Somewhat tangentially (but tied to the type of pan-narrativism that I used to go up against when writing about games), there is an ongoing discussion about whether we constitute our identities\u00a0through narratives what we make about ourselves, or not.<\/p>\n
Galen Strawson covers it well, The Dangerous Idea that Life is a Story<\/a>. Here is Jeremy Bruner quoted:<\/p>\n In the end, we become <\/i>the autobiographical narratives by which we \u201ctell about” our lives”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Strawson argues that it may well be that many people really do\u00a0conceive their lives as having\u00a0narrative form,\u00a0episodes, arcs, but that this is not universal.<\/p>\n I think it\u2019s false \u2013 false that everyone stories themselves, and false that it\u2019s always a good thing. These are not universal human truths \u2013 even when we confine our attention to human beings who count as psychologically normal, as I will here. They\u2019re not universal human truths even if they\u2019re true of some people, or even many, or most. The narrativists are, at best, generalising from their own case, in an all-too-human way. At best: I doubt that what they say is an accurate description even of themselves.<\/p>\n […] it does seem that there are some deeply\u00a0Narrative <\/i>types among us, where to be Narrative with a capital \u2018N\u2019 is (here I offer a definition) to be naturally disposed to experience or conceive of one\u2019s life, one\u2019s existence in time, oneself, in a narrative way, as having the form of a story, or perhaps a collection of stories, and \u2013 in some manner \u2013 to live in and through this conception. The popularity of the narrativist view is prima facie<\/i> evidence that there are such people.<\/p>\n Perhaps. But many of us aren\u2019t Narrative in this sense. We\u2019re naturally \u2013 deeply \u2013 non-Narrative. We\u2019re anti-Narrative by fundamental constitution. It\u2019s not just that the deliverances of memory are, for us, hopelessly piecemeal and disordered, even when we\u2019re trying to remember a temporally extended sequence of events. The point is more general. It concerns all parts of life, life\u2019s \u2018great shambles\u2019, in the American novelist Henry James\u2019s expression. This seems a much better characterisation of the large-scale structure of human existence as we find it. Life simply never assumes a story-like shape for us. And neither, from a moral point of view, should it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Are you the narrative type? I am not.\u00a0I have already been an avid reader of novels, but never conceived my own life that way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Somewhat tangentially (but tied to the type of pan-narrativism that I used to go up against when writing about games), there is an ongoing discussion about whether we constitute our identities\u00a0through narratives what we make about ourselves, or not. Galen Strawson covers it well, The Dangerous Idea that Life is a Story. Here is Jeremy … Continue reading “Are you a Narrative or a non-Narrative?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2137\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}