This article draws upon the rich and diverse history of situation to develop a new tool for narrative analysis across media and form. The term has played a role in theater, creative writing, and screenwriting; as situatedness, it has been linked to the categories of identity; and it has been used to chart relations between social and aesthetic experience. Seizing upon the way situation emphasizes emergent dynamics, we theorize it as a narrative concept by distinguishing it from plot, genre, and (...) context. Identifying its minimal conditions as two elements in relation with something at stake, we explore what situation can offer in capsule readings of Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. (shrink)