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In addition to illuminating the courses of lives and their interconnection, stories about experiences can shed light on a longstanding philosophical puzzle about the self. How can the self be thought of as responding to change in ‘a perpetual state of becoming’ (Chandler, 2000: 211), and, yet, as continuous over time, as somehow identical from one day to the next? A light-hearted example is that of Helen, a Brisbane, Australian interior designer who is positive that she is changing, in that she expects her tastes to become ‘less cottagey,’ at the same time as she’s confident that she’ll always love the cream-colored cottagey chair in her bedroom, meaning that it will always reflect her sense of self (Woodward, 2001: 126). The question is also a serious one. It’s only because your self is understood to have continuity that people can lay plans with you and hold you accountable for your deeds. Otherwise, as Craig (1997) points out, a war criminal could give a ‘That wasn’t really me’ defense. What, then, is the basis of this continuity?

As Chandler (2000) discusses, one tradition of Western thought would reply that the self is an essence. That is, we each possess some inner core, whether it be a soul, a destiny, a Cartesian ego who declares ‘I think therefore I am,’ or a bundle of persisting personality traits. Such a reply does not explain how Helen can foresee herself becoming ‘less cottagey.’ It fails to capture the sense that time or change matter. A contrasting reply posits that the self is not so much a noun as a verb, a process of narration. This reply builds on the thought of sociologist and symbolic interactionist George Herbert Mead (1934) and philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1984). Mead says that the self has two components, a me comprised of the attitudes and meanings we perceive others to hold of us, and an impulsive I that makes sense of the me. Meanwhile, Ricoeur says that the past is always understood from the perspective of the present and with an eye to the future. Douglas Ezzy (1998) fused these two theories to propose that a present-day narrative self continually updates its own unfinished story. The I strives to interpret the meanings of the me’s history and to project that me into a future. It is through this process that Helen can both affirm her past acquisition of the cream-colored chair and coherently project a future in which her tastes will change.

An initial analytic strategy arising from all this is to ask whether research participants think of their selves as essences or as processes of narration? ‘I made one of my participants cry,’ Jodi Kaufmann (2010: 104) writes at the outset of her article about how Jessie, a male-to-female transsexual, had responded to a draft analysis depicting her gender as fluid, as a narrative-in-progress that disrupted binaries of sex and gender. Jessie responded, ‘You have taken away the identity I have worked all my life to build … Who am I if you take this away?’ (p. 104). Although Jessie had spent nearly 80 percent of her life history interview speaking of how she had been mistakenly born in a male body – i.e., of her self as having a female essence – Kaufmann had initially considered these passages less relevant because they seemed to her to reproduce heteronormative expectations and the criteria by which psychiatric gatekeepers decide who is eligible for sex-reassignment surgery. Jessie’s desire to live her female essence would repudiate any outsider’s notion of her gender as fluid.

Note that, with the above question and example, we have shifted into research with a fully constructionist orientation. Even though Jessie, war criminals, and other individual selves may be understood to be anchored in continuity in a realist sense, we have let that anchoring slip, and are engaging more fully with our narrators’ self-constructions. We now mark a second shift, into strategies concerned with the connection of narratives to wellbeing or psychological adjustment.

A first such strategy asks how respondents are affected by the view of self as a narrative or by particular narratives about their selves. Can thinking of the self in narrative terms offer them resilience in the face of an uncertain or foreshortened future? Chandler et al. (2003) observed that among adolescents in a Canadian psychiatric unit, those who spoke of the self as a narrative process were at lower risk of committing suicide than those who spoke of the self in essentialist terms. Studies of people diagnosed with life-threatening or chronic conditions have similarly explored which kinds of narratives about the future give them the most hope. Ezzy’s (2000) landmark study of people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) in Australia found that they narrated their experiences in three ways. In what Ezzy called ‘linear chaos narratives’, PLWHA expressed the belief that ‘there is no future’ (p. 612). In ‘linear restitution narratives’, they denied the inevitability of death and expressed hope by attempting to ‘colonize the future’ (p. 615) by making long-term plans such as home-buying. Finally, in ‘polyphonic narratives’ that were full of contradictions, PLWHA embraced uncertainty and expressed a hope that it could enrich the present, as in this interview excerpt:

It’s a bit cliche maybe that it’s probably the best thing that ever happened to me. Something like a sentence of death concentrates the mind wonderfully. … Previously I was wasting a lot of time in that you can, you can always find heaps and heaps of things to do in your life to avoid the, the larger issues. (p. 614)

What happens when the process of narration is disrupted by a past trauma that has breached the self? Here, the psychotherapeutic model for addressing trauma through narrative holds tremendous sway. In it, trauma is understood to disrupt comprehension, remembrance, and the ordinary forgetting required for narration to occur. In the flashbacks of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), memories too painful to be accessed verbally thrust themselves cruelly, vividly, and uncontrollably to the fore, transforming what had been ‘there and then’ into the ‘here and now’ (see BenEzer, 1999; Kraft, 2004). If a person with PTSD can externalize a traumatic experience by expressing it verbally to a trustworthy listener, the argument goes, then a narrative can be formed that permits the past and present meaning of the experience to be considered, and that will reduce its intrusions into the future.

