This chapter will deal with five narratives that are centered on the sudden escalation of violence, using the tools, concepts and structures developed in Chapter 2. The narratives in this chapter, including “Jacob Schissel's story” and “The Norwegian sailor,” have been selected to illustrate the emotional impact of such stories as well as the fundamental structure of narrative. It would be over-ambitious to claim that I can account for the powerful effect these stories have on listeners or readers, but an exploration of the causal connections inherent in them may cast some light on the deeply human roots of the conflicts. For each of the five stories I will begin by reproducing the full text in numbered form. I will then address the questions of how we can understand the sudden increase in the level of violence in the narrative, and who is to blame, in the narrator's presentation. To approach the answers, I will first identify the most reportable event, and put together a likely reconstruction of the events. Where a weak link appears in the causal chain – a sequence of events whose connection is uncertain – two steps are required:

• a cultural inquiry that might illuminate the causal connection, and

• an examination of the language used in the narrative construction to see how praise or blame is assigned or avoided.

Jacob Schissel, NYC: “Jacob Schissel's story”

The setting, the text and much of the structure of this narrative have been explored in Chapters 1 and 2. Here the full structural pattern is added in accordance with the analytical approach of Chapter 2. The major sections of the narrative will be indicated by full headings (Abstract, Orientation, Complicating action, Evaluation, Resolution, Coda), if they are fully developed. When orienting or evaluative clauses are found in the complicating action section, this is indicated by abbreviated labels at the extreme left (or, ev).

The beginning of this inquiry considered the role of narrative techniques in transforming the representation of reality in the interests of the narrator. An important tenet of our analysis is that narrative provides sufficient means to accomplish this end without distorting the underlying facts of the matter. People certainly can lie about what has happened, and they do so. But in any particular case we proceed on the assumption that they are not engaging in the difficult and dangerous tactic of telling lies. Instead, we accept their account of the facts of the matter and see what other means they have to make the worse appear the better cause.

This last phrase, originally used to describe the practice of the Greek Sophists, brings us into contact with some of the most vigorous debates of professional historians, and in particular with successive waves of interpretation and reinterpretation of the social role of these very Sophists. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, English historians portrayed the Sophists as opportunistic knaves who taught young Athenians how to flatter and grovel before the democratic mob. Gorgias of Leontini, Prodicus of Ceos and Hippias of Elias came to Athens to gain their living in this way. In Mitford's History of Greece, he sums up his view of the Sophists with the traditional phrase: “Many of them indeed would take either side of any question, political or moral; and it was generally their glory to make the worse appear the better cause.” This view underwent a wholesale reversal in the second half of the nineteenth century in a reassessment most prominently seen in Grote's History of Greece (1888), first published in 1850. Here the Sophists appear as respected teachers who provided the people of Greece with instruction in skills essential to legitimate democratic government. Liberals and Whigs joined in this rewriting of history, and attributed the former prejudice against the Sophists to the aristocratic bias of Tory politics.

Among the historians whose writing I have admired, none bulk larger than Stanley Thomas Bindoff. His published work deals with the political history of the Elizabethan era; the book I know most intimately is the 1950 Pelican edition of his Tudor England. This chapter will extract from that larger history his narrative account of the death of Queen Elizabeth I. It will allow me to define more precisely the boundary between narrative history and historical analysis, and to assess the strengths and weaknesses of each approach to interpreting and understanding the past.

Before entering into this particular confrontation with death, it will be helpful to examine Bindoff's narrative of a death that shortly preceded that of the queen: the rebellion and execution of her favorite, Essex. Bindoff introduces Essex with this non-narrative description of the final stages of Elizabeth's reign, the setting in which Essex rose to fame and power.

Up to this point, we have been dealing with narratives that are remarkable for their brevity as well as their interest, and their capacity to transfer the experience of the narrator to the listener. A number of them could be best seen as consisting of several episodes, defined by a shift of orientation to a different time and/or place. We turn now to spoken texts that are episodic in principle. Each of them consists of a series of well-formed narratives united by a single initiating factor – an event with dynamic consequences or an unstable situation. This initiating factor generates the most reportable events that in turn generate the construction of the individual episodes. It is responsible for instability in the orienting situation for each episode described by the narrator. The final episode centers on the resolution of this common problem.

These are epic narratives in several senses. First, they cover an epic sweep of time and place. Second, the problem confronted is not an ordinary problem. As in traditional epics, the protagonist is thrust into a struggle against what appear to be hopeless odds. Third, the protagonist is not an ordinary person. Through a series of displays of extraordinary abilities, the protagonist ultimately resolves the problem.

The central focus of this book is on the narrative techniques used to convey the life experience of one human being to another. The book is also centered about the termination of that life, and speakers' ways of dealing with the reality of death: when their own lives are in danger, when death suddenly overtakes someone close to them, when they are faced with the certainty of an oncoming death. The oral narratives presented here are not a random sample of those told in this domain. On the contrary, they are a selection of the most interesting and effective from thousands that have been elicited, recorded and transcribed in the course of fifty years of sociolinguistic research by me and my students. As such they are prototypical rather than typical. Although the research tradition they are drawn from is largely quantitative, this is not a study of variation in narrative structure, but a logical account of the generation of that structure.

The logic of narrative analysis

The following eight-point schema is proposed for the analysis of any given narrative or episode of a narrative. It draws upon the concepts developed in Chapter 2 and the results of applying these concepts in Chapters 4–15. It is to be understood here that “narrative” designates “oral narrative of personal experience” and that the extent to which the schema applies to other narratives will vary.

The narrative historian who is the subject of this chapter is not known by name. His work is merged into the larger sections of the Old Testament that are sometimes called the “Court History of David.” The particular narratives that we will consider here are found in the second book of Samuel. They display the extraordinary talent of this writer for dramatizing events, with many of the techniques that we have encountered among the most gifted narrators of personal experience. Since he is not named for us, I will refer to him as “the historian” or more specifically as “the OT historian,” since the particular narrative to be considered here bears the mark of a single author in its stylistic and ideological integrity.

That narrative is part of the extended history of David, who succeeded Saul as king of Israel and Judah. It concerns the failed rebellion of David's third son, Absalom. This is the third such event we have encountered; the parallels between Absalom, Monmouth and Essex are remarkable. The “beautiful face and body, brilliant personality and style” of Essex is matched by our OT historian's description of Absalom:

In the humanities, we are not often so fortunate as to find both a clear question and a clear answer to that question. I take as such a case the solution to the problem posed in Wolf's Prolegomena of 1795: was there a single poet named Homer who composed the 15,000 lines of the Iliad, and, if so, how could he do this before writing was invented? The question was not answered by the discovery that the Linear B script of Crete, which antedated Homer, was Greek, since this script was used only for accounting, and never for literary purposes. It was not answered by the attribution of the text to many authors, since no agreement could be found as to which part was to be attributed to which Homer. It was answered by Milman Parry and Albert Lord, who showed that the Homeric poems replicated the characteristics of the oral narrative poetry of contemporary Yugoslavian bards. The oral composer makes use of ready-made formulas for fitting proper names into meter; of repeated themes as a guide to oral compositions of indefinite length; and a variety of dialect forms inherited from the models on which his poem is based. Lord sums up the crucial discovery in this way: