Personal narrative

Personal narrative is a prose narrative relating personal experience usually told in first person; its content is nontraditional. "Personal" refers to a story from one's life or experiences. "Nontraditional" refers to literature that does not fit the typical criteria of a narrative.

Life stories

writes about life stories, which are similar to the personal narrative: "A life story consists of all the stories and associated discourse units, such as explanations and chronicles, and the connections between them, told by an individual during his/her lifetime that satisfy the following two criteria: The stories and associated discourse units contained in the life story have as their primary evaluation a point about the speaker, not a general point about the way the world is. The stories and the associated discourse units have extended reportability."
Linde also mentions that life story and autobiography have similarities and differences: “the primary way autobiography differs from life story is that it is a written, not oral form. More specifically it constitutes literary genre with its history, its demands, and its market.” Jeff Todd Titon also refers to personal narrative as being very similar to a life story. “A life story is, simply, a person's story of his or her life or what he or she thinks is a significant part of that life.” Titon goes on to state that personal narrative arises from conversation. According to Linda Degh, an example of personal narrative would include “any part of life history from the cradle to the grave, including great turning points to insignificant details in family life, occupation, entertainment, celebration, religion, crisis, illness, and travel, may provide material for elaboration into a narrative.”
A personal narrative can be organized by two coherence principles of life stories: causality and continuity. Causality is the relationship between cause and effect. This means that one action is the result of the other's action. Continuity is the consistent existence of something over some time.
William Labov defines personal narrative as “one verbal technique for recapitulating experience, in particular a technique of constructing narrative units which match the temporal sequence of that event.” Labov argues that narrative can be broken down into subcategories such as the abstract, orientation, complication, resolution, evaluation, and coda. The abstract is the summary of the story that usually comes at the very beginning of a story. Labov notes that the orientation serves to orient the listener in respect to person, place, time, and behavioural situation. The orientation tells us how the story begins. An example would be “I went to the store in San Francisco.” The complication of a narrative is the conflict. A complication is key in narrative because without complication there can be no resolution. Labov writes that the complication is regularly terminated by a result. This result is referred to as the resolution. Evaluation comes when the author reflects on the events that occurred in the story. This is common in personal narratives. Coda is another word for a conclusion. The coda concludes the evaluation and gives efficient closure to the narrative. Lastly, Labov notes that narrative is usually told in answer to some stimulus from outside.
Different approaches can be applied to personal narrative such as performance and sociolinguistic. Performance in a narrative is the execution of an action. Performance as a new and integrated approach overcomes the division of text and context resulting from more traditional approaches. When it comes to the personal narrative as a conversational interaction, Langellier thinks that personal narrative as a story text and storytelling share a concept of narrative as a separate unit of communication. Conversational interaction meaning face-to-face verbal and story text is referring to the actual written narrative. The sociolinguistic approach includes different techniques such as intensifiers, comparators, correlatives, and explicative to fully evaluate narratives. Intensifiers are used to develop one particular event. Comparators move away from the actual event and consider what could have happened. Correlatives join two events with a single independent clause. Explicatives interrupt the narrative to go back or forth in time.

Functions

Narrative is an elementary need of people, according to the "homo narrans" theory, and personal narrative is the "paradigm of human communication," one of the main activities performed on a daily basis. Narratives have the power to lend orderliness to unordered experiences, personal narratives reflect social organization and cultural values, and are intertwined with social evaluation of people and their actions.
At the core of personal narrative is a moral evaluation of self. The moral proposition present in all first-person narratives is, "I am a good person," or that the speaker acted wrong, and learned what was right. A key aspect of personal storytelling is the narrator must tell the story to persuade the listener that they would have acted similarly; the speaker extends their moral stance to the listener as well.
The notion that "this happened to me" is the justification of storytelling rights for all personal narrative, defence of one's actions is an integral part of this moral negotiation. More than any other topic of personal narrative, one talks more giving evidence of fairness or unfairness, drawing sympathy, approval, exoneration, understanding, or amusement from their audience.
Even some surface-level badmouthing of self can function as a reassertion of one's merit or value. The self-deprecator uses ventriloquation to act out or distance the speaking self from the enacted self, thus making a distinction from the self-deprecator from the self that is deprecated.
Personal narratives aren't static. Tellers change their stories for each listener, and as their relationship with that listener changes, tellers change their stories as their values change and as their understanding of their past changes.
Personal Narratives also function as a means of self-exploration. Our stories inform us who we are, who we can become, and who we cannot become. Additionally, these narratives transform who we are: narrators act when they tell, creating new selves and transforming the existing self. Not only do our memories of self shape and are in turn shaped by personal narrative, but narrators shape their narratives in order to overcome disjunction between reality and memory. Narrators authenticate their memories, in spite of the imperfect, malleable nature of memories by creating credible-sounding accounts.
One key function of personal narrative is to distinguish the self from others. Narrative is a paramount resource for forming personal identity by oneself, as well as showing and negotiating the self with others.
Conversely, we tell personal narratives to share our lives, communicate trust, and create intimacy. Personal narratives make a statement: "what you must know about me," and these stories are traded more frequently as traders grow closer, and reach milestones in the relationships. There is an obligation to trading personal narratives, an expectation of being kept in the loop that Harvey Sachs calls a symptom of "being close."
Groups can also use personal narratives to conceal an identity through collage. Family stories are accepted and held onto based on how they "shape" the group, not based on each story's individual merit or the storytelling skill.
Personal narratives also have an effect on the real world because "individuals act on what is said to them." Gillian Bennet writes about 'bereavement stories' and how personal narratives take private experience and shape it into public from in accordance with traditional attitudes and expectations.

