The construction of multiple identities in elderly narrators’ stories

Elderly storytellers are often at pains to represent multiple past identities even within the scope of a single account. Some of these identities may be incompatible, as when the teenage hell-raiser straightens out to become the perfect homemaker, and then after her husband dies becomes a successful business woman. Retrospective reassessment follows from long and varied experience, and hence becomes a natural resource for storytellers old enough to have had the time to reevaluate events. Further, comments about people and places from the past automatically force a shift between the telling frame and the narrative frame; they create the impression that the teller’s present identity is not representative of all aspects of the narrator’s projected identity. In addition, elderly narrators insert others’ perspectives into their stories, as when a widow explicitly introduces the perspective of her deceased husband into a story in progress. Elderly tellers convey multiple identities beyond what they project, and their listeners form opinions of them based both on what they reveal about their pasts and how they reflect on them from their current perspectives, and this also results in the construction of multiple and on occasion conflicting identities. This article reports an analysis of such discourse practices in stories told about themselves by people aged 80 or more years living in Indiana.