The concept of role, necessary for both symbolic play and narrative, emerges out of ear& social interactions.

The Development of Maybe: The Evolution of Social Roles into Narrative Roles Shelley Rubin Dennie Wolf

As an inventor of imaginary worlds, the storyteller’s task is to create and sus- tain narrative illusions. However illusory these worlds may be, their inhabi- tants, the characters of the story, must be infused with a richness and fullness that gives the st0ry’:j world a reality apparently independent of the storyteller. For children, learning to tell stories entails seeing the world in sucessively dif- ferent ways. During the first stage of this process, the child, at the age of one, comments only on actual objects or events directly before him or her. By the age of three, however, the child can generate stories which speculate about possible events and imaginary characters. It is this passage from the real to the hypothetical-from what is to what may be- that makes possible the construc- tion of narrative worlds.

The evolution of storytelling capacities in young children, then, repre- sents a shift from the given world of manipulable objects, pragmatic actions,

The research reported in this chapter derives from a Longitudinal Study of Symbolic Developmenit funded by the Spenser Foundation. We are grateful to Jennifer Shotwell for her assistance in the research and preparation of this chapter. We also thank Patricia McKeriion and Dan, Gail, and Jonathan LeClerc for their contributions to the research presented here.

New Directionsfor Child Deuelopmenl, ti, I979 15

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and immediate feelings to the world of imagined events. At the root of this achievement is the child‘s developing ability to invoke the actions and feelings of a range of characters in a variety of contexts. The child’s understanding of roles, derived from early social interaction, must expand in particular ways to sustain the illusion of internally motivated characters within a story. This can be seen most clearly in the child’s early enactments with small toy replicas. Here, at the boundary between pragmatic object manipulation and imaginary narratives, the nature of this transformation from social to narrative roles can be explored.

This chapter presents an intensive study of one child between the ages of 12 and 30 months as he progresses toward the establishment of nar- rative roles. First, we examine how, in the context of early interactional games and through a developing capacity for imitation, the child learns to dis- tinguish between a particular role and the actor playing that role. Next, we trace the child’s ability to extend this insight about roles to the world of small replicas. The recognition of dolls or animals as potential agents leads to the possibility of narrative roles and enables the child to move from the role of actor to that of narrator. The final section of this chapter explores the evolu- iion of these two achievements in the child’s early narrative enactments with props.

Roles: Their Significance for Narrative

Even in the simplest social exchanges there are roles, if by this we mean nothing more than the part played by a participant in relation to some ongoing action. In this way something no more complicated than the exchange of an object entails the complementary roles of the giver and the taker. Roles of this spare, pragmatic kind exist as soon as infants can maintain plans of action long enough to connect with others in gazing, object handling, or vocal play.

A second, more sophisticated meaning for the term role refers to the kind of stance or participation in a situation that is implied when we talk of the role of the narrator or the audience, the villain or the heroine. If we speak of roles in this sense, then a grasp of roles becomes a quite different and more complex acquisition. In this second sense, an understanding of roles is doubly critical to the development of storytelling. Within stories, having a concept of role provides a cast of characters whose motivations and intentions lend direc- tion to and whose interactions provide the inner dynamics of events. And at the boundary between stories and pragmatic activity, a concept of role becomes important in a second way: It distinguishes the activities and atti- tudes of the teller from those of the characters. But before either the roles within stories or those surrounding stories can develop, the groundwork has to be laid. This groundwork takes the form of a slow separation of roles from par- ticular actors and an increasingly sharp distinction between the worlds of pragmatic action and narrative.

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You and I: The Human Origins of Roles in the First Year

J, at 12 months, and his father are seated opposite each other at the kitchen table. J’s father is trying to get him to finish the last bites of lunch, lifting the bites one by one rather than leaving J to his own devices. The repetitive nature of actions sparks a kind of game. The father holds out a bite to J, but J turns his head abruptly to the side, hiding his mouth. The father follows this and again brings the bite up to J’s mouth. J turns his head sharply to the opposite side. The father pretends to quit - saying, “Guess no more lunch.” With that J whips his head into position facing his father and opens his mouth wide while his father drops in the previously ignored bite of lunch.

