Narrative Identity and Narrative Imperialism: A Response to Galen Strawson and James Phelan

Abstract

What is identity? In an article I published in this journal two years ago, I defined as notion that what we are is a story of some kind. Before investigating its social and somatic sources, I added that I regarded this idea as counterintuitive and even extravagant. James Phelan liked my characterization of identity enough to quote twice in an article of own in Narrative last October. In that Editor's Column, Phelan praises the British philosopher Galen Strawson for his overall effort to debunk the identity thesis as both effective and salutary (209). As the lead-in to commentary on Strawson, Phelan casts me as the apostle of identity, and would seem to follow, accordingly, that my views have been debunked by Strawson. As Phelan concludes, I'd be guilty-along with Oliver Sacks, Jerome Bruner, and others-of reducing the numerous and complex relations between the self and one's narratives about the self to a single [narrative] model (210). When I finished reading the Editor's Column, I didn't recognize myself in Phelan's Eakin, not surprisingly because Phelan quotes me selectively to suit own agenda, a protest against what he calls narrative imperialism, impulse by students of to claim..,. more and more power for our object of study and our ways of studying (206). So to set the record straight at the outset, permit me to run the entire passage in which Phelan found cue. In what follows, I reflect on Oliver Sacks's observation that it might be said that each of us constructs and lives a 'narrative', and that this is us, our identities (110, emphasis original):