Making visible an ideological dilemma in an interview narrative about social trauma

This article builds on contemporary understandings that identity is accomplished interactionally and discursively through storyteller/interviewer engagement inside the telling of the story. It introduces a new notion of narrative inquiry through the concept of “transactional positioning” to achieve an imagined interaction between a listener outside the institutional interview context and a tale told in an interview narrative some time ago. Texts are arranged by a select listener in a pre-thought out way to imaginatively fill gaps between what the narrator said and what he could have said during the interview but did not. The intertextual activity on the part of the listener aims to expand, retrospectively, the positioning of the interviewee so as to make more visible his ideological dilemma, uncovered through conversation analysis and critical discourse analysis of an interview narrative about the social trauma of being an Italian-Australian interned during World War II.