Against Narrativity

Abstract

This essay attempts to sort out what is at stake in some of the quite different claims made on behalf of narrative: for example, the difference between the empirical claim that we happen to be creatures who understand ourselves through stories and the essentially normative claim made, for example, by Taylor, that it is a “basic condition of making sense of ourselves… that we grasp our lives in a narrative.” The essay argues that that the boldest earlier claims for narrative failed to take into account a distinction between the perspectives of narrativists and episodists—the former tending to construe a temporal integrity through numerous life events and the latter inevitably unable to see life as more than a series of disconnected episodes.