Abstract
Why do vastly different narrative plots turn on contested witnessing of the past? Here I propose two mechanisms of plot generation. The strong hypothesis holds that one of the most common yet strangely undertheorised forms of plot generation is witnessing as the consequential reopening of someone’s actual firsthand encounter together with its elicitation, obstruction, counterfeiting and contestation. The weaker hypothesis holds that narratives foregrounding being-with develop through recursive discernment of others’ pasts, typifications and commitments. Close readings of a range of entirely counterintuitive examples show how the two mechanisms interlock, and where neither applies.
I. Two Stories That Should Have Nothing in Common
A man wakes aboard a spacecraft with no idea how he got there. Two crewmates lie dead in the beds beside him. He knows a great deal of physics and biology, and he can still do calculations in his head, but he cannot remember his own name, let alone the decisions that put him light-years from Earth. In Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary (2021), Ryland Grace gradually reconstructs the circumstances of his mission, and the most consequential thing he recovers is that he did not volunteer. He refused to go, and he was put aboard anyway.
A man and a woman sit in a hotel room in the southern Peloponnese. They have been together for nine years, have twin daughters, and have spent the day with friends. By midnight they are fighting about what each of them gave up, who decided what, what was promised and what was meant. In Richard Linklater's Before Midnight (2013), Jesse and Céline were both present for almost every occurrence they argue about, and they cannot agree what those occurrences were.
In one narrative, a person's access to his own past has been disrupted. In the other, two people have overlapping access to a shared past and cannot agree on its significance. The genres differ, and so do the settings, the temporal scales, the stakes and the mediations that dominate. Conventional comparison would set science fiction against romantic drama, survival against intimacy, individual memory against shared memory. Yet both narratives make the reconstruction of a consequential interrecursive past a source of dramatic action. Both turn on the question of what happened between people, who actually encountered it, and what becomes possible when that past is reopened.
The similarity is not an identity. In Project Hail Mary, recovered memory is not witnessing; its force lies in the reappearance of an earlier interrecursive history that the protagonist could not previously articulate or challenge. In Before Midnight, past encounters and commitments are repeatedly reopened through consequential questioning between the people who experienced them. The two share a broad architecture, and only the second offers straightforward cases of witnessing proper.
This article advances two hypotheses about that architecture. The strong hypothesis is that witnessing, together with attempts to elicit, obstruct, counterfeit or contest it, is a widespread generator of narrative plot. The weaker hypothesis is that, more generally, narratives foregrounding being-with frequently develop through recursive discernment of other people's past encounters, biographical trajectories, present commitments and possible futures. The weaker hypothesis is broader, and neither is asserted to be universal. Neither claims, either, that audiences or narrators are themselves witnesses. Audiences follow the reopening of encounters among characters; they do not have their own firsthand access to fictional occurrences consequentially questioned.
The question the article pursues is why these mechanisms recur across narratives that otherwise have so little in common. Section II restates LVT's existing account of narrative as the reconstruction of interrecursive pasts. Sections III and IV set out the strong and weaker hypotheses and the relation between them. Section V tests both on six narratives chosen for their differences: Project Hail Mary, the Before trilogy, When Harry Met Sally, Pride and Prejudice, Othello and The Martian. Section VI turns to counterexamples and proposes that the mediational profile of a narrative helps explain which mechanism dominates. Section VII places the argument against existing narrative theory, from Aristotle to cognitive narratology, and states carefully what is and is not claimed.
II. Narrative and the Reconstruction of Interrecursive Pasts
Living Value Theory (LVT) has already argued that narrative is an exceptionally powerful form for reconstructing interrecursive pasts. Narrative "functions as symbolic contextual retention through time", and it exists "where consequential pasts remain recursively open for later response" (Ecks 2026f). A consequential past, in this sense, is "a past event whose effects remain recursively relevant in the present" (Ecks 2026f). The reason narrative is suited to such pasts is that "interrecursive complexity resists contextual stripping" (Ecks 2026f). An interrecursive past cannot be reconstructed adequately by listing a sequence of physical events. What matters is that living beings encountered one another, responded to what they understood the others to be doing, acted under expectations about others' conduct, and produced consequences that changed what became possible afterwards. Narrative can follow unfolding encounters, distinguish the understandings of different participants, and connect earlier actions to later consequences. This does not make narrative the only way to reconstruct interrecursive pasts, nor confine narrative to them; what it establishes is an affinity.
