# Narrative Identity **Domain:** Philosophy / Psychology / Personal Identity **Doc Type:** Theory Node **Classification:** Humanistic Identity Account **Maturity:** Established Debate **Related:** [[wiki/Personal Identity|Personal Identity]], [[wiki/Personal Authoritative State|Personal Authoritative State]], [[wiki/Autobiographical Memory|Autobiographical Memory]] --- ## Position **Narrative Identity** understands a person partly through the intelligible, revisable story that organizes commitments, actions, relationships and change across a life. The narrative is not merely a stored biography. It is an interpretive structure through which a subject understands what events mean and which projects count as its own. ## Reconstruction Problem An archive can preserve dates, messages and preferences while failing to preserve authorship of the life story. A generated reconstruction may impose coherence the person rejected, freeze one period as definitive or omit contradictions that were constitutive of the self. High recall is therefore not equivalent to narrative continuity. ## Governance Consequence Continuity services should preserve revision history, unresolved conflict and later self-interpretation rather than selecting a marketable persona. A continuant must be able to reinterpret inherited material. Narrative evidence can support identity and standing, but it cannot alone prove numerical continuity. ## Sources - Paul Ricoeur, *Oneself as Another* (1992). - Marya Schechtman, *The Constitution of Selves* (1996). - [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Personal Identity and Ethics](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-ethics/) ## See Also [[wiki/Restoration Integrity|Restoration Integrity]] · [[wiki/Narrative Integrity|Narrative Integrity]] · [[wiki/Narrative Sovereignty|Narrative Sovereignty]]