Telling Time: A Rhetorical Approach to Narrative Order

Abstract Critics of Nicole Krauss's Great House (2010) find the novel “downbeat,” “tragic,” and “bleak.” Such interpretations rely on what Peter J. Rabinowitz has called “the rule of conclusive endings” by privileging the narrator of the final chapter. However, as a braided narrative, Great House weaves together five characters who narrate different stories that lead to more hopeful interpretations. The following article proposes that Krauss invites readers to simultaneously privilege multiple, conflicting interpretations by emphasizing the occasions on which her character-narrators speak. Although occasion is the central term in the rhetorical definition of narrative according to James Phelan and Rabinowitz, it has not received as much theoretical attention as the other components. Each narrator's occasion has clear temporal dimensions that cannot be reduced to one side of the story/discourse binary. Although many postclassical schools of narratology have moved away from the story/discourse distinction as central to the definition of narrative, theorists still use this binary when describing narrative order. This pair of terms fails to capture a crucial dimension of narrative time: telling time, the story moments from which a narrator speaks that contain every word of their text. While the Great House's text order ending leads to a depressing conclusion, the novel's telling order and simultaneous telling times illuminate more optimistic interpretations. Attending to the dimension of telling time in Great House illuminates an intersubjective field that not only makes the novel's tragic themes bearable but also imbues the novel with a sense of vitality and hope.