Here the actors’ parts are not spare; J is doing much more than is demanded. In fact, this and similar instances represent the first occasions on which he plays rather than performs a part. Instead of simply eating the offered bite, J adds the nuances of refusal and teasing. Here is an indication of what will later be critical in the emergence of the role of storyteller-a distance from the pragmatic requirements of performance. The teasing is in some ways the first evidence of a seam between the world of pragmatic action and another, imagined world. But, rich as this interaction is compared to straight- forward feeding, it yields only joking versions of actual events rather than novel ones. T o move from joking to narrative, J must be able to construct events without acting in them. T o do so requires being able to put other actors into his place. But this hinges on a concept of roles through which individual actors can rotate-something that escapes him at 12 months.

J’s father initiates a game of peek-a-boo, placing his hands over his face and waiting to see what J will do. J looks at him, waits a moment, then, catching onto the game, puts his own hands over his face, waits briefly, then pulls them away, looking rather puzzled to find that his father is still sitting with his hands over his face. He then repeats the action, peeking out at his father through his parted hands and vocalizing to catch his attention. The game progresses only whenJ’s father gives up, takes down his hands, and calls out, “Where’s J? Where did he go?” At that point, J pulls away his hands, smiling broadly. Then, to begin a new round of play, he quickly claps his hands over his face once again.

Several points can be made about the roles played out in this game. First, there are not ]parts so much as there are typical actions for each of the participants. J has learned the actions of the hider, and he sticks conservatively to them, even when that means that his actions imitate rather than comple- ment those of his father. There is no changing of parts, despite the father’s consistent cues to J that he, the father, wants to be found. Instead, J “reclaims” the only portion he knows of this game by repeating the actions typical of that

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part over and over. He can neither accept the seeker role nor be explicit about asking his partner to take the seeker role relative to his as the hider. Moreover, his conception of even the hider’s part is frozen in stereotypic responses. The role of hider consists for him solely in covering and uncovering his face rather than in evading the seeker in a variety of ways. Rather than acting out a gen- eral stance, J’s enactment of roles at this point consists of playing out routines that can be varied in terms of performance (timing, tempo, and so forth) but not in terms of structure.

The limitations of this literal relation between actors and their typical actions emerges in the following observation, which revealsJ’s inability to dis- tinguish between roles in a situation.

J has been playing in his own room. There he found his jack-in-the-box sitting on the table with a block resting on its lid. He cranked the han- dle, the jack popped up, sending the block flying off behind a shelf. J wants to make this grand event happen again, but he has lost his block. He runs to the kitchen, calling out his father‘s name. He pulls his father back into the room and points behind the shelf, saying, “There, there.” His father has a hard time understanding and tries several guesses, pulling out first one favorite book then another. J, somewhat exasper- ated, at last takes his father‘s hand in his own, places them both on top of the jack-in-the-box, makes a kind of explosive noise, and moves his and his father’s hand in an arc toward the bookcase. J then reaches his own hand down behind the bookcase, making somewhat conventional- ized effort sounds to signal reaching. Still looking at his father, he says something like, ”Block.”

Faced with his father’s lack of understanding, J must do something if he is to get his block back. His only strategy is to make his father’s knowledge of the situation literally synonymous with his own by moving his father‘s hand through the critical events. Using himself as a model, he shows his father what he is to do-reach behind the shelf to find the block. What is present is the ability to make another appreciate his own point of view by enforcing an iden- tity of action and thus of intent. What is lacking is the ability to conceive of the situation from the other‘s point of view, to shift perspectives or roles. This capacity depends upon the ability to distinguish between roles and the actors that fill them. Only then can the child develop a concept of role which extends beyond a particular actor’s actions.

Roles for Actors

The ability to conceive of a role as independent of a particular actor emerges gradually in the period between 12 and 18 months. It builds out-of a number of broad cognitive changes that transform the child‘s earlier knowl- edge of social interactions into the conceptual structures required for storytell-

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ing. These early changes can be viewed as a new freedom from dealing in par- ticulars, a freedom which is visible in many contexts. It shows up in the child's capacity for using a range of persons as intermediaries to obtain particular goals.

J, at 18 months, wants a banana from the top of the refrigerator, Knowing he will need an intermediary, he crosses the room and yanks on his father, pointing and vocalizing toward the fruit, checking back to his father's line of gaze and expression to make sure that he has con- nected. His father refuses, saying that it is almost dinner time. J fusses then goes on playing. A few minutes later when his mother arrives home from work, J, seeing a new opportunity, pulls her toward the refrigerator, vocalizing, pointing, and checking as before.

