parsley itself was growing.
He pulled a handful of parsley out
and slowly ate it.
That fifty-cent hammer at Woolworth's had been just
what he needed, he thought bitterly.
It was a real hammer, not a toy.
He had already gathered some first-class nails from
the floor of Foley's Packing House and some old
box wood;
with a hammer he could make something, perhaps a
table or a small bench.
So A1 had slipped the hammer into the pocket of
his overalls
and started out,
but then a man had grasped his shoulder
and silently dragged Al to the back of the store
into a small office.
An older man was seated behind a desk in the office
doing paperwork.
"Well, here's another shoplifter."
The man spat the words out sneeringly.
"What did he take?" the older man asked.
"A hammer."
The younger man looked at A1 with hatred.
He took the hammer from Al,
placed it on the desk
and then left, muttering to himself.
The older man, who was the manager of the store, had
gone back to his paperwork.
A1 stood there for fifteen minutes before the man
looked at him again.
"Well?"
"I didn't mean to steal it.
I just need it
and I haven't got any money."
#:171— “l‘-¢‘-%-g‘
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"Just because you haven't got any money doesn't
mean you've got a right to steal things, now does
it?"
"No, sir," Al replied.
"Well, what am I going to do with you?
Turn you over to the police?"
Al didn't say anything,
but he certainly didn't want to be turned over to the
police.
"If I let you go, will you promise never to steal
from this store again?"
"Yes, sir."
"All right."
The man shrugged with resignation.
"Go out this way
and don't come back until you have some money to spend."
Then he had opened the door to the alley
and A1 had hurried out.
Al chewed on some more parsley.
He had been humiliated
and he was deeply ashamed.
It was not his nature to take things that did not
belong to him.
He hated them, the young man who had caught him and the
manager who had made him stand in silence for so
long.
He thought about them for a long time.
Finally he went inside
and told his mother what had happened.
"I don't want you to steal," his mother said in
her broken English.
"Here is fifty cents.
You go back to that man
and you bring it home, that hammer."
"No," Al answered.
"I won't take your money for something that I don't
really need.
I just thought I ought to have a hammer so I could make
something if I felt like it.
I've got a lot of nails and some box wood, but no
hammer."
"Go buy it, that hammer," his mother insisted.
"No," Al said.
"All right," his mother sighed, "Shut up."
That was what she always said when she didn't
know what else to say.
Al went out
and sat on the steps.
His humiliation was beginning to really hurt now.
His mother made a salad for supper,
but when A1 put the food in his mouth he just didn't
care for it.
So he went out
and wandered along the railroad tracks to Foley's
Packing House.
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They were still working, hurriedly nailing boxes
together as the light faded.
Al watched them for a while,
then he walked to Woolworth's.
A1 stood angrily in front of the closed store, hating
the young man who had caught him.
Then he went to the public library to have61look at the
books again,
but he didn't like any of them
so he moped around the town looking without luck for
some money.
Finally he went home
and went to bed.
His mother had already gone to bed because she had
to be up early to go to work.
Al didn't sleep much that night.
He couldn't get over what had happened,
and he realized that he would have to do something
about it.
When his mother got up at five the next morning,
Al was already out of the house.
She fixed breakfast,
packed her lunch
and hurried off to work.
That day there was overtime
and she stayed
and worked
and didn't get home until nine o'clock that night.
It was still light out when she reached home
and saw the familiar figure of her son working in the
garden, nailing pieces of box wood together with
a hammer.
he was building something;
it looked like a bench.
She made her supper
and ate it in silence on the table by the parsley garden.
When she was done she said, "Where did you get it,
that hammer, A1?"
"I got it at Woolworth's."
"How did you get it?
You steal it?"
"No, I worked for it.
I carried different stuff to different counters in
the store."
"Well, that's good," the woman said.
"How long you work for that little hammer?"
"I worked all day," Al said. ,
"Mr. Clemmer, the manager, gave metjmahammer after I
had worked one hour,
but I went right on working.
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At the end of the day, the fellow who caught me
yesterday took me to Mr. Clemmer's office,
and he told Mr. Clemmer that I had worked hard all
day,
and I ought to be paid at least a dollar.
