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Philosophy & Literature

Don Quixote & Narrative Identity

Inês Pereira Rodrigues asks, are we always (or ever) who we say we are?

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.

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