The Place Where Things Fall Apart: The World from Inside a Fragment

Narratives of traumatic or supernatural experience and other stories of fright and awe frequently have moments of breakdown in fluency, where otherwise articulate performance is replaced by hesitation, fragmentation, or other signs of untellability. Broken or partial sentences, however, can be seen as framing mechanisms highlighting moments of narrative significance. This paper explores the potential for understanding moments of breakdown not as unintelligible fragmentation but as markers of heightened meaning and import. Looked at topically and across similar narratives told by a variety of narrators may provide new ways of understanding fragmentation as narrative framing.