Stability of hidden stories

In: Narrative inquiry: a forum for theoretical, empirical, and methodological work on narrative, Band 29, Heft 1, S. 82-98

Abstract

AbstractWe refer to the concept of the hidden story as a story about one's own life, internalized in the mind and knowable "indirectly", through a monologue and inference, using linguistic and literary theory tools. The aim of the study was to determine whether the hidden story thus reconstructed would be stable in time. A twenty-one-year-old woman was asked to deliver a ten-minute monologue on her upbringing. After two years the test was repeated. Both monologues were transcribed, analyzed and interpreted to isolate a hidden story from each of them. We reconstructed the earlier and later stories. Two threads: "rebellion" and "heritage" appeared in both stories, but they combined to form a more coherent narrative only in the later one. The "closeness with parents" thread, present in the earlier story, was replaced with the "marital love" thread. The character and pattern of the changes illustrate changes that result from developmental factors.