The affinity becomes clearer once the three types of recursive counterpart are distinguished. Nonrecursive counterparts are encountered as material conditions, traces, tools, landscapes, buildings or documents that do not answer back. Selfrecursive coordination involves remembering, reconsidering, imagining, regretting and reassessing one's own past. Interrecursive coordination involves living counterparts whose own coordination may respond to, contest or transform another's (Ecks 2026e). Narratives typically include all three, but the three do not generate the same kinds of plot. A damaged spacecraft can generate an extraordinarily complex sequence of material problems, none of which need depend on a dispute over anyone's past encounters. A dispute between spouses over what was promised years earlier depends on an interrecursive past that has become consequentially questionable again. LVT's general account of narrative already distinguishes stories whose load-bearing process is nonrecursive, selfrecursive or interrecursive, and holds that "plot is the progressive transformation of recursive discernment" (Ecks 2026b). The present article narrows that account. It asks what specific mechanisms generate plot when the load-bearing process is interrecursive and its object is the past and future of other lives.
Plot is not chronology. That one thing happened before another does not explain why the second follows from the first. A plot is generated when earlier coordinations create, constrain or reopen possibilities for later ones. Interrecursive histories are especially productive here because their consequences are not exhausted when the original encounter ends. An encounter can become newly relevant years later. A promise can be reopened after circumstances have changed. A statement once accepted can become questionable. A biographical judgment that seemed settled can lose its fit. These possibilities establish the conditions for the two mechanisms examined below.
The same account explains why audiences can follow such reopenings with such intensity. Narrative offers what LVT calls metabolic buffering, "reduced direct recursive exposure" (Ecks 2026f): an audience can feel the full weight of a disputed encounter without being questioned itself, and without its own trust, status or future depending on the answer. This is one reason why the audience's position should not be confused with a witness's. A reader of Othello knows exactly how the handkerchief travelled, and knows it with a certainty no character possesses, but no one will ever ask the reader what they saw. The audience follows the recursive fate of characters' access to events, with more, less or different access than the characters, and it does so precisely because its own access is never reopened. Witnessing within a narrative and following a narrative are therefore different coordinations, and the second depends on the buffering that keeps it from becoming the first.
They can be gathered in a single temporal proposition that recurs through the argument: an interrecursive past is never simply over merely because the original encounter has ended. The proposition needs immediate qualification. Most past encounters do not remain open. They sediment, become irrelevant, or are practically closed. The point is that particular past encounters can become open again, that reopening can transform the present, and that narrative is especially capable of reconstructing such transformations. In LVT's theory of recursive opening, a reopening "reactivates a relation that has already been closed or sedimented" (Ecks 2026c), and the narratives examined here are, among other things, extended studies of what such reactivation does.
III. Witnessing Proper: The Strong Hypothesis
The strong hypothesis depends on a strict definition, developed in a separate article. Witnessing is the consequential interrecursive reopening, at L3 or above, of a past occurrence through the articulated firsthand encounter of someone who actually experienced it, in response to another person's questioning or challenge about what happened (Ecks 2026d). Its conditions are jointly necessary. The person must actually have encountered the relevant occurrence. The encounter must later become the subject of consequential interrecursive reopening. That reopening must reach explicit symbolic articulation. And something must be at stake in establishing what happened. Neither legal institutions nor formal procedures are required; a family quarrel can contain witnessing proper. Most importantly, witnessing, far from being a permanent property acquired by everyone who happened to be present, is constituted in a particular episode of consequential reopening.
The definition excludes a great deal, and the exclusions matter for narrative theory. Seeing an event is not witnessing; neither is remembering it. Casually recounting an experience is ordinarily narration. An expert reconstructing an event they did not encounter is not witnessing that event. Someone falsely claiming firsthand access is producing a false claim. A person who does witness may nevertheless be mistaken or incomplete. These distinctions keep the narrative theory from making witnessing synonymous with any transmission of information about the past. A character who learns a fact, reads a document, or remembers something alone in a room is not thereby involved in witnessing.
Once witnessing proper is defined, four plot-generating processes organised around its possibility come into view. In elicitation, someone seeks to make an actual past encounter answerable through another person's account. In obstruction, someone prevents, refuses, delays or makes impossible the consequential articulation of firsthand access. In counterfeiting, someone claims or manufactures the appearance of firsthand access they did not possess, or misrepresents what an actual encounter establishes. In contestation, someone challenges the reliability, scope or interpretation of an actual firsthand account. Obstruction and counterfeiting, though not themselves witnessing, are plot-generating processes whose significance depends on the possibility of witnessing. A concealed encounter matters to a plot precisely because, if it were reopened, someone who was there could be made to answer for it.
