Somebody Telling Somebody Else A Rhetorical Poetics Of Narrative

PREFACE

ix

I

N 2000, fresh off his first victory in the Tour de France, Lance Armstrong

wrote a book with Sally Jenkins called It’s Not about the Bike, a title that led

me to consider calling this book It’s Not about the Text. (Of course, Arm-

strong’s title now evokes the response, “We know—it’s about the performance-

enhancing drugs,” but I ask you to leave that response in these parentheses.)

Just as It’s Not about the Bike signals that Armstrong’s achievement was less

about his equipment than about his agency, my title would signal that narra-

tive is less about its materials (narrators, characters, events, techniques, and

so on) than about how tellers use them to influence their audiences in par-

ticular ways. And just as the surprising negation in Armstrong and Jenkins’s

title implicitly acknowledges that the bike matters (notice that It’s Not Only

about the Bike would be a far less arresting title), so too would the hyper-

bolic negation in my title implicitly testify that I believe narrative texts remain

important. In other words, it’s not entirely not about the text. Finally, however,

I decided my purposes would be better served by a positive expression of what

I think narrative is about.

In previous work, I have proposed and explored a (default) rhetorical

definition of narrative: somebody telling somebody else on some occasion

and for some purposes that something happened. Using the opening of that

definition as my title will, I hope, not just signal the continuity of this book

with that work, but also call even more attention to the significance of tellers