These terms provide a theoretical framework for helping literary analysts to conceptualize the ways in which readers redirect their attention away from their immediate surroundings as they become immersed in the reality generated by the text.
More broadly, deixis refers to the inherent ambiguity of certain linguistic expressions and the interpretive processes that communicants must perform in order to disambiguate these words and phrases.
Essentially, deictic expressions help form the layers of narrative that direct the audience to either the narratorial discourse or to the story world.
Labov schematizes the organization of natural narrative using the following conceptual units: abstract, orientation, complicating action, resolution, evaluation, and coda.
As a feature of natural language, deixis is an important element of oral narrative and can be realized in different ways in each of Labov's categories.
The orientation typically occurs near the beginning of a narrative and serves to introduce the characters, settings, and events.
Such a center, therefore, determines which deictic expressions are pragmatically licensed by a context that has been naturally delimited through this perceptual and evaluative locus.
Such instances of commentary and evaluation often reflect the perceptual field, as well as the interpretive and ideological stance, of the narrator as they present the story's events.
A fundamental shift occurs when the deictic center moves from one character to another—for instance, in cases of omniscient thought report.
Here the reader must adjust the deictic center accordingly and interprets the lens of the current focal window through the experiential subjectivity of the character-locus.
Other forms of story-internal deictic shifts involve the cognitive framing associated with embedded narratives and other discourse-types: stories-within-stories, letters in epistolary fiction, diary entries, etc.
"[1] Buhler's model attempts "to describe the psychological and physical process whereby the live deictic field of our own bodily orientation and experience" is "transposed into an imaginative construction."