So Mr. Clemmer put a silver dollar on his desk for me,
and then the fellow who caught me yesterday told him
that the store needed a boy like me every day for
a dollar a day,
and Mr. Clemmer said I could have the job."
"That's good," the woman said.
"You can make a little money for yourself."
"I left the dollar on Mr. Clemmer's desk," the
boy said,
"and I told them both I didn't want the job."
"Why you say that?" the woman said.
"Dollar a day for an eleven-year-old boy is good money.
Why you not take the job, Al?"
"Because I hate them both," the boy said.
"I would never work for people like that.
I just looked at them
and picked up my hammer
and walked out.
I came home
and I make this bench."
"All right," his mother said, "Shut up."
His mother went inside
and went to bed.
But A1 just sat on the bench he had made
and smelled the parsley
and didn't feel humiliated any more.
210
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"The Parsley Garden" retold by Betty
First of a11,Al was inside this WOolworth's
and he wanted this hammer.
And so he picked it up
and got it out
And that night he was thinking about it,
you know, because he had been caught and
had to go to the manager's office;
the manager's office.
And he had to explain a lot,
and after this was done, you know, he was H
sent home. ?
He was ashamed “
and he was humiliated
and he was, you know, really upset, you know,
because he was the one that had gotten it.
And it wasn't his nature to do it.
And so he was thinking about it that night. 1
And he was, well he was sitting at the parsley ¥
garden.
And this garden had okra and just lots of other
vegetables in it.
And he then he decided, you know, he decided
to go to bed.
So he had a bad night,
and he decided,
you know, since his mother got, his mother
had gone, you know,
he had this conversation with his mother
and finally she went to bed.
And so he went to bed too.
And then he didn't have a good night because
he was thinking about this.
And so his mother got up at five o'clock.
He was already up.
And he, when his mother came back that day,
you know, it was over work time,
and so she got back about nine o'clock.
And it was still daylight out.
She saw her son working on something.
And she says, "Where did you get that hammer?"
After she had eated dinner, she says, "Where
did you get that hammer?
Did you steal it?"
And he says, "No, I worked for it."
And she says, "Where?"
And he says, "Woolworth's.
And I worked all day for it
because after an hour they gave me the
hammer,
but I worked instead.
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And they decided, well, and they decided,
the man decided he's worked pretty hard
and I think he should get a dollar a day.
And he said this to the manager.
And he said I could have a job.
And his mother said, "Well, did you take it?
It's good for you." You know.
He goes, "No, I didn't take it."
She says, "Well, Why?" You know.
"A dollar a day for an eleven-year-old boy
is pretty good money."
And so he said, "I don't want, I didn't take
it because I didn't like them both.
I just picked up my hammer
and I looked at them,
picked up my hammer
and came home
and built this little bench."
j'fl'n'flrl‘k‘
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.2
213
"The Parsley Garden" retold by Billy
[:::1 Al went into a store
C 2 and saw a hammer
E-——-3 and didn't have no money
4 so he went and put it in his overhalls
5 and walked out.
6 But the manager's worker caught him
7 and took him up to the manager's office.
8
And he said. . . Al was waiting there for a
few minutes
E 9 'til the manager said something
10 that he was going to take him to the police.
11 But A1 didn't say nuthin.
12 And then Al, the next day, Al went to the store,
R 13 and worked for Mr. Clemmer and, for a hour,
14 and got the hammer.
15 And Mr. Clemmer asked him if he wanted to
work for a dollar a day.
cl 15 and he said no because he hated them both.
_.- it.â€
214
"The Parsley Garden" retold by Darrell
O
btthH
This boy, he went by the Woolworth's store to. . .
and he saw people nailing boxes together
and he wanted to do that same thing so,
but he needed a hammer.
So. . . he went to a store
and stole a hammer out of there.
And he got caught by Mr. Clingers, the manager,
and he took him in there,
and he put the hammer back, ,
and they let him go. E
And he went home, 2
and told his mother all about it.
And she said, "I don't want you to steal
anymore."
So she had to get up early next morning.