J begins to rixognize that there are many instances of humans who share qualities and potentials for action. At about 15 months, J is often engaged in mapping a quality or attribute of one action onto others.

J has just performed a trick for his father, for which his father claps and applauds. J, though his back was originally to them, now turns to look at his aunt and mother, eager to see if they are similarly affected. When he discovers they are not clapping, he scans their faces for reasons, looking from them to his father and back again to them.

Additional hints of such a realization appear in conjunction with a gradually developing capacity for imitation (Piaget, 1962). This emerges as early as 12 to 15 months, when J begins to imitate the actions of others, substi- tuting his toys for the objects adults use and mimicking their actions with ges- tures of his own:

J, at 14 months, watches as his mother vacuums his room. After watch- ing a moment, he burrows in his toy box and produces a long-handled push toy that he grabs onto and shoves along before him, poking into crevices and under furniture much as his mother had done shortly before.

J, at 14 months, sees his father shake a dust mop out the window. Later that same dayJ finds the broom in the closet and drags it out. He pulls it to the window where his father had shaken the mop and tries to push it up. When he has no luck, he goes off in search of his father, who hangs onto him, as J tries shaking it out the window.

At first these iimitations appear in parallel or when triggered by the sight of an appropriate prop. Later they occur after an interval in time, becoming what Piaget has termed "deferred imitations" (1962). Gradually,

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such imitation ceases to be the child alone mimicking the actions of others. It now incorporates interaction between roles. J’s mother writes of him at 18 months:

I had just taken a few Polaroid pictures of J. He was fascinated with the camera and waiting for the pictures to come out, so I could get him to stand still for several. When I had finished, he really wanted to see the camera, so I handed it to him. He didn’t care a lot about the mechan- ics. What he wanted to do was to trade places. He made me stand where he had been standing and he arranged me, as I had done to him. Then he stepped back and held up the,camera as I had. Then he went looking for his father and brought him back and wanted to make him pose just as he had done with me.

In this example, J not only acts the part of the photographer but wants to reproduce the larger situation in which there is both photographer and sub- ject. If he adopts one role, then his counterpart in play must take on the com- plementary role and become the subject of the photo. It is this ability to reverse roles that finally yields a concept of role independent of a particular player. This new concept radically reorganizes the structure of pretense in two critical ways. First, roles emerge not as fixed action patterns but as stances toward or within an action. And second, these stances are generative: They do not dictate what to do but suggest a mode of behavior within a situation. In the following example, J , at 17 months, plays a game of peek-a-boo in which he is able to adopt the stance of the seeker as well as that of the hider. In his enact- ment of the hider role, J goes beyond the mere actions appropriate to the role to suggest the tension between chaser and chased, aggressor and victim.

J sees his father coming around the corner toward his room. J quickly ducks down beside his bureau, a favorite screen in hide-and-seek games. His father pretends to hunt high and low, calling him. J pops out from his hiding spot then dashes across his room, hiding in his closet. Again his father pretend to scour the room, calling all the while. When his father at last opens the door to the closet, J runs out of the room, looking back to see if his father is chasing him. J runs through the house and back toward his room. He comes over to his father and, pulling him over to the side of the bureau, tries to place him in this typ- ical location for a hider, saying, “Daddy, Daddy.” Once his father crouches in place, J backs off, looks away, calling, “Daddy? . . . Daddy?”

Much as this new capacity for roles and dramatic play represents an important achievement, a further advance lies between it and the capacity for constructing narratives through the use of toy replicas. What is still lacking is the ability to map roles onto inanimate objects.

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Roles in Narrative: The Development of “Maybe”

In many ways, the development of narrative capacities implies a fun- damental reconceptualization of the world. Previously the child participated only in presently occurring events; slowly this expanded to include the replay of past events in deferred imitations. The move to narrative marks a move past recollection to speculation-not only what did happen but what might have happened or what could happen. Significantly, one mother commented of her child at this time, “I can’t tell whether she’s telling the truth any more. It used to be that when she told me something, I knew it had really happened. Now I can’t be sure.” In storytelling, furthermore, the child’s role is not that of a direct participant but rather one of a narrator who orchestrates the actions of seemingly independent characters. The establishment of narrative roles, then, entails two crucial achievements: The child must not only endow small props with the qualities of live participants capable of initiating actions and speech but must step out of the role of actor into that of author or narrator.

