Explaining People: Narrative and the Study of Identity

In a 2005 editorial in the journal Narrative, James Phelan registered recent complaints about “narrative imperialism,” or the over-extension of the concept of story, and issued a call for more measured and nuanced applications of narrative concepts to topics not traditionally or obviously compatible with a narrative approach. Phelan’s comments were occasioned by Galen Strawson’s (2004) attack “against narrativity” in a provocative piece that challenges the adoption of a narrative approach in one of the fields that seem to have been most deeply influenced by it: the study of identity formation. Strawson contested on two fronts the view that stories shape our sense of selfhood: first, he argued against narrativity taken as the descriptive claim that human experience is narrative in nature (and thus that self-identity is experienced as a story); second, and more importantly, he objected against the normative and ethical claim that to live a good life one must be able to recount it in a story. His critique revolves around this distinction between narrativity as a “psychological” thesis and its “ethical-normative” counterpart.

Strawson’s critics have targeted several flaws in the logic of his arguments—from untenable distinctions to lack of evidence—but they have also recognized the importance of his challenge and have expressed an interest in exploring further its implications (Battersby 2006; Schechtman 2007; Eakin 2006). It is such an exploration that I offer in this article, by addressing the questions raised by Strawson and putting them in the larger context of the scholarship on narrative identity. I argue that Strawson’s objections force us to rethink the basic tenets of the narrative approach and prompt us to be more specific about its distinctiveness and sphere of application. The assessment I offer proceeds by questioning two of Strawson’s main assumptions: about the personal nature of a narrated self-identity and about narrative as a form. Instead, drawing on the scholarship about narrative identity that Strawson tends to ignore or downplay, I argue for the social nature of the “storied self” and present a view of narrative as an epistemic and social transaction. Strawson is concerned with the descriptive accuracy of the narrative view and with its normative thrust. By contrast, I believe that we need to be concerned with the analytic purchase of the narrative view. To illustrate this analytic purchase, I focus on two competing identity-narratives presented in E. M. Ravage’s autobiography An American in the Making (1917) and in the retelling of the same story in a text written by Ravage’s grandson, Christopher Clausen, “Grandfathers: A Memoir” (1993). These stories seemingly recount the same lived experiences— of an immigrant coming to America at the beginning of the twentieth century—but they endow events with different meanings by arranging them in certain sequences that make the story recognizable in connection with particular master plots. In creating different accounts of the same actor, these stories function as competing explanatory frameworks for the life of an immigrant. To approach the self-identity of the immigrant featured in Ravage’s and Clausen’s accounts is to explore the analytic template underlying these explanatory frameworks, as well as the conditions under which a given framework is likely to be deemed more plausible than others.

The Narrative View of Self-Identity

The narrative view of self-identity achieved the popularity bemoaned by Strawson because it managed to usurp alternative approaches. Its heyday began when the idea that the self is a story was proposed in several fields at once during the last two decades of the twentieth century, from moral philosophy and hermeneutics to philosophy of mind and cognitive science (Dennett 1998; MacIntyre 1981; Ricoeur 1992). What made the narrative view so compelling and powerful, in addition to its epistemic value (Ritivoi 2005), was a relative neutrality toward questions of ontology. The ontological neutrality of narratives is a direct consequence of a fundamental narratological assumption: that the universe of utterance and the uttered world, or discourse and story (or sujet and fabula, to use the taxonomy imposed by Russian formalism), are distinct...