In a passage from Paul Ricoeur’s 1991 essay Narrative Identity, the French philosopher discusses the narrative constitution of identity, be it personal or community. In this passage, he proposes the idea of narrative identity as a fundamental experience that integrates history and fiction into one type of narrative – that which is concerned with interpreting and understanding who we are.
Ricoeur suggests here that any knowledge I have about myself (and others, I would add), about who I am, what personality I have, what my core values and beliefs are, is an interpretation that I express both to the world and myself in the form of a narrative. In other words, it is through a story that I interpret and understand who I am. And all such personal or collective stories are an intertwining of history and fiction.
“… after a long journey through historical narrative and fictional narrative, I asked the question of whether there was any fundamental experience that could integrate these two major types of narrative. I then formed the hypothesis that the constitution of narrative identity, whether it be that of an individual person or of a historical community, was the soughtafter site of this fusion between narrative and fiction. We have an intuitive precomprehension of this state of affairs: do not human lives become more readily intelligible when they are interpreted in the light of the stories that people tell about them?… It is thus plausible to endorse the following chain of assertions: self-knowledge is an interpretation; self interpretation, in its turn, finds in narrative, among other signs and symbols, a privileged mediation; this mediation draws on history as much as it does on fiction, turning the story of a life into a fictional story or a historical fiction, comparable to those biographies of great men in which history and fiction are intertwined.”
Ricoeur, 1991
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