Methodology and Interpretation tears and prayers by saying that the child was healthy and she should go home. In terms of genre, the first half of the story is a self–contained personal experience story consisting of an introduction (the conversation with her grandson and his wife), a conflict (the wife is four months pregnant), an escalation (emotional torment that the child may be born blind), a resolution (the child can see), and a conclusion to the story with a value judgement (And I believe it was the grace of God, have mercy!). At the centre of this story is the narrator’s emotional torment resulting from an unintentional coincidence of circumstances. In addition, the experience was so powerful that the narrator cannot hold back her tears when telling the story, even though many years have passed since the event. Because the story is a structural and compositional whole, the narrator’s inclusion of a second part, or continuation, to the structure of an already whole story seems unusual. As a result, the personal experience story in this performance acts not as a self–contained narrative, but rather as an introduction to another story – as an announcement of a main event. In the second half of the story the narrator makes reference to the Biblical story of the healing of the blind when she tells of her meeting and conversation with Jesus Christ, which results (in the mind of the narrator) in the child regaining his sight. The narrator does not mark a clear boundary between the truth and her vision (It’s as if I see it, they appear to me, as I’m sitting there on the side of the road. I even see myself sitting there on the side of the road and all of them [Christ and his disciples] walking past). The narrator interprets the event as a miracle of God that she has experienced herself, and therefore the second half of the narrative is considered a memorate in terms of both content and function, which reflects the narrator’s religious views. Both halves of the story could be analysed separately as two independent narrative units, but, as the narrator finishes the second half of the story, she nonetheless includes a sort of synthesizing conclusion to the whole story, in which she returns to the value judgement offered in the first half. The narrator has thereby integrated two stories into one, which have certain connections between them in terms of both genre and
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