The exploration of narrative expressions constitutes a central element of the ethnographer's trade. It also, however, presents numerous methodological and interpretive dilemmas which are not easily resolved. For example, such dilemmas may emerge when a young person may be interviewed about, or asked to visualize, their past experience in a neighbourhood, the wider city or family life. For experienced ethnographers, we learn that young people may often imagine they have little history to tell and that many young people have been born into local conditions of loss that have substantially erased patterns of familial or community memory. In this chapter, we argue that narratives expressed by young people always carry residual meanings which operate in the present in reappropriated forms and which shape their projected futures. It is the ethnographic interpretation of these narratives that may assist us in better understanding how particular identity categories – such as a young person imagining he or she is Eminem or seeing oneself as "a Thug" or "a Gina" – may be seen as part of a larger narrative imagination – as a form of social and cultural meaning which carries residual effects into the present.