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Article published In:
Narrative Inquiry
Vol. 29:1 (2019) ► pp.82–98

Stability of hidden stories

| University of Social Sciences and Humanities
| The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin
| The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin

We 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.

Keywords: monologues, hidden stories, time stability
Article outline
  • Introduction
    • Hidden stories
    • Stability of hidden stories
  • Method
    • The research participant
    • Procedure for isolating hidden stories from monologues
  • Results
    • Summary of the analysis and interpretation of Monologue 1
      • Motifs identified on the basis of content analysis
      • Motifs identified on the basis of the way of speaking analysis
      • Narrative schema of the story
    • Summary of the analysis and interpretation of Monologue 2
      • Motifs identified on the basis of content analysis
      • Motifs identified on the basis of the way of speaking analysis
      • Narrative schema of the story
    • Comparison of stories isolated from Monologues 1 and 2
  • Discussion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 July 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.17080.kun
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