Abstract
This chapter introduces the concept of Before-and-After stories as a special kind of story where the narrative structure serves as a means for identity construction. On the basis of two interview narratives the author illustrates how these kinds of stories consist of three phases in which narrators position different facets of their selves in different ways. Crucial to the analysis is the observation that the passage of time—in most instances a rather inconspicuous aspect of telling a story—is utilized to advertise personal change for the better. Drawing on methods from the social constructivist paradigm (such as discourse analysis, positioning analysis and interaction analysis), the author reconstructs how contrasting facets of individual selves serves as a means of doing implicit face-work while avoiding self-praise at the same time.
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- 1.
See also Keating (in this volume) on cultural differences as a cause for misunderstandings in a job-related environment.
- 2.
Some of these narratives were used as data for a PhD project on conversational repertoires of identity construction and self-presentation (Sacher 2012). All teachers gave their permission for their interviews to be used in different research contexts.
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Appendix
Appendix
1.1 Transcription Symbols
The data was transcribed according to the transcription system GAT (Selting et al. 1998) (Table 7.1).
1.2 German Data
1.2.1 “Katastrophe”
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Transcript 7.3 Katastrophe (German original)
1.2.2 “Inne Dutten”
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Transcript 7.4 Inne Dutten (German original)
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Sacher, J. (2017). The Passage of Time as a Narrative Resource in Constructing a Better Self. In: Bagga-Gupta, S., Hansen, A., Feilberg, J. (eds) Identity Revisited and Reimagined. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58056-2_7
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