Why does witnessing generate further action rather than merely supplying information? An earlier occurrence is closed in one sense: it is no longer happening. But it can become consequentially open through questioning someone who was there. The answer may alter trust, responsibility, status, punishment, affection or future commitments. That alteration creates new encounters, and those encounters may themselves be reopened later. The sequence is open-ended and recursive. A wife asks a husband where he was; his answer changes what she does next; what she does becomes, in turn, something about which he can later ask her. Witnessing is therefore more than a way of reconstructing plot information for the audience. It can generate the next phase of the plot.
Two further features make witnessing especially productive for plot. The first is that firsthand access is at once a resource and a liability. The person who was there holds something others need, and this gives them power: they can disclose, withhold, delay or shade. But the same access makes them answerable. They can be pressed, threatened, disbelieved or silenced, and the burden of having been present can be forced on them by others' questions. LVT's account of recursive jurisdiction, the governance of who may open, refuse or reclose a matter (Ecks 2026c), describes the field in which these struggles take place. Who may ask, who must answer, who may refuse, and who decides that an answer has settled the matter are among the most frequent sources of dramatic conflict, in domestic stories as much as in courtroom dramas.
The second feature is that a single answer can combine several processes. A person can articulate their actual encounter accurately on one point, shade it on another, and fill the gap with an inference presented as observation. Elicitation can produce witnessing proper and counterfeiting in the same speech. Contestation can be justified on one detail and unjust on another. Plots exploit these mixtures. They allow a character to be both truthful and deceptive, and they allow other characters, and audiences, to discover which parts were which only later.
The strong hypothesis can now be stated precisely. Witnessing-driven plots are likely to be especially common in narratives organised around disputed interrecursive histories. This does not mean that every narrative involving secrets, revelations or memories is witnessing-driven. Secrets can be discovered through documents; revelations can come from traces; memories can return in solitude. The empirical question in each case is whether the consequential reopening of actual firsthand encounters is responsible for the principal plot movement.
IV. Recursive Discernment: The Weaker Hypothesis
Living beings coordinate with others without complete access to their past experiences, intentions, understandings or future actions. This condition is more than an epistemological shortfall that better information could remedy. It is a practical condition of being-with. One must act, trust, cooperate, avoid, commit, negotiate or withdraw while the other's past and future remain incompletely accessible, and the condition generates continuing discernment.
LVT already defines recursive discernment in general terms, as "the continual activity through which living beings determine" what kind of recursive organisation an aspect of a situation has and how much uncertainty remains, an activity that "does not terminate in a stable relation between a knower and a known" (Ecks 2026b). The weaker hypothesis concerns its interrecursive, other-directed form: the consequential process of assessing and reassessing another living being's encounters, dispositions, commitments and possible actions through continuing coordination with them. What makes this form interrecursive is that the other can respond to, contest or change the assessment, and that the other is engaged in discerning the discerner in return.
Two kinds of other-directed discernment must be distinguished. Event-specific discernment concerns a particular occurrence. Did someone say something? Was someone present? Was a promise made? Did someone actually encounter what they claim? Biographical discernment is broader. What kind of person is this? Have they changed? Can their account of themselves be trusted? Are earlier typifications still appropriate? What have their previous actions made possible or unlikely? Event-specific discernment can lead directly into witnessing. Biographical discernment can organise a plot without any discrete episode of witnessing at all.
Biographical discernment works through relatively stable understandings of who others are. Such understandings are indispensable to ordinary living; one cannot perpetually reopen every assumption about everyone. In phenomenological sociology, Schutz (1967) called them typifications. In LVT terms, they are recursive attributions, "sedimented discernment" that "can be revised when future coordination disconfirms it" (Ecks 2026e). Repeated encounters can make an earlier typification increasingly ill-fitting, and its reopening can change the whole trajectory of being-with. A plot generated this way is less about discovering a hidden truth than about overcoming earlier symbolic stabilisations that no longer coordinate adequately with another's developing life.
Discernment also faces forward. When someone says "I will always love you" or "I will meet you again", they are not witnessing a future occurrence; they are making a commitment concerning a future that may never come. The other must assess whether the commitment is sincere, sustainable and likely to go on governing action. LVT's account of mixed time is directly relevant: "the past is actualised, the future unfinished", and "a commitment constrains only while it is maintained" (Ecks 2026a). Humans "can thus construct a symbolic future and then submit present life to it", and "one can become trapped by a future one invented" (Ecks 2026a). Past and future are not interchangeable. A past occurrence has happened, however disputed its reconstruction; a future commitment concerns something that may never occur. But they interlock, because a person's past actions and earlier promises shape how their present commitments are assessed.
