| This paper aims to examine the section of complicating action in the narrative structure presented by Labov (1972). Complicating action consists of narrative clauses, that is, a series of temporally ordered clauses. However, other kinds of clauses appear in actual narratives, and they seem to intervene the flow of a temporally ordered story. This leads to the two research questions: (l) What functions does intervening discourse in the complicating action fulfill? (2) What kind of cohesive devices are used to return to the main story line from intervening discourse? These questions are to be answered through close examination of actual narratives collected by personal interviews.
As a conclusion, there are three functions intervening discourse fulfills: to provide supplementary information; to order subsidiary events to clarify the temporal order of a main story; and to evaluate a narrative. The narrators retrieve the main story line from intervening discourse by employing conjunctions, by utilizing reference, by paraphrasing a whole idea unit, or by completing an instigating idea unit. Thus, four types of cohesive devices are observed in this research.
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