Between 18 and 24 months, J begins to construct this capacity to treat toys as “independent agents” (Watson and Fischer, 1977; Wolf, 1978). Origi- nally dolls and animals are handled only as the passive recipients of the child’s own pretense actions- the child feeds, beds down, and talks to those props. As in the following example from J’s mother’s diary at 20 months, J uses replicas to recreate experiences from his own life.

J had fallen down and cut his forehead just above the eye. He had a Band-Aid over the stitches. When we came home he wanted to put a bike helmet of his on. I told him no, because I didn’t want it to start bleeding again. He was unhappy about the Band-Aid, so we put one on his baby doll, which seemed to make it okay. Later that night, he was walking by the doll in its little rocker, and he pointed to the Band- Aid and said what I said to him earlier, ‘Ouch, it hurts. Be better soon. Poor baby.’

This ability to endow substitute agents with human characteristics opens the door to the possibility of establishing narrative worlds. Presented with a set of symbolic play props, the child begins to construct small events that are no longer purely pragmatic. At 15 months, when J is offered a toy house and several people and animal figures, his play shows a marked absorp- tion with the pragmatic issues of placement and displacement- fitting a lion and several other figures in and out of a house or successively knocking one of the small figures off the edge of the table where he played. From the age of 18 months, however, even though these physical action schemes continue to have a strong attraction, his responses to the props begin to be informed by a con- cept of the relations among the figures considered as agents. The lion may now be barred from entering the house by those who are grouped together inside the house. In a similar manner, the figure is not simply knocked off the

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table but the child attends to the narrative ramifications and extends the story to relate, “Oh no . . . her hurt . . . gotta go to hospital.”

The evolution of these events entails the dual development of figures as agents and the child as a narrator rather than an actor within the scene. Throughout the next year, storytelling moves toward an increasing clarity of this role division. In addition, corresponding changes must also occur in the child’s differentiation of roles within stories; characters must become distinct from one another, and individual characters must come to incorporate inter- nal variety.

In the following section, we pursue J’s responses to two stories that pre- sent further issues in the development of narrative roles. These stories high- light two of the most potent interactional themes in early stories. We will look first at J’s enactment of the aggressor-victim dichotomy and explore how the force of his characterization both enriches and constrains the possibility of dif- ferentiation between characters. Next, we will turn to a story in whichJ’s pref- erence for repetitive action sequences competes with the establishment of familial roles. By charting such responses between the ages of 18 and 30 months, we hope to follow J’s progress from pragmatic play with toys to the construction of narrative worlds.

Aggressor-Victim: From Actions to Qualities

When young children first begin to relate their dreams, one of the ear- liest themes to emerge, signalling perhaps the first externalization of the child‘s accumulated fears, is that of monsters. Because the aggressor-victim theme is so emotionally charged, and because it presents an extreme case of role polar- ization, this dichotomy suggests itself as a likely arena for examining some of the earliest instances of role differentiation in narrative. By presenting the child with small props representing a girl, a house, and a lion, one can watch early action schemes give way to storylike events in light of some specifically narrative issues.

Clearly, as with any role, learning the part of the lion entails a familiar- ity with the cultural convention of what this role implies. Nevertheless, while the child may learn at an early age that a lion’s role is to elicit fear, the possibil- ity of depth and flexibility within that role depends upon the child‘s expanding interpretation of that convention over time. Just as the aggressor category spans a narrative continuum that ranges from lions and dragons chasing their prey to the wicked stepmother in a fairy tale, so the nature of the threat posed by the aggressor figure may also evolve based on the child’s changing concep- tion of the role. While the threat of the aggressor for a young child may be largely physical (for instance, “he gonna eat me”), for an older child the ten- sion may reflect more psychological overtones. In order to appropriately extend the lion’s characterization to any situation, the child must be able to capture not just the lion’s actions but also the underlying qualities that moti- vate these actions. Furthermore, once the child can adapt to any situation the

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qualities that form the essence of the lion’s role, he must be able to explore variations-such as a lonely lion- that put these very qualities at issue. While the child’s earliest narrative enactments with props do not distinguish the lion from any of the other figures, these later variations gain meaning only against the backdrop of how a lion typically acts.