The relation between the two hypotheses is not that witnessing is a more intense version of discernment. Witnessing has ontological conditions, actual firsthand access, consequential interrecursive reopening and articulation at L3 or above, that biographical and prospective discernment do not require. The two can nevertheless lead into each other repeatedly. A general suspicion can prompt a specific question about an earlier encounter. An answer can change a broader assessment of someone's character. The changed assessment can transform expectations about future commitments. And the actions that follow create new past occurrences that may later be reopened. Movement between the mechanisms is a major proposed source of plot.
Two further refinements follow. First, other-directed discernment has a selfrecursive counterpart. People also discern their own biographies, reassessing who they have been and what their earlier actions made of them, and such reassessment often depends on the recovery of an interrecursive past: what others did to them, for them or with them. Project Hail Mary turns on exactly this, and it shows that the recovery of an interrecursive past can drive a plot without becoming either witnessing or other-directed discernment. Second, interrecursive discernment is reciprocal. Each party is discerning the other's discernment of them, revising their own conduct in light of how they think they are being typified, and sometimes acting precisely to change that typification. Harry and Sally each revise their sense of the other, and each also revises their sense of how they themselves are seen. The plot moves when both revisions meet. This reciprocity is what distinguishes interrecursive discernment from the attribution of mental states to a character who cannot answer back, and it is why biographical discernment between living counterparts so rarely stabilises for long.
V. Six Narratives, Two Mechanisms
The six narratives below were chosen because their differences are substantial: a science-fiction novel, a trilogy of films, a romantic comedy, a nineteenth-century novel, a tragedy and a survival story. They demonstrate the comparative reach of the two mechanisms. They do not establish their statistical prevalence.
Project Hail Mary: the inaccessible interrecursive past
Ryland Grace retains his scientific and technical capacities while lacking access to the consequential interpersonal circumstances that brought him aboard. His amnesia, an effect of the induced coma that carried him through the voyage, has removed his history with other people while leaving his competence intact. The contrast is productive for LVT. Technical coordination and interrecursive reconstruction do not operate in the same way. Grace can identify the microorganism that is dimming the Sun, engineer solutions and calculate trajectories. None of this tells him how the mission was organised through other people's decisions, interventions and coercion. That knowledge returns in fragments of recovered memory, interleaved with his work aboard the ship, and the most consequential fragment is that he refused the mission and was forced to go (Weir 2021).
The recovered account transforms his understanding of his own presence aboard. He has been coordinating with his situation on the assumption that he chose it; he must now coordinate with the knowledge that others chose it for him, and with what that reveals about himself. This is a strong case for the broader hypothesis about interrecursive pasts and for selfrecursive discernment of one's own biography. It is not witnessing proper. The decisive recoveries take place in solitude, as reconstructions of Grace's own past that no one is asking him to answer for. The people who could reopen his encounters with Eva Stratt, the official who ran the project, and with the mission's other planners are light-years away, and the only being with whom he can now coordinate interrecursively, the Eridian engineer Rocky, did not share that past. The novel's interrecursive drama with Rocky is organised around building a relationship and solving shared problems in the present, not around disputed past encounters. The case is valuable precisely because the two mechanisms can be separated in it. A consequential interrecursive past can return and reorganise a life without anyone being questioned about what they encountered.
The Before trilogy: from anticipated futures to contested shared pasts
Linklater's three films follow Jesse and Céline across eighteen years, and they offer an unusually revealing longitudinal comparison of how plot mechanisms change as a relationship acquires a past.
In Before Sunrise (1995), Jesse and Céline meet on a train, get off together in Vienna and spend a night walking through the city. They have almost no shared history. Their being-with is organised around exploration, attraction, tentative biographical discernment and the anticipation of future encounters. The night ends with a commitment rather than an account: they agree to meet on the same platform in six months, without exchanging addresses. The plot's pressure is prospective.
In Before Sunset (2004), nine years later, Jesse is in Paris promoting a novel based on that night. The missed reunion becomes the first consequential past the two of them share, and the film contains a compact instance of the strong mechanism. Céline asks whether he went back to Vienna. Jesse first says he did not. When she presses him, he admits that he did. Céline explains that her grandmother's death kept her away. The sequence runs from elicitation, through an initial false denial that obstructs the reopening, to witnessing proper, in which Jesse's actual firsthand encounter, his being on that platform, is articulated in response to a question on which a great deal now depends. The film's remaining plot, the hesitant reassessment of what each has done with their lives since, is driven by biographical and prospective discernment: who has each become, and is there still a future?
