The Court's Story of Facts. A Narratological Approach to the Narrative in the Judgement

This contribution begins with posing the basic question of how the court’s story of facts, as it is presented in the written judgment, can be described in narratological terms. The author goes on to claim that many of the established narratological concepts need revision in order to fulfill this task. A central premise for his argument is that the difference between factual and fictional stories – which is still a somewhat underdeveloped topic within narrative theory – must be dealt with before one can proceed to construct an adequate narratological apparatus for the analysis of the court’s narratives. After suggesting how a workable distinction between factual and fictional narratives could be made, the author goes on to modify, through the analysis of selected samples from Norwegian judgments, narratological notions such as narrative constitution, the narrator, characterization, focalization – with the aim of optimizing these concepts for the narrative analysis of the court’s story of the facts.