Retelling stories in spontaneous conversation

Retold conversational stories provide a natural testing site for analyzing narrative. Distillation of a kernel story from separate narrative performances facilitates comparison between them and highlights their similarities and differences. This article investigates (a) immediate retelling for a newly arrived listener, (b) relating the same story for different audiences, and (c) group reconstruction of a story already familiar to those present. I propose methods for analyzing retold stories in conversation and suggest several directions for future research.