In Before Midnight, their accumulated shared history becomes repeatedly available for dispute. Jesse's son from his first marriage has just flown home to Chicago, and Jesse's guilt about living so far from him opens a chain of questions about where the family should live, who sacrificed what career, and how the circumstances in which the relationship began should now be understood. Both were present for most of what they argue about, so the disputes repeatedly take the form of reciprocal contestation: each reopens the other's account of encounters they shared, and each answers from their own access. At the same time, Céline's question whether Jesse would still find her attractive if he met her for the first time on a train today asks for biographical and prospective discernment rather than witnessing. The film ends with a commitment whose form is playful and whose stakes are not: Jesse reads Céline a letter supposedly written by her future self.
The trilogy supports a precise hypothesis: the accumulation of shared interrecursive history increases the opportunities for witnessing-driven plot development. This is not a developmental law. Shared histories can also become settled, or be deliberately closed by people who choose not to reopen them. But the comparison shows plot pressure shifting, as the relationship ages, from anticipation, through the reopening of one missed encounter, to the contestation of a whole shared past.
When Harry Met Sally: the revision of biographical typifications
Rob Reiner and Nora Ephron's When Harry Met Sally (1989) initially appears to challenge the strong hypothesis. There is no single disputed event whose reconstruction drives the narrative. Harry and Sally meet on a drive from Chicago to New York in 1977, meet again on a plane five years later, and meet a third time five years after that, when their respective relationships have ended. Throughout, they assess each other through fairly stable and sometimes stereotyped understandings of character, gender, relationships and personal history, beginning with Harry's thesis that men and women cannot be friends because sex always gets in the way, and his typification of Sally as high maintenance.
Over time, these understandings become increasingly inadequate. The characters change, and so does their capacity to recognise each other's changes. The plot is generated by successive revisions of biographical discernment, and its climax is a speech that consists almost entirely of particular, accumulated encounters: that she gets cold when it is seventy-one degrees, that it takes her an hour and a half to order a sandwich, the crinkle above her nose. Harry's New Year's Eve declaration replaces a typification with a biography. It is not witnessing. No one has questioned him about an encounter, and nothing he says is offered as an answer to a challenge about what happened. The film's interludes, in which elderly couples recount how they met and sometimes correct each other, show ordinary joint narration of shared pasts, which is also distinct from witnessing.
The case establishes why the weaker hypothesis cannot be reduced to the strong one. A narrative can be driven by the transformation of sedimented understandings while event-specific witnessing remains secondary.
Pride and Prejudice: competing accounts and the revision of character
Jane Austen's novel offers a rich intersection of the two mechanisms, and it repays the strict definition with unusual precision. Elizabeth Bennet's understanding of Darcy and Wickham develops through encounters, reported histories, letters, judgments and retrospective reinterpretation. The plot turns not merely on attraction but on whether existing assessments of other people's conduct and character can be maintained.
Wickham's account of Darcy, given to Elizabeth soon after they meet, is largely volunteered rather than elicited, and it misrepresents encounters in which Wickham was a participant. It is a case of counterfeiting in the sense defined above, a misrepresentation of what actual encounters establish. Elizabeth later recognises "the impropriety of such communications to a stranger" (Austen 2003 [1813]: ch. 36).
Darcy's letter, written the morning after Elizabeth rejects his proposal, is the novel's hinge, and it should not be classified wholesale. The letter responds to a consequential challenge: Elizabeth has accused Darcy of separating Jane from Bingley and of ruining Wickham. Some passages articulate Darcy's actual firsthand encounters in direct response to those accusations. On Jane, he reports what he himself observed at the Netherfield ball, that her manner showed no "symptom of peculiar regard" (ch. 35); he was there, and this is witnessing proper, however mistaken his interpretation proves. On Wickham, he recounts his own dealings over the promised living and his own discovery of the planned elopement with his sister, both encounters he had. Other passages convey information he did not encounter firsthand, and he knows it: for the truth of what he relates he appeals "to the testimony of Colonel Fitzwilliam" (ch. 35), naming a further person who could be asked. The letter thus combines witnessing, explanation and reported information, and it explicitly points beyond itself to another possible reopening.
Its effect on Elizabeth is biographical discernment of the most thoroughgoing kind. She rereads Wickham's conduct, Darcy's conduct and her own judgment together, and concludes: "Till this moment I never knew myself" (ch. 36). Later the mechanisms interlock again. Lydia lets slip that Darcy was at her wedding; Elizabeth writes to her aunt to ask; Mrs Gardiner, who encountered Darcy's interventions in London firsthand, answers Elizabeth's question in a letter that again reorganises her understanding of Darcy's past and possible future (chs. 51–52). The larger movement runs from established biographical judgment, through its destabilisation by witnessing proper, towards a different understanding of another person's past and future.