As we suggested earlier, a child between the ages of 18 and 24 months straddles the symbolic fence. Confronted with the props for such a narrative, J still tends toward exploratory object manipulation even after differentiated roles have been dramatically modelled: The lion, along with the girl, is simply stuffed inside the house. J endows the lion with no particularly lionlike quali- ties that would render such a pairing problematic. Indeed, blocks substituted for figures would provoke a similar reaction.

Nevertheless, J begins to exhibit fleeting instances of differentiation between roles. At times he may kiss the girl replica or knock the two figures together, exclaiming in an angry voice, “Grrr . . . No! No!” He may growl for the lion or brandish it in a threatening manner. On occasion, he may even have the lion growl and approach the girl.

Despite the achievement over mere object handling represented in these responses, the narrative limitations are considerable. T o begin with, J most typically uses the lion to scare the adult participant rather than in an interchange with the girl. The narrative event is subsumed into a kind of peek- a-boo game; the child hangs on to the lion, prolonging the suspense, then abruptly thrusts it toward the adult who responds, to the child’s delight, with terror. The lion as yet has no sustained symbolic function as scarer. If the adult has her lion figure approach J’s girl figure, J has the girl figure, undaunted, walk inro the lion. If the adult has the lion fall down, J accepts an offer to kiss it and give it a Band-Aid. Even when J uses the lion to project an aggressorlike role, the role is distinguished by a set of actions rather than by the qualities underlying those actions.

As such examples also indicate, rather than respecting the boundary of the story and working through the characters, J participates as a full partner in the action, saying, “Hi,” to the lion or kissing the girl. The characters are acted-J will walk them-but he does not yet have them initiate actions. As with the earliest peek-a-boo games, there is no elaboration of the role; the child can tease by delaying the entrance of the figure, but the structure of the role itself remains unexpanded.

In the first half of the second year, the expectations the child brings to bear upon a similar ,set of props alter dramatically, as we see by the following example of 26 months:

J is provided with props representing a girl, house, and lion. J holds the lion and has it approach the girl, roaring menacingly. The experi- menter has the girl act very frightened and flee from the lion. J contin- ues to have his lion approach the girl, then directs the experimenter, “Girl in house . . . go bed.” The experimenter puts the girl inside the

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house and has her say how glad she is to have gotten away from the lion. J pauses, then knocks the house over. The whole event begins again and is repeated several times.

This storytelling performance is interesting from several perspectives. J has clearly apprehended the aggressor role of the lion as well as the polarized interrelation of the two characters. By 28 months, the potency of the aggressor cateogry is unmistakable. Immediately upon seeing a small replica of a lion, J announces, “Dat scary lion,” and quickly hides it away across the room. As such anecdotes imply, the child can generate a viable, if highly temporary, solution to the conflict between the figures. Such resolutions rely on physically separating the two antagonists. As in the above story, in order to shield the girl from the lion the child directs the experimenter to put the girl to bed. More commonly, however, the child resorts to disposing of the lion. J abruptly ban- ishes the lion from the scene, hiding it across the room or underneath a pile of toys.

Although J begins to seek resolutions to story problems, he has not retreated from direct participation in the action. He steps in and gives direc- tions for a resolution rather than narratively accomplishing this through the characters within the confines of the story. In banishing the lion, J protects the girl, but his manipulation rather than the girl’s response determines the course of the action. Throughout this time span, it is the child’s intervention that accomplishes the resolution rather than the actions of the characters.

Moreover, the threat posed by the aggressor figure is so strong that his character is, in a sense, frozen. The lion has one dimension - physical intimi- dation. A variation in which he is both lion and lonely surpasses the scope of the child. After witnessing a version in which a lonely lion promises to reform and never scare again, J directs impatiently, “Say roar. Say rrrrr. Make big noise.” A repentant lion is an impossibility until a role can incorporate multi- ple, even paradoxical dimensions. Presented with a set of props (large lion, small lion, other animals) in which the lion can serve as both father to the small lion and aggressor to the other animals, J switches rapidly back and forth from one characterization to the other with no narrative means of integrating the two.

