How are intentional, subversive, political, and ideological orientations communicated in narrative storytelling? Stories require not only an orientation in regards to the communicative act but also a moral or ethical orientation in relation to the values that characterize the narration and, to a larger extent, the narrative world. Borrowing from the field of linguistic pragmatics, this paper focuses on the narratology of deixis and specifically the function of deictic expressions. In strict linguistic terms, these expressions are used to orient the addressee in relation to the place, time and condition or situation of the speaker at the time of speaking. Deixis is also used to name those narrative words and expressions—like up/down, here/there, near/far, now/then, sooner/later—that orient the reader within the spatio-temporal axes of the storyworld. We ask: by means of what deictic markers are readers oriented within the moral and ethical axes of the narrative world? How are values like right/wrong, good/bad, true/false signaled to the implied reader? By what kinds of narrative vectors? And into what kinds of dynamic relations do these expressions enter in order to communicate the invisible but powerful moral-ethical environments that enable the construction of narrative meaning?

Keywords: narratology; deixis; ethics; morality; reading