Othello: counterfeit witnessing and the destruction of trust
Shakespeare's tragedy is the clearest demonstration of the strong hypothesis, because almost every process organised around witnessing appears in it, and each one moves the plot. Othello demands to be made a witness himself: "Give me the ocular proof" (3.3). Iago supplies counterfeits instead. He claims to have lain beside Cassio and heard him say in his sleep "Sweet Desdemona, / Let us be wary, let us hide our loves" (3.3), a fabricated claim to firsthand access. He engineers an encounter in which Othello overhears Cassio laughing about Bianca and takes it for talk of Desdemona (4.1), an actual encounter whose meaning has been falsified in advance.
The handkerchief is the multimaterial object through which the counterfeit acquires its force. Desdemona drops it; Emilia picks it up and gives it to Iago; Iago leaves it in Cassio's lodging; Cassio passes it to Bianca; Othello sees it in Bianca's hand. Every step is an actual encounter, and none establishes what Othello takes it to establish. The tragedy depends on his inability to distinguish what has actually been encountered from what has been claimed, insinuated or arranged.
Witnessing proper is available throughout, and its reception is the tragedy's second engine. Othello questions Emilia, who has been with Desdemona constantly: "You have seen nothing then?" She answers truthfully: "Nor ever heard, nor ever did suspect" (4.2). This is elicitation answered by witnessing proper, and Othello discards it: "She says enough; yet she's a simple bawd / That cannot say as much" (4.2). Firsthand access is overridden by a counterfeit he has already accepted. Only after Desdemona's death does Emilia's encounter with the handkerchief break through. "O thou dull Moor! that handkerchief thou speak'st of / I found by fortune and did give my husband" (5.2). She speaks against her husband's order to be silent, "'Tis proper I obey him, but not now" (5.2), intervening in a reopening already under way, and Iago kills her for it. His last act is obstruction in its purest form: "Demand me nothing: what you know, you know: / From this time forth I never will speak word" (5.2). Here witnessing is far from an incidental device. Its elicitation, counterfeiting, rejection, eventual emergence and final obstruction are constitutive of the plot.
The Martian: a limiting case
Weir's earlier novel The Martian (2011) makes a deliberately different case. An astronaut, Mark Watney, is left behind on Mars after his crew believes him dead. The principal dramatic pressure comes from sustaining life within a hostile dwelling through embodied and multimaterial coordination: repairing equipment, growing food, rationing water and air, travelling across the surface. Being-with matters, especially through the eventual contact with Earth and the rescue. There are episodes of concealment and disclosure: mission managers at first withhold from the returning crew the news that Watney is alive, and a plan to turn back for him reaches the crew against official decision. Watney's log entries, which carry much of the narration, are records and reports, not answers to anyone's questions about what he encountered.
None of this makes the principal narrative witnessing-driven, and little of it is driven by biographical discernment either. LVT's general account of narrative already treats The Martian as a narrative whose load-bearing loop is nonrecursive (Ecks 2026b). The case shows that a narrative can be compelling without either of the mechanisms proposed here dominating its plot. That is an important boundary condition, and the theory is stronger for it.
VI. Counterexamples and Mediational Profiles
There is no reason to expect a single mechanism to explain all narrative. LVT has no reason to suppose that one kind of recursive opening dominates every story. Different narratives foreground different stakes and different forms of coordination. A narrative dominated by material breakdown, bodily danger or hostile environmental conditions may generate its action without any consequential reopening of another person's past. Being-with is rarely absent from such narratives; it is simply not the principal generator of their dramatic pressure.
This suggests a five-mediation hypothesis: the mediational profile of a narrative helps explain which plot mechanisms become dominant. Narratives foregrounding multisensorial embodiment may develop through injury, endurance, pain, movement or bodily transformation. Narratives foregrounding multimateriality may develop through building, repairing, breaking, obtaining or losing material arrangements. Narratives foregrounding multiversal dwelling may develop through inhabiting, escaping, navigating or transforming environments not of anyone's making. Narratives foregrounding multispecies being-with are especially likely to generate consequential questions about others' histories, commitments and possible futures. Multisymbolization becomes especially important when earlier encounters are explicitly articulated, challenged, stabilised or reinterpreted, which is why it is indispensable to witnessing proper. These are tendencies, not exclusive categories. All five mediations are involved in living coordination, and a narrative's profile concerns which of them become especially consequential to its plot. The Martian is dwelling- and multimateriality-heavy; Othello is being-with-heavy with a decisive multimaterial object at its centre; Project Hail Mary combines a dwelling- and multimateriality-heavy survival plot with a selfrecursive reconstruction of an interrecursive past.