He went over there again
and he got the job.
I mean worked for them a day
and he gave him a hammer.
And when his mom got back, she saw him sit,
working on a bench
‘_- ....__.. .--~ ~ _
.
and he didn't want the job because he didn't
like them both.
215
"The Parsley Garden" retold by Don
Okay, his mother had a garden of parsley,
garlic, onion, tomatoes,
and she called the garden, a parsley garden.
And when Al was in that Woolworth's store,
he tried to steal a hammer,
and he got caught.
The guy that caught him took him back to the
manager.
The manager said--told him if he'd like him
to call the police.
And Al didn't say anyting.
Then the guy told him he would let him go.
Then he went back the next day
and started, and worked for him.
Then he got the hammer.
But they wanted him to work all the time,
and they, and he told them no.
And his mother was mad at him.
She told him to shut up.
Then she went to bed.
And Al just sat outside, sitting on the bench
that he made with that hammer and nails
and that box that he got.
That's all I remember.
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"The Parsley Garden" retold by Elliot
Okay, Al came home,
and he was really humiliated!
And then he started day dreaming
and remembered why he was.
He wanted to make something out of some of this
box wood and some nails that he'd gathered
UP:
and he didn't have any hammer.
So he went into this one store
and he ripped off a hammer.
But this one young dude caught him
and he took him into the manager
and the manager, he said a few words.
And then Al had to wait for fifteen minutes.
And then the manager finally asked him if he
was going to steal from the store any more.
Al said, "no-o-o."
And so the manager let him walk out.
And that's why he was humiliated.
And he told his ma that
and she told him to shut up.
And so, a little bit later they went to bed.
And then. . . Okay, Al was up before five, some
time before five.
And his mom fixed her breakfast and everyting
and got off to work.
She had to work overtime.
And when she got there, she saw Al was making
a bench with a hammer
and she asked him if he had stole it.
And he goes, "No."
And she asked him where he got it.
And he told him that he had worked all day
over at the one store where he was working
off, where he was going to rip off the
hammer,
and told him that after one hour of work, he
had gotten the hammer.
But he had stayed on
and worked all day.
Then at the end of the day, the young man,
he'd already been to the manager, I mean,
yeah, he'd already been to the manager,
and told the manager that he'd worked hard all
day
and he deserved at least a dollar.
And the manager laid a silver dollar there
and, and he didn'ttake it,
he didn't want it.
He didn't want a job there.
217
R39 And he left the silver dollar there
0 and he walked out.
I 41 Let's see, and then after he got done telling
R his mother that and everything, she
finally, they talked a little more,
42 and finally she goes, "All right, shut up."
cl 43 And that was the end of that.
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"The Parsley Garden" retold by Leslie
This boy, Al--they had a parsley garden
and one day he was sitting by the garden;
he was eating parsley.
And he wanted, if he had time, he wanted to
make something out of some old box wood
and with his nails.
he didn't have a hammer.
somehow he wanted to get the hammer.
But
And
he went to Woolworth's
he took this hammer.
And this young man got him
and took him to Mr. Clemmer's office.
He was the manager.
And he said that he was stealing,
and he asked him why he was stealing.
And he said cause he wanted the hammer,
and didn't have any money for it.
And he asked him if he had any money, why,
wait, he asked him if he didn't have any
money, why did he come for the hammer?
And if he would steal any more.
And he said, um, and they got all done
talking,
and then he asked him if he would steal anymore
if he didn't let him have the hammer.
And he said he wouldn't steal any more at that
store.
But he didn't like them any more because he
picked him up and stuff.
And he went home
and finally told his mother what had happened.
And they both went to bed.
And
and
But he didn't get much sleep that night
because he was thinking about what happened.
And his mother had to get up early the next
morning.
And she got up at five o'clock.
He had already been gone.
I He was at Woolworth's working, putting,
putting boxes from counter to counter.
And the young man said that, told Mr. Clemmer
they need a good boy like that around the
Woolworth's store.
And they'd pay him a dollar a day if he did thatr
And he said he didn't want the job.
He just wanted the hammer.