Criticism

Some argue that the creation and negotiation of self cannot be applied to all equally, that it is a Western-specific phenomenon. Personal narrative, according to some, belongs "within socially defined situational contexts." George Gusdorf argues that in most cultures the basic unit is the community, and one cannot be said to have a self. Charlotte Linde explains that she examines the self "in a particular culture" because different cultures see formulations of different selves because different cultures have separate examples that form a culturally safe self.
Personal narratives arise from power structures, and are therefore ideological, simultaneously producing, maintaining, and reproducing that power structure; they either support or resist the dominant meaning. Power structures have been noted as an inherent influence on personal narratives gathered and reported by ethnographers. It is argued life histories guided by questions are not personal narratives, but fall somewhere between biography and autobiography because the ethnographer helps the teller shape their story, and thus they cease to function for only the speaker.
Feminist critics have argued the theory of self is inapplicable to women and leaves women, people of color, and all marginalized groups without a self, or a deficient self. Some have noted a tendency in patriarchal societies for men's stories to be far away, as in military service, while women's stories are homebound, revolving around love, marriage, and family life.

Performance approach

Scholars studying the performance of personal narrative are interested in the presentation of the storytelling event. This is how the study of PN is found to be both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary requiring respect to multiple approaches of how we interpret PN. Personal narrative, in relation to storytelling, “is a way of speaking by a storyteller to an audience in a social situation—in a word, a performance". In reference to the performance of PN, Richard Bauman states that “the act of communication is put on display, objectified, lifted out to a degree from its contextual surroundings, and opened up to scrutiny by an audience.” Performance of a PN occurs in “natural speech,” that is, the ways in which the speaker uses language to convey a message. Because this language is not constant but ever-changing with the context of the PN, “no two performances are ever exactly the same”. It is impossible for a person to recount a personal experience in exactly the same way every time they perform the PN. As evident in all forms of communication, all performance is located, executed, and established as meaningful specifically within its “socially defined situational contexts” therefore the language must change with its surroundings in order to be relevant.
The intended message of performance of PN, as stated by Bauman, first “makes one communicatively accountable; it assigns to an audience the responsibility of evaluating the relative skill and effectiveness of the performer’s accomplishment.” Kristin Langellier adds that performance then, “constitutes a frame in which says metacommunication to the listeners: ‘interpret what I say in some special sense; do not take it to mean what the words alone, taken literally, would convey’.” The interaction between the teller and the audience will determine how the story is shaped and what will be told. The performance is also “keyed” by including “a range of explicit or implicit framing messages that convey instructions on how to interpret the other messages being conveyed”. The “knowledge and ability to communicate in socially appropriate and interpretable ways” through the use of framing and keying in the performance speaks to the teller's communicative competency. These modifications to the performance based on the teller's recognition of the listener's limited interpretive ability, display an effort to ensure the success of the narrative.
Once the personal narrative's message has been effectively conveyed, the narrative is completed and the teller, or performer, will signal “the end of the episodic sequence, indicating that he or she has relinquished the role of a dominant active contributor to the interaction, and is returning to the conversational mode”. Performances are thus “temporally bound, with a defined beginning and end”. These temporal boundaries also require the narrative to be told in the specific sequential order in which they occur. Gary Butler provides an example of how a teller may deliver the performance of a PN:

Well you heard… his grandfather... his... his brother had drowned... He was in the Gulf somewhere. His wife, his wife, now, the Amedée’s grandmother, was in the woods looking for the cows one evening. Now- told me this story often. Well, it was... it was before my time... Now, some nights, we used to tell all the old stories, you know?... She heard/she saw the trees and leaves mov/well, it made a racket, you know? And she said, “Bon Moses de Dieu! Who’s there?” “It’s me, Jean Buisson,” he said.... It was like that/that’s how Amedée told it to me, you know?... He said, “It’s me, Jean Buisson.” Then he said, “I want masses. I want masses said for me.” And the priest was in St. George’s in those days. She came/she came home. She told her husband. And the next morning he got dressed and walked to St. George’s to have masses said for his brother.

The performance of this PN adheres to the convention of using “natural speech.” The teller repeats words, pauses, and laughs throughout his telling of the PN. The teller frames the PN with a distinct beginning, “Well you heard…” and familiarizes the audience with the shared knowledge of how the grandfather's brother had drowned. The teller ensures continuous interaction with the audience prompted by “you know?” This holds the audience responsible for appropriate response and attentiveness to the PN. The teller follows a temporal sequence within the boundaries of the PN and provides a definitive end with “And the next morning he got dressed…” This marks the end of the teller's extended turn and allows for turn-taking to resume between the teller and the audience.