If the characterization of the lion suffers from being overly defined, the enactment of the girl’s role reflects the opposite tendency. Two responses pre- dominate in this time period. Most typically, her role is overshadowed by the highly charged aggressor figure, and the child essentially converts her role to that of the more potent figure. Asked to play out the role of the girl, J has her growl and roar. Alternatively, J has the girl adopt a stern, parental tone, chid- ing, for example, “GO back, bad lion!” But whether J has the girl growl or scold, he does not recreate her victim status; neither her fear nor her flight from the lion is enacted. Perhaps because of the greater emotional risk involved in projecting vulnerability- as well as the emotional detachment this entails - conveying the girl’s fear appears to be more difficult than conveying the lion’s menace.

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Because the child has no effective interactional means to nullify the threat posed by the: aggressor (such as having the lion and girl agree to be friends), the action in these early stories tends to be circular. The child is essentially straitjacketed by the very force of the characterization he has evolved. Putting the girl to bed does not ultimately dissipate the threat of the lion, so the action is reinitiated by knocking the house down and beginning again. Similarly, banishing the lion makes him no less powerful, and J brings him out seconds later to repeat the scenario.

As these examples demonstrate, the establishment of interrelations between characters makes possible a narrative sequence of actions and conse- quences that explores the implications of those roles. However, two important limitations remain. The event itself is still quite circumscribed. The sequence of chase and escape lacks narrative modulation; J neither enacts the reaction of t t e victim nor extends or elaborates on the basic pursuit. Furthermore, the narrative thread is broken by the child’s intrusions; J resorts to the expedient of direct intervention rather than working through the characters and main- taining the story frame.

At this early stage, the aggressor-victim dichotomy is almost exclu- sively a problem of role relations. The characterizations basically determine the course of the story; there is no extended sequential plot through which such characterizations must be maintained. In this regard, it may be helpful to look briefly at anoth,er story in which the demands of differentiated roles are knatched against the pull toward action sequences.

Mothers and Babies: Roles Within Actions

Perhaps the only theme in children’s early stories that rivals the aggressor theme is that of the faimily. Given any set of props that accommodates such a pos- sibility, the child’s first move in the direction of role relations is invariably to establish family groupings. While the aggressor and familial roles may intersect in the case of a punitive parent, for example, the child tends to polarize the aggressor and caretaking attributes into distinct characterizations. Though a child achieves narrative competence through a coordination of action and role structure, the narrowness with which each one is at first conceived gives rise to a precarious bal- ance. Just as the young child cannot sustain a character with a multiple iden- tity- a lonely lion, for example- so one would expect the child to have difficulties in expanding a character’s role beyond a strictly familial function. As action schemes develop into action sequences, however, their preeminence may over- whelm the possibility of the child’s constructing differentiated roles. For the young child, the rigidity of either of these competing approaches- invoking family relationships or replaying action sequences - may engulf a story.

As an example, we can turn to J’s reenactment of a given story at 29 months. Using symbolic play props, we presented the following story:

A sheep goes to his friend’s house and asks the mother duck if his friend the duck can come out and play. The mother duck gives permission

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and the two set off. They come to a pond. The duck swims; the sheep tries, but cannot, so the duck helps by giving him a ride on his back. They walk on and come to a fence. This time, the sheep can jump over the fence, but the duck is unable and accepts a ride on the sheep’s back. Once over, they lie down by some flowers to rest.

As we have outlined, J’s reenactments of this narrative draw from two contradictory sources. To begin with, the child’s tendency toward parallel action on the part of all the characters undercuts the maintenance of differenti- ated roles. J alternates randomly between having each of the three figures swim in the pond, jump over the fence, or go to sleep, bypassing both the reciprocal assistance between the sheep and the duck and the mother duck‘s role “offstage” for most of the action. In fact, after several rounds, even inani- mate objects follow the same action path. After conveying the sheep and ducks across the fence, J announces, “And the flower gonna jump, too.”

Interspersed within these action sequences, J’s responses also reflect a reinterpretation of the story toward a simpler version of parent-child interac- tion. After the props have been introduced as a mommy duck, a baby duck, and their friend, the sheep, J interposes, “No, that’s mommy duck, that’s baby Jonathan, that’s Daddy.” Later, after laying all three figures down to sleep, J corrects the arrangement, putting the two ducks side by side because, “The baby gonna sleep with the mommy.”