And then, he left the half dollar,
dollar there
and he went home with his hammer
and made a bench.
the silver
1
0
GE
2
(D \l dune-w
l
219
"The Parsley Garden" retold by Louise
Okay, Al stole a. . . didn't have any money
so,
and he wanted a hammer.
So he went to the store
and he took the hammer.
And then a guy caught him
and he turned him in to the manager.
And the manager was going to turn him over
to the police.
And. . . the guy. . . or Mr. . . . Okay and
then they were going to turn him over to
the police,
and he didn't want them to.
And he worked for an hour,
and they gave him the hammer,
but he kept on working.
And they wanted him to stay for the job.
But he didn't, he didn't cause he hated them.
WNH
E
\IO‘U'I
10
11
C-—-12
-—-13
E l
llw
28
,__30
-—~31
32
33
34
35
36
L——37
220
"The Parsley Garden" retold by Micky
Well, first Al came home
and he wanted a hammer
and he didn't have any money.
And his mother gave him the money to go buy
it. . . no. . .
He went to the store
and stole it.
And he. . . a man took him back to Mr.
Clemmer's office, .
and and Al stood there for fifteen minutes.
And then Mr. Clemmer said, "Why did you steal
it?"
And he said, "I didn't have any money."
And then Mr. Clemmers told him not to steal
it again if he let him go.
And Al went home.
And he didn't feel good.
And he walked around town
and then he went and then he went home,
went, ate a little supper,
and went to bed.
He didn't sleep much.
And then his mother went to work at five
o'clock in the morning.
And then she seen that Al was up but already
out of the house.
When she came home, she came home at nine
o'clock that night
and she seen Al working out in the back in the
parsley garden, working on a bench.
And Al's mother went inside
and ate her supper
and sat out by the table
sat on a table by the parsley garden.
And Al's mother said, "Where did you get that
hammer?
--and he said, "I worked--
Did you steal it?"
And A1 said, "No,
And then his mother said,
And he said,
today
and they gave me this
and after one hour they gave me this hammer
and I worked the rest of the day.
And the young man brought me back to Mr.
Clemmer's office
and said, said, that I should deserve a dollar
and work here every day.
I didn't. I worked for it."
"What did you do?"
"I worked at the store all day
221
And I turned it down because I hated them."
And then, and then, Al's mother said, "All
right, shut up."
And he went back to bed,
he went inside
and didn't feel humiliated any more.
1.. '-‘.
222
"The Parsley Garden" retold by Sally
Well, he wanted a hammer.
+ fl
2 And so he stole it at one of the stores.
3 And he was mad at. . . well. . . two men,
4 the men in the store caught him.
C 5 And he finally went home
6 and he sat in the garden
7 and he got a drink of water out of the faucet
8 and he went in
____9 and told his mom that he stole the hammer.
"'10 So she was going to give him some money to
E go back and buy it ?
.__11 but he didn't want to. 4
g...
M
So she justtoldlï¬mtto shut up 1
so he just started walking around f
and then he went home. 5
raw
ht»
RE
15 And then he got a job at one of the stores. bf'
L_.16 And he earned the money to buy the hammer.
‘T—'l7 But he didn't want to take the money because
E he didn't like the two men
‘ 18 so he just took the hammer
l9 and went home.
223
"The Parsley Garden" retold by Terry
Well, he went to Woolworth's
and he stole a hammer
and they caught him
E and he said, "Look. Don't turn me in to the
police."
thH
And they let him go--out the, into the alley.
He went home
and told his mother.
\IO‘UI
8 And his next, the next, the next morning he
was up
9 and he went to Woolsworth's, Woolworth's.
C 10 And he worked all day .
11 and he got the hammer.
!_____12 And they offered him a job, a job there.
31:13 And he didn't take it. .
I 14 So he walked out, §f
15 and he came home
16 and started working on, he worked on, he made
C a bench.
17 His mother asked him where he got the hammer.
R -—-18 And he said he worked for it at Woolsworth's.
r-19 And they, he, they, she, he told, he told
E her that he could have got a job there
20 but he didn't take it.
F"â€â€'21 And so. . . when his mom went to bed, he just
sat there.
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