Positioning Selves in Narrative Accounts of Military Trauma

Linguistic and narrative strategies employed in two dyadic interviews of male veterans of the war in Afghanistan were analysed and compared. Each interviewee told chains of connected stories that positioned them in relation to catastrophic events and their effects. These incidents were framed as being linked to decisions that the teller had taken in perilous circumstances. Sequences of generic clauses in sections of orientation were used to manage knowledge asymmetries, to establish story world norms, to display professional, soldierly and veteran identities and to present danger, serious injury, and death as normative in the context of military work in a conflict zone. Resolutions to narratives involving death or injury resided not in specific narrative event clauses but in sections of evaluation that framed the outcome of a preceding story chain in terms of its personal, current significance to the speaker. Our exploration of contrasting accounts of similarly catastrophic events by two storytellers, one of whom was diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder, offers insights into ways in which trauma is represented that could be useful in psychotherapeutic contexts.