Narrative Co-Construction: A Rhetorical Approach

Considering narrative as a communicative act implies that all interlocutors in this act take an active role. From this rhetorical stance, reading has always been a co-constructed world-building exercise: the audience, as much as the author, builds a storyworld as conveyed by the narrative. This article employs critical apparatuses that foreground this collaborative nature of narrative communication to illuminate its collaborative world-building processes. Thus, by focusing on these aspects of narrative communication, we here begin responding to Paul Dawson’s and James Phelan’s invitations toward a multi-directional narrative communication model approach. To illustrate this approach’s utility, we explicate readers’ co-constructions of the story-worlds and the actual world in John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars (2012). Attending to world-building processes in, about, and around the novel of our case study, we call attention to how the rhetorical resources used to construct the storyworld are not limited to the physical space of the book and, in fact, often cross into the actual world.