Liam McNeish Butler
Research Methods – Prof. Lee
Interview Analysis
I believe I have an advantage over most others when it comes to understanding my cultural identity. When you’re from New York City there is this obnoxious side of you that can’t wait to tell people where you’re from, what you went through growing up, and how it made you who you are. However for me and many other children who grew up after 9/11, there is a strange relationship with what we know about our city, and what we’ve been taught. Some don’t fully understand the attacks, or what led them to occur, in fact many don’t know much else besides what they learned in school. However, some learn from parents, or family and friends how the city they now know was shaped by terror, and grief. My mother taught me about 9/11 from a young age, and it helped me understand the ways in which people respond to tragedy, and how important it is to promote empathy and kindness in the face of terror.
When younger people hear about 9/11 they are most likely listening to a story from the perspective of someone who was old enough to comprehend the attacks, or reading about it in articles and news stories. Most of the time these stories are summaries of what happened, and how we reacted, but often times they don’t paint the full picture of what 9/11 did to people in nearby communities. These were the first words my mother said when I asked her about the days and weeks after 9/11 for our interview, “Devastation, just, devastation, because we lived in a community where we lost 86 people, at the world trade center. It was horrific. You walk down the street and people would be on their knees crying, and this went on for weeks. There were notices on fences, and on walls with pictures of people, asking “have you seen this person”. And of course they wouldn’t see them ever again, not even to bury them.” Of course I will never be able to personally understand these memories, but it’s summaries such as these that exemplify the effects of terror on an individual. Imagine living through these attacks, wondering if your loved ones are alive, but having no way to get into Manhattan or make a cellphone call.
My mother often talks about what New York City was like before 9/11 during a time where the United States was experiencing a steady period of growth, and things in New York had finally settled down after several decades of high crime. “People were focused on getting ahead in their lives, people were focused on the community they lived in. There wasn’t ever a big middle eastern community in Hoboken, but I remember when it wasn’t a big deal to New Yorkers.” My mother included that the unity that existed before 9/11 wasn’t the same, and “that unity only lasted until we went to war in Iraq”. Knowing what New York was like before the attacks establishes an idea for what the orientation was prior to 9/11.
I’m not sure that my mother included much information that would fall under complicating action or results, but she did include, “There was a sense of community, like in any disaster. In any crucial event. Where everyone pulls together, and tries to help. I mean we had friends who volunteered to go clean things up at ground zero, and now you know….they have lung illnesses”. The story of 9/11 doesn’t seem to be over, and it affects thousands of first responders and residents who were in the area of Ground Zero.
I think my mother tells this version of what she experienced because it’s important to her that I know that the people who perpetrated these attacks were bad people, and it wasn’t because of their religion or how they looked. She included, “Well we had a president who decided we should attack Iraq, but I think by the time we got there we’d all figured out that the attackers were not Iraqi. I think we expected a more considered response.” She continued, “They didn’t look at all of the facts, they said ‘how can we use this to our advantage’ and they ended up delegitimizing the whole thing.”
In order to bring the interview back to the present I asked my mom if she remembered what I first learned about 9/11, and if she knows how it was taught to me throughout my education. On this topic, my mother said, “I would imagine some of what you learned about it was through osmosis, through the fact that there were memorials all around you. That, well certainly, your second birthday party which was 4 days after 9/11 wasn’t held. It was too hard a time. People were too devastated. I think you figured it out a little but every year before your birthday.”
Patterson and De Fina have included several ways that the Labovian narrative analysis is flawed in its approach to analyzing the research. Some of these include, an inevitable partial recount of personal experiences, and failing to appreciate the creativity that is involved in personal storytelling. I don’t believe that my interview transcript illustrates any shortcomings of this method, in fact I appreciated the tactics that helped me better build the narrative. Maybe there is some partial account in the retelling of my mothers experience, but the method helped me distinguish what was usable for my analysis.
My interviewee’s cultural identity was constructed as she continued in retelling her account of 9/11, and the effects it had on our community. She first distinguished herself as a New Yorker when she briefly covered life before the attacks, and continued to discuss our time living in Hoboken furthering the extent that she explains her identity. My mother is the only parent I have and is the main reason I have the identity I do today.
One response a reader may raise about my interviewees answers is whether the accounts are partial, and have been selectively chosen by the subject. However the narrative analysis of the interview supports my revised topic, and directly refers to the ways in which emotions are affected by the tragedy. The analysis also further supports my topic as my mother included examples of communities unifying in the face of fear.