Theorists of narrative have been divided into those who conceive of narrative primarily as a cognitive instrument for imposing meaningful order onto the real and those who consider it to be primarily an ontological category that characterizes the human way of being in the world, that is, something constitutive of human existence. These can be called respectively the epistemological and ontological position on the significance of narrative for human existence. Galen Strawson, in turn, has made an influential distinction between descriptive and normative positions on the narrativity of experience. In this essay, I suggest that even though these conceptual differentiations are helpful to a certain extent, such binary terms may also prevent us from paying adequate attention to complex interconnections between the ontological, epistemological, and ethical dimension of the relation between narrative and human existence. I argue that the question of the significance of narrative for human existence can be formulated with an emphasis on any of these philosophical dimensions but that the answers involve implicit assumptions concerning all three dimensions. In the debate on narrative and human existence, particularly undertheorized has been the role of tacit ontological assumptions concerning what is counted as real. In disentangling the debate, I argue that both experience and narrative are phenomena constituted by interpretative activity; while it is important not to conflate experience and narrative, it can be meaningfully said that narrative interpretations of experiences have a constitutive role in our existence. By looking at how certain novelists have dealt with this problematic, the essay also suggests how to tie the theoretical study of narrative more intimately to the study of the philosophical underpinnings of narrative forms in literary history.

The chapter delineates narrative hermeneutics as a framework for exploring the ethical complexities of the relationship between life and narrative and discusses the interconnections between the ethical and ontological assumptions underlying different conceptions of narrative. It outlines a broad Nietzschean-hermeneutic conception of interpretation and proposes three interconnected advantages of privileging this approach in theorizing narrative, experience, subjectivity, and their interrelations. It allows one to (1) understand how narrative relates to experience without seeing their relationship as dichotomous or identifying them with each other, that is, how they exist in a tensional but reciprocal relationship, best understood in terms of an interpretative continuum; (2) articulate how life does not form one coherent narrative but is instead a process of constant narrative reinterpretation; and (3) understand the relationship between narrative webs and the individual subjects entangled in them as fundamentally dialogical and as entwined with practices of power.

Against the backdrop of the polarized debate on the ethical significance of storytelling, this book develops a nuanced framework for exploring the ethical complexity of the roles narratives play in human lives. Focusing on how narratives enlarge and diminish the spaces of possibilities in which people act, think, and reimagine the world, it proposes a theoretical-analytical framework for engaging with both the ethical potential and the risks of storytelling. It elaborates a narrative hermeneutics that treats narratives as culturally mediated interpretative practices that can be oppressive, empowering, or both, and argues that the relationship between narrative unconscious and narrative imagination shapes one’s sense of the possible. Its hermeneutic narrative ethics differentiates between six dimensions of narratives’ ethical potential: they can cultivate a sense of the possible; promote self-understanding; enable understanding other lives non-subsumptively in their singularity; transform narrative in-betweens; develop the capacity for perspective-taking; and function as forms of ethical inquiry. These aspects are analyzed in dialogue with literary and autobiographical narratives that deal with the legacy of the Second World War by problematizing the adequacy of the perpetrator–victim dichotomy—exploring how it is as dialogic storytellers, fundamentally vulnerable, interdependent, and implicated in violent histories, that individuals and communities become who they are. The book brings into dialogue narrative ethics, literary narrative studies, narrative psychology, narrative philosophy, and cultural memory studies. It develops narrative hermeneutics as a philosophically rigorous, historically sensitive, and analytically subtle approach to the ethical stakes of the debate on the narrative dimension of human existence.

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