The current debate on slowness and narrative offers an ideal opportunity to reconsider the structuralist aversion to pragmatics and context. The article argues that a well-constrained approach to context is possible if we revise the concept of narrative dynamics to include transtextual and transactional dimensions; this theo¬retical contribution to contextual poetics sheds new light on dialogical constellations in narrative fiction, e.g. the interdependencies between Karl Ove Knausgård’s ‘slow’ autofiction and the autobiographical novel October Child (2021) by Linda Boström Knausgård.