John Berger: Another Way of Telling

All stories are discontinuous and are based on a tacit agreement about what is not said, about what connects the discontinuities. . . . The discontinuities of the story and the tacit agreement underlying them fuse teller, listener and protagonists into an amalgam. An amalgam which I would call the story's reflecting subject. . . . If this sounds unnecessarily complicated, it is worth remembering for a moment the childhood experience of being told a story. . . . You were listening. You were in the story. You were in the words of the story-teller. You were no longer your single self; you were thanks to the story, everyone it concerned.

John Berger, in John Berger and Jean Mohr, Another Way of Telling (New York: Pantheon, 1982), pp. 285-86.