You could create your article page with a sidebar and main. Go to Dashboard->Pages and Themes->Page Types and add a default autonav to the sidebar that displays link beneath a page. I hope that makes sense, it's kind of an awkward sentence. Basically you are just setting up global blocks for that page type so that when you add another article in that format it add the autonav to it. You will need to click on the block in the page type defaults view and tell it to setup on the child pages.

The result would be that each article has a list of all the articles on the side and when you click on the link it would load a new page with the article list on the side and the selected article displayed. You could use the page list block too if you didn't want to use autonav.

Here is an example:
http://www.dwaynethompson.org/discussion/big-government/...

Hope this helps.

You can just create a top-level page in your sitemap for the article "index", put a page list block in the sidebar that lists all pages beneath it, and make sure you add all new article pages underneath that page.

Or are you talking specifically about loading the articles in the main pane without actually going to a new page? In that case you need to use some javascript to make ajax calls to load up the content. Or maybe just show/hide content if it's already on the page (but depending on how many articles you plan to have this might not be a good idea).

Are you a php or javascript coder at all?