Exciting work is being done that inquires into the generalizability of the psychotherapeutic model. Such work assesses whether healing need always be language-based (Gheith, 2007; Kidron, 2012), questions whether the communal and enduring injuries of mass political violence are best remedied by treating trauma as an individual pathology (Kagee, 2004; Summerfield, 1999), and scrutinizes claims, such as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s, that narration can further healing at a national level (van der Merwe and Gobodo-Madikizela, 2008; van der Walt et al., 2003). The last of these points brings to light how differently the various strategies we have been looking at would approach data about the same period of the past. While positivist researchers are asking, ‘Exactly what happened during apartheid?’, and researchers interested in histories from below are asking ‘How do marginalized groups’ accounts of this period differ from what had been official history?’, some researchers interested in the self would ask ‘Can what helps individuals to heal also help a nation?’

More broadly speaking, we can observe how narratives serve to explain the breaches, turmoil, discontinuities, or glitches in our lives. Järvinen (2001), for example, analyzes the justifications and excuses in the life histories of two male alcoholics in Copenhagen to show how they are turning their amoral behavior into moral tales that say more about who they want to be than who they have been becoming. Another strategy holds that the narratives we generate in such circumstances are drawn from cultural repertoires, that is, the conventional narratives available in a specific cultural context (Linde, 1993). This focus somewhat echoes our earlier mention of how narrating epiphanies in one’s life are linked to cultural and institutional contexts but here we see more specific emphasis on how these narratives are culturally constituted and perhaps constrained. Among Soviet Gulag survivors, Figes found some to offer what he called a ‘Survival’ narrative of transcending troubles through individual struggle (2008: 126). Although this is a narrative that will be familiar in many cultural contexts, Figes also found survivors to offer a distinctively ‘Soviet’ narrative (p. 16) of taking consolation in thinking that their forced labor had contributed to the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War (World War II) or to the Soviet economy, creating the industrial towns in which they and former Gulag administrators continued to live and in which they take pride. ‘It is our little Leningrad,’ (p. 131) says one such survivor of her fume-ridden Arctic mining town.

Within a familiar setting, we may take repertoires for explaining discontinuity, and even for identifying what constitutes a discontinuity, so much for granted that they become invisible. Charlotte Linde (1993) proposes that a strategy for locating discontinuities and repertoires is to hone in on what narrators take the most pains to explain and how they go about doing so. Applying this strategy to white middle-class Americans’ career histories, Linde (1993) observed that her subjects offered copious explanations of how they found silver linings in the accidental turns their careers had taken. They also exerted themselves to explain how apparent discontinuities in their careers could actually be understood as continuities at some deeper level. These narrators achieved coherence by using cultural repertoires that emphasized the persistent exercise of agency, not to mention having a job. Linde’s strategy is thus alert to the values accentuated in particular contexts and to the hazards of appearing to fail to embody them. (If this appeals to you, then Part III’s discussions of discourse analysis should, since cultural repertoires might equally be called ‘discourses.’)

As this review of strategies for studying narrative’s relation to the self draws to a close, we note that it has been preoccupied with projects of self-understanding in which bounded individualism and rationality are valorized (see Bordo, 1986). If individuals can understand themselves and tell their stories, the logic goes, they can become happier. Much as the urge to self-expression may be being experienced as natural, who has been schooled to tell what to whom, and to what end, reflects social inequalities (Tilly, 2006). Steedman (2000) also makes this case through her 300-year history of the project of self-narration, in which she draws parallels between the recent flourishing of pedagogy about self-expression and the requirement in place in England since the eighteenth century that the poor confess their troubles as a condition of obtaining social assistance. Freund (2014) even cautions that oral histories can compel narrators to construct selves as something to be known, to be fixed, and to be surveilled. In Chapter 9, we will see such themes again emphasized by philosopher Michel Foucault.

Moreover, cross-cultural studies have long pointed to alternate conceptions of the self that emphasize relational and communitarian values (e.g., De Craemer, 1983; Markus and Kitayama, 1991). In certain contexts, neither the concept of the self as an essence nor that of the self as a process of narration holds up. Further, citing examples from their own and others’ ethnographies around the globe, in which narrators who had been asked for life stories presented information about myths, taboos, or their lineage, sometimes in song, sometimes in dramatic performance, and sometimes by handing over their identity cards, Kratz (2001) and Giles-Vernick (2001) argue that the life story – and the conception of the self that it entails – is far from universal. If your respondents explicitly or implicitly question the logic by which you understand the self, consider making that the focus of your investigation.