RT Journal Article SR Electronic(1) A1 Reid, Margaret YR 1993 T1 Narrative Silence in America's Stories JF Journal of Narrative and Life History VO 3 IS 2-3 SP 269 OP 281 DO https://doi.org/10.1075/jnlh.3.2-3.11nar PB John Benjamins SN 1053-6981, AB AbstractIn the historical event of the American Revolution, as well as in certain central texts of the American literary imagination, a tension between the power of a community to define itself through language and the resistance of experiential history to such enclosure is represented through a particular form of narrative silence. This narrative form may first suggest repression and the failures of memory. But the American imagination has used narrative silence as a way of representing events that lie outside of the known and planned, in order to preserve the residual life of experience and so to bear witness to the imagina-tion's dependence on the whole of history. In this essay, I argue that this narrative form reveals a central paradox of the American cultural imagination: This imagination successfully encodes its story of community exactly insofar as it creates a place—in language and in thought—for the safely silent acknowl-edgement of the power of experiential knowledge and untold secrets. (Culture studies; literary criticism), UL https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/jnlh.3.2-3.11nar