My dissertation examines instances of differends—Jean-François Lyotard’s term to signify a kind of speechless and corresponding inaudibility in the face of life-altering, traumatic experiences—in Sigmund Freud’s case study “Dora,” in Heinrich von Kleist’s works “ Die Marquise von O…,” and “ Über das Marionettentheater,” in Adalbert Stifter’s “Granit,” and in W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz. A nascent hermeneutics of listening and an equally nascent theory of the operations of narrative power emerge, which together begin to explain how silencing occurs; how uneven structures of power get created, reproduced and maintained; and how identities are constructed, deconstructed and then reconstructed through multiple co-constructions. The motivation is to re-instate and re-acquaint the listening subject, the “storylistener,” with her/his more-noticed twin, the speaking subject, the “storyteller,” in an ontology of selfhood that strives to avoid negating the one in the process of affirming the other.