Randy D. Gordon. Courtesy photo
When we left off last time, we had just walked through Gerry Spence’s masterful closing argument in the famous Silkwood v. Kerr-McGee case and observed how he had drawn the jurors into his performance as full participants. He did this by providing each of them with the building blocks to construct narratives that would justify (again, to each of them) beliefs as to what “really happened” to Karen Silkwood and, moreover, who was responsible. To understand how he did this, let’s consider how narratives are constructed and how they lead us to conclusions.
In “The Sense of an Ending,” Frank Kermode takes the ticking of a clock as a rudimentary, yet pregnant, narrative form:
