‘My Mind Is with You’: Story Sequences in the Talk of Male Friends [2001]

Abstract

[This article focuses on the extent to which narrative construction involves collaboration between speakers, and how collaboration functions in informal friendly talk. Increasingly, conversation is seen as an achievement that involves the collective activity of all participants. Thus, conversational narrative is only possible when all participants in conversation jointly orient to someone telling a story. Where stories occur in sequence, the collaborative achievement of co-participants at talk is more overtly displayed. Story sequences are a common phenomenon in conversations of all kinds: a story can always be followed by another story, and a "second story" (Sacks, 1995) will be perceived as being in sequence as long as it is contiguous and has a topical link with the first story. In this article I want to focus on the role of story sequences in talk among male friends, drawing on a corpus of thirty all-male conversations. Telling a second story involves co-participants in paying careful attention to what each other is saying. As Sacks (1995, p. 257) puts it, telling a relevant second story says "My mind is with you." This capacity of sequential story-telling to testify to the closeness of participants means that it can be a powerful way of "doing" friendship. I argue that this aspect of sequential story-telling has particular value for male speakers who need to be careful how they display connectedness because of the taboos associated with homosexuality.]