Don Quixote & Narrative Identity

Inés Pereira Rodrigues asks, are we always or ever) who we Say we are?

- Inês Pereira

At some point in life, I venture to guess, we’ve all had suspicions about who someone claimed to be, being unconvinced by their story. There would have been something about how they presented themselves or the situation they were telling us about that was just not believable. Or perhaps we’ve watched, disconcerted, as someone we know well claimed to be the kind of person we’re quite sure they’re not.

The theory of ‘narrative identity’ tries to answer the question of how persons maintain their identity through time. It proposes that who we are is constituted by or formed from the stories we tell about ourselves. We make sense of the events and occurrences in our lives through story-telling, by weaving them into a coherent narrative, making ourselves the protagonists and assigning some supporting roles, and many extras. We make sense of who we are by telling this story to ourselves: our sense of self emerges – or so says French philosopher and literary critic Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) in his 1992 book Oneself as Another. Among other things, it would mean that who we are, our identity, is not already given: we are not already essentially determined as being this or that person, as if our identity were a substantial core fully formed at (or before) birth that remained the same as we change through our lives in more superficial ways. Instead, it means that who we are is a continuous work of self-interpretation, which we both make and discover through these stories. This work of becoming is ongoing through our self-story-telling.