Profiles can also shift within a single narrative. Robert Zemeckis's Cast Away (2000) spends most of its length on a man's embodied and multimaterial survival on an uninhabited island. When he returns, the plot's pressure moves abruptly to being-with: the woman he left behind has married, and the final movement turns on what each of them now understands the other's life to have been during his absence, and whether any shared future remains. LVT's general account of narrative treats survival stories of this kind as cases whose load-bearing loop is nonrecursive (Ecks 2026b). The shift at the end of Cast Away shows how an interrecursive past can reassert itself when survival is no longer in question, and why a mediational profile should be described for the phases of a narrative as well as for the whole.
Being-with does not automatically entail witnessing. Before Sunrise and Before Midnight both foreground being-with, but the first is concerned mainly with establishing new interrecursive possibilities, while the third repeatedly reopens an accumulated shared history. Witnessing is especially likely to become important where being-with has generated a consequential past that remains available for dispute. Accumulated history is not sufficient, however. There must be actual reopening. Many long relationships, in life and in fiction, carry vast shared pasts that no one ever questions.
The empirical status of these claims should be stated plainly. The comparison is exploratory. It establishes the conceptual mechanisms and demonstrates their reach across contrasting cases. It does not show that more than half of all narratives are driven by witnessing or by recursive discernment. A later study could test both hypotheses on a systematically selected corpus, coding each narrative for whether the mechanisms are constitutive, secondary, incidental or absent, and applying the strict definition throughout. The qualification is a strength: it prevents the empirical claims from outrunning the evidence, and it makes the hypotheses testable.
VII. What Narrative Theory Has and Has Not Explained
The importance of knowing and not knowing in plot is among the oldest topics in poetics, and the LVT hypotheses must be placed carefully against that tradition.
Aristotle's Poetics made recognition (anagnorisis), "a change from ignorance to knowledge", and reversal (peripeteia) central to the best tragic plots (Aristotle 1996: ch. 11). LVT does not claim to have discovered that such transformations generate plots. Recognition, however, is much broader than witnessing. Someone may recognise an identity, a situation or a consequence, through a scar, a token or an inference, without anyone's actual firsthand encounter being consequentially reopened. Aristotle's own ranking of the kinds of recognition, from recognition by signs up to recognition arising from the incidents themselves, already distinguishes mechanisms within the family. The strong hypothesis identifies one specific ontological mechanism within that family, defined by the reopening of someone's encounter rather than by the change in someone's knowledge. Cave's (1988) history of recognition shows how much interpretive work the larger concept has done; witnessing is a narrower and more demanding subset.
Todorov's typology of detective fiction distinguishes the story of the crime from the story of the investigation, the first absent but real, the second present but insignificant in itself (Todorov 1977). This is perhaps the clearest existing account of how a past occurrence and its later reconstruction can organise narrative. The LVT hypothesis extends beyond crime fiction, and it draws a distinction Todorov does not: between reconstructing a past through nonrecursive traces and reopening it through the actual firsthand encounters of people who were there. A detective may solve a crime without ever obtaining witnessing, through fingerprints, timetables and deduction. Conversely, a romantic dispute may be witnessing-driven without containing anything resembling an investigation, as Before Sunset shows.
Genette's analysis of focalisation (1980) and Sternberg's account of suspense, curiosity and surprise as effects of how information is ordered in time (1978; 1992) explain essential features of the distribution of narrative information. They establish that questions of who knows what, and when, have long been central to narratology. The LVT contribution lies elsewhere. It asks how characters' own consequential attempts to establish what others actually encountered generate subsequent action. Its concern is with the ontological conditions of plot movement rather than with the distribution of information to readers.
The closest challenge to the weaker hypothesis comes from cognitive narratology. Zunshine (2006) argues that fiction engages and exercises the reader's capacity for attributing mental states, and that much of its pleasure lies in tracking nested attributions: what one character thinks another believes about a third. Palmer (2004; 2010) has shown that novels construct fictional minds largely through action and interaction, and that much fictional thinking is social, shared and distributed across groups. These are substantial predecessors to the idea that narratives are organised through attempts to understand other people, and the article must acknowledge them fully. The difference should not be put as the claim that earlier scholars studied individuals while LVT studies relationships. LVT rejects both individuals and relations as foundational explanatory units. Its contribution is to reconstruct ongoing coordination through the five irreducible mediations, through recursive openings and closures, and through consequential stakes. Recursive discernment in this sense is more than the attribution of mental states. It is a process through which established understandings of others become questionable and are practically reorganised, in posture, timing and action as well as in thought. The distinctive question is what changes in living coordination when a previous understanding of another person ceases to fit.