In a real sense, the familial identities J designates for the props, while they differ from the roles put forth in the original story, point to his ability to structure role relations among the props. Though we described J putting the characters through a series of actions in a random sequence, one also finds vignettes of sequential action in which he draws out the narrative conse- quences of events. For example, J drops the baby duck over the blocks serving as a fence and relates, ”He fall over. Ooooo [crying sounds]. Help him [bring- ing sheep over]. Help him, policeman.” Later, with the duck, he describes as he enacts, “He going a jump in the water. He going a jump over the fence. He fell, he fell in water. He’s wet . . . . I have to dry him up.”On the other hand, such vignettes veer far from the course of the original story and are consistent with J’s tendency to rework the story along more personal lines.

Clearly, this story’s structural complexities outweigh those of the spon- taneously generated lion and girl story. Yet the same issues resonate through- out both. J’s inability to maintain the dual function of the duck (as the mother’s baby and the sheep’s friend) echoes his difficulty in formulating a lion who is at once lion and lonely. In both cases he isolates one potent dimension to the exclusion of a more widely conceived characterization. His conversion to a theme of familial interaction is reminiscent of the stern, parental tone that he attributes to the girl in the former story. As in the previous story, the child’s limited grasp of the interactional issues of the story leads to a cyclical reinitia- tion with no clear denouement.

Finally, as with the lion and girl story, J’s role is not yet distinct from those of the characters. Rather than resolving narrative problems within the

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story frame, he himself steps in. When the experimenter brings the story to the point where the sheep cannot swim, J sets the sheep in the pond. Similarly, informed that the duck cannot get over the fence, J simply carries her over himself.

Although such limitations are numerous, they should not overshadow the achievements of this age period. The expansion of pragmatically derived knowledge of roles into a symbolic conception of independent characters is no trivial advance. By investing props with agent status and by working through these props to play out sequential events involving differentiated characters, the child has begun the process of constructing imaginary worlds. The potency of these early narrative role structures may limit breadth within a role, but the very introduction of these roles measures the child’s distance from purely prag- matic schemes.

looking to the Future: The Child as Storyteller

As we have seen, in the evolution of narrative ability the child must draw from experience without being bound by it. The structuring of role rela- tions to narrative ends entails three major accomplishments.

To begin with, the role played by the child must become one of narra- tor rather than one of direct participant. In order to maintain the story frame, the child must sustain the illusion of independent characters. Action and speech must appear to be motivated by the characters in the story. Problems that arise within the story must be addressed by characters within the story rather than through the intervention of the child.

Second, the child must sustain differentiated roles. Instead of moving all characters through identical actions, the characters’ roles must determine their actions. Interaction between characters must reflect both their differenti- ated status and the. qualities that motivate their actions.

And finally,, the child must also incorporate differentiation and ambig- uity within roles. In the sheep and duck story, the small duck must be simulta- neously a friend to the sheep and a child to the mother duck. In the lion and girl story, differentiation may range from accepting the possibility of a repent- ant lion to reconciling the competing demands of a lion who is at once aggres- sor to the other animals and daddy to a smaller lion. The acknowledgement of multiple dimensions within a character also allows the child to express charac- ters in different moods in varying contexts who still retain their identity.

What underlies each of these achievements and makes possible the con- struction of imaginary worlds is the child’s increasing separation from the world of the immediate present. In progressing from the examination of what is to the exploration of what may be, the child moves from the world of prag- matic action to the %world of imitated action to the world of imagined, narrative action. Yet this ability to use props as autonomous characters is only the first step in the development of a capacity to sustain the illusion of a narrative world. Through the elaboration and coordination of elements within the story- plot, characterization, theme, tone, narrative stance- the child

becomes able to construct and maintain the story boundary delimiting the sphere of the imaginary event. I t is toward this achievement that the three- year-old child must move.

References

Piaget, J. Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood. New York: Norton. 1962. Watson, M., and Fischer, K. “A Developmental Sequence of Agent Use in Late

Wolf, D. “Otherhood: The Development of the Concept of Independent Agents.” Infancy.” Child Development, 1977, 48, 828-836.

Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1978.

Shelley Rubin investigates young children’s narrative development at Harvard Project Zero.

Dennie Wolf directs a longitudinal study of early symbolic development at Harvard Project Zero. In addition, she is a coauthor of a book concerned with the intersection of parent and child lifeccles, Ourselves and Our Children, Random House, 1978.