I. INTRODUCING STORIES

Narratologists commonly draw a distinction between the story and those things that tell the story- the tellings, as I will call them here. Here is an example intended to highlight that distinction. The Parable of the Sower is a parable found in the New Testament books of Matthew, Mark and Luke, and in the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas. Though the relevant pieces of text in the Gospels are remarkably similar, no two of the four are identical. The verses in Matthew, Mark and Luke, have been translated and paraphrased, along with the rest of the Bible, into literally thousands of different languages and versions, all of which include the The Parable of the Sower. The Parable of the Sower is the story told, and the Gospels, paraphrases and translations are the various tellings of that story. At the heart of the distinction, and presupposed in the example above, is the idea of the 'transposability ' of the story: the thought that the same story can be told by different tellings. The same story is told by numerous children's picture bibles, and animated cartoons, and could be recounted here with little trouble. If I told the The Parable of the Sower here, I would not thereby increase the number of parables, though I would increase the number of tellings. Jonathan Culler describes this distinction (under its various terminological guises) as the “indispensable premise of narratology.”1 While the narratologists ' approach focusses on the structural features of narrative, very little has been said about the ontology of this distinction. In a recent paper, Aaron