Brooks (1984) offers a powerful account of narrative desire, repetition and the drive towards an ending that makes the beginning and middle intelligible. LVT's emphasis is different. Recursive openings generate new possibilities, but plots also depend on their provisional closure. A disputed encounter may finally be settled; a biographical judgment may become reliable enough to act on; a promise may be renewed, abandoned or rendered irrelevant. Narrative closure can therefore be the provisional stabilisation of previously open interrecursive coordination, as well as the satisfaction of a desire to know how things end. The final scenes of Pride and Prejudice and When Harry Met Sally close in this sense, and Before Midnight deliberately declines to.
The originality claim should be stated with care. Rather than discovering recognition, dramatic irony, fictional minds, narrative curiosity or the importance of testimony, the article proposes the combination of a strict ontology of witnessing with an other-directed account of recursive discernment, explaining how both generate plot through the reopening and transformation of consequential interrecursive histories, and how the movement between them carries plots forward.
VIII. Conclusion: The Recursive Productivity of the Past
The protagonists of Project Hail Mary and Before Midnight inhabit radically different worlds, yet both confront past interrecursive encounters that remain consequential for their present lives. In one case an earlier history has become inaccessible and must be reconstructed. In the other a shared history has become disputed and must be reopened. When Harry Met Sally shows that a plot may develop instead through the revision of generalised biographical assessments. Pride and Prejudice shows witnessing proper and biographical discernment driving each other forward. Othello shows the devastating consequences of counterfeit firsthand access and of witnessing that is elicited and then disbelieved. The Martian shows that other mediational coordinations can generate equally powerful narratives without witnessing at their centre.
The six cases also show that the two mechanisms do not compete. In Pride and Prejudice and Before Sunset, a single episode of witnessing proper sets off a long movement of biographical discernment. In Othello, the destruction of biographical trust makes witnessing proper impossible to receive. In When Harry Met Sally, biographical discernment carries the whole plot without any witnessing at all. What links them is the condition from which both arise: other people's pasts and futures cannot simply be known, yet coordinating with them requires consequential judgments about both.
Narrative does more than arrange events into sequences. It can reconstruct how earlier interrecursive coordinations remain available for renewed questioning, assessment and transformation. Witnessing is a particularly demanding and consequential form of such reopening. Recursive discernment is broader, extending across biographical understandings and future commitments. Both are powerful because living with others requires acting on pasts that are incompletely accessible and futures that remain uncertain.
A past encounter outlasts its occurrence: it may become consequential again when someone who was there is questioned about what happened. An established understanding of another person may likewise become questionable as later encounters reveal its inadequacy. Narrative is especially capable of reconstructing these recursive transformations. Its plots frequently develop not simply because something happens, but because what has happened between living beings becomes available for consequential reconsideration. Witnessing and recursive discernment name two distinct yet closely connected ways in which an interrecursive past continues to generate a future.
References
Aristotle. 1996. Poetics. Translated by Malcolm Heath. London: Penguin.
Austen, Jane. 2003 [1813]. Pride and Prejudice. Edited by Vivien Jones. London: Penguin.
Brooks, Peter. 1984. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Knopf.
Cave, Terence. 1988. Recognitions: A Study in Poetics. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Genette, Gérard. 1980. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Linklater, Richard, dir. 1995. Before Sunrise. Castle Rock Entertainment.
Linklater, Richard, dir. 2004. Before Sunset. Warner Independent Pictures.
Linklater, Richard, dir. 2013. Before Midnight. Sony Pictures Classics.
Palmer, Alan. 2004. Fictional Minds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Palmer, Alan. 2010. Social Minds in the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Reiner, Rob, dir. 1989. When Harry Met Sally. Written by Nora Ephron. Columbia Pictures.
Schutz, Alfred. 1967. The Phenomenology of the Social World. Translated by George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Shakespeare, William. 2016. Othello. Edited by E. A. J. Honigmann, revised by Ayanna Thompson. Arden Shakespeare, Third Series. London: Bloomsbury.
Sternberg, Meir. 1978. Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Sternberg, Meir. 1992. "Telling in Time (II): Chronology, Teleology, Narrativity." Poetics Today 13 (3): 463–541.
Todorov, Tzvetan. 1977. "The Typology of Detective Fiction." In The Poetics of Prose, translated by Richard Howard, 42–52. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Weir, Andy. 2011. The Martian. Self-published; reissued New York: Crown, 2014.
Weir, Andy. 2021. Project Hail Mary. New York: Ballantine Books.
Zemeckis, Robert, dir. 2000. Cast Away. 20th Century Fox and DreamWorks.
Zunshine, Lisa. 2006. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.