9 Narrative Structure and Verbal Aspect Choice in Luke to the displaced consciousness. The aorist can, in addition, signal the intrusion of the narrator upon the discourse in order to give the audience a framework by way of background or commentary for the on-the-spot observations of mimetic discourse. Such intrusion is actually the diegetic mode woven into a mimetic discourse. The venue that Bakker selects to develop his two modes of discourse theory is an analysis of Thucydides’ use of the imperfect versus the aorist in his Histories. His writing was remarkable even in ancient criticism for its enargeia. He achieves great rhetorical success by drawing the reader into the narrative as though the reader were actually present and perceiv- ing the occurrences himself. Bakker believes Thucydides accomplishes this through his careful use of verbal aspect and discourse mode-switch- ing along the lines of the paradigm above in order to place the reader variously within and outside of the narrative. The paradigm for aspect use in Luke-Acts that I propose is an in- terpretation of Bakker’s two modes of discourse. The Lukan paradigm evolves out of the fundamental property of “distance” present in the op- position of the imperfective and perfective aspects21. Out of this semantic notion of “distance”, the principle characteristic that distinguishes the aspects as used in Luke-Acts arises: perspective. Luke manipulates this characteristic, in fashion similar to Thucydides, to effect two modes of discourse, the mimetic and the diegetic, through which he propels the narrative and gives it enargeia. Additionally, Luke utilizes the semantics of perspective and mode-switching to create a larger structure for the discourse composed of narrative episodes (pericopes) outlined by verbal/ perspectival cadences. 21 Strictly speaking, the aspectual opposition is between perfective and non-perfective, according to Porter, i.e., the stative aspect (perfect and pluperfect tenses) is included with the imperfective in a binary opposition to the perfective (Verbal Aspect, 90). This, I agree, is formally true. In Lukan usage, however, narrative use of the stative aspect is limited to certain specific circumstances and consequently so rare that the stative option is typically closed, resulting in an authorial choice between the aorist and imperfect tenses. (Similarly, on the functional limitation of choice to the imperfective and perfective aspects in im- peratival constructions, see D. Mathewson, “Verbal Aspect in Imperatival Constructions in Pauline Ethical Injunctions”, FilNeot 9 [1996] 21-35.) Also, one should note that the so-called “historical present” is exceedingly rare in Luke-Acts. There are 24 uses and all but five are verbs of speaking — a class of verbs that Bakker, “Story Telling in the Future: Truth, Time, and Tense in Homeric Epic”, in E. Bakker and A. Kahane (eds.), Written Voices, Spoken Signs: Tradition, Performance, and the Epic Text (Cambridge, MA 1997) 14, has noted are particularly well-suited to the historical present, “since it is this event, which coincides with what the verbalizing consciousness is doing in the present, that is best suited for drawing the remembered world into the here and now of the present”.