You are meeting someone new and are asked, “Tell me about yourself.” How would you begin? Perhaps you would start at your beginning: where you were born, your family, where you grew up, places you lived, where you went to school. You might move into the present by relating what kind of work you do and describing your life passions. You may glide into the future by articulating your hopes and dreams. This is your personal narrative.
Now take your personal narrative and edit out all references to people. You’ll find this impossible to do for a very good reason: your personal narrative is interwoven with the narratives of hundreds of others, like a magnificent carpet with an ever-shifting pattern.
Narrative provides us with one of our most viable forms of identity—individual and communal. ~ Richard Kearney
These hundreds of others include not only friends and family, but also strangers you may exchange a word with or observe. They comprise your teachers, writers of books you have read, directors and actors of movies you have seen – every person who has caused you, directly or indirectly, to better understand yourself. They become a part of your personal narrative, helping you put together the pieces of yourself in a way that makes sense and gives meaning to your life. In this way, personal narrative forms your unique identity.
Acknowledging the vital role others play in your life generates a feeling of connectedness. As John Donne eloquently wrote over four centuries ago: No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
Why is recognition of connectedness important? Because it is not only an antidote to loneliness, it reassures each of us that our place in the carpet of existence is essential. Take out one person and all inter-relationships would of necessity change, hence would Reality itself. Your singular life, therefore, is indispensable to the Grand Design. Federico Fellini put it well in this scene from La Strada (view first 4 minutes of clip):
For this piece, I have my friend Amy ~ whose dissertation discusses the theme of identity which intrigued me ~ to thank. In her dissertation acknowledgments, she thanks her doctoral advisor … who no doubt had her doctoral advisor to thank when she obtained her degree … and the inter-connections go on.
Richard Kearney is the author of On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva.
If you enjoyed this post, you might also like: Oneself As Another.
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What you’ve described as internal elements of personal narrative are actually the elemental components of our inner object world. You’re correct in that we cannot recount a narrative without these personal references; they are the bedrock of our identity, our selves. The psychoanalyst, Robert Stolorow, wrote eloquently about the myth of individuality. I would add that the intrapsychic (discrete elements of our own subjective minds) are actually intersubjective (the products of relational experience and environmental interaction).