Narrative, Identity, and the Disunity of Life

In this paper I challenge the view that the unity of a life consists in the life’s narrativity. My argument proceeds through analysis of the time of autobiographical narratives. Using the work of literary theorists Käte Hamburger and Harald Weinrich, I show that the time of the narrative-historical self is disunified. The reason lies in the ontological function of the autobiographical narrative, which is determined by the type of selfhood that belongs to the narrative self. The latter is a self for whom the unity of her life has become a quest/ion, that is, something ontologically doubtful and thus desired rather than given.