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The claim that selves are narratively constituted has attained considerable currency in both analytic and continental philosophy. However, a set of increasingly standard objections to narrative identity are also emerging. In this paper, I focus on metaphysically realist versions of narrative identity theory, showing how they both build on and differ from their neo‐Lockean counterparts. But I also argue that narrative realism is implicitly committed to a four‐dimensionalist, temporal‐parts ontology of persons. That exposes narrative realism to the charge that the narratively constituted self, on the one hand, and the self that is the object of much of our everyday self‐reference and self‐experience, on the other, can't be the same thing. This conclusion may well force narrativists to abandon metaphysical realism about narrative selves—which, in turn, may leave the invocation of ‘narrativity’ as identity‐constituting somewhat under‐motivated.

In recent years a significant debate has arisen as to whether Kierkegaard offers a version of the "narrative approach" to issues of personal identity and selfconstitution. In this paper I do not directly take sides in this debate, but consider instead the applicability of a recent development in the broader literature on narrative identity -the distinction between the temporally-extended "narrative self" and the non-extended "minimal self" -to Kierkegaard"s work. I argue that such a distinction is both necessary for making sense of Kierkegaard"s claim that we are ethically enjoined to become selves, and can indeed be found in Either/Or and the later The Sickness Unto Death. Despite Kierkegaard"s Non-Substantialism, each of these texts speaks (somewhat obliquely) of a "naked self" that is separable from the concrete facticity of human being. In both cases, this minimal self is linked to issues of eschatological responsibility; yet the two works develop very different understandings of "eternity" and correspondingly divergent accounts of the temporality of selfhood.This complicates the picture of Kierkegaardian selfhood in interesting ways, taking it beyond both narrativist and more standard neo-Lockean models of what it is to be a self.2