Of all the devices by which the fusion of narrated event and narrative event is effected in narrative discourse, reported speech is perhaps the most sociolinguistically interesting. The appropriation of another's utterance, to be sure, is not confined to narrative contexts. As Bakhtin argues, “The transmission and assessment of the speech of others, the discourse of another, is one of the most widespread and fundamental topics of human speech. In all areas of life and ideological activity, our speech is filled to overflowing with other people's words” (1981:337). But Bakhtin himself has explored the patterns and functions of reported speech most fully in the novel, and other sociologists of language are finding it increasingly useful to examine the dynamics of speech actions and reactions in a variety of narrative forms, from oral stories of personal experience to myths, as a means of elucidating relations of speech, action, and ideology in the social worlds reported by such narratives (Labov 1982; Silverstein 1985; Urban 1984). There is a dual payoff here that is especially attractive to a language-oriented student of verbal art: Insofar as acts of speaking are of focal interest in certain kinds of narrative, an understanding of the ways that these speech acts are contextualized within the narrative can enhance our understanding both of how speaking operates and is understood to operate in social life and of how narratives are constructed.