"The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character"
About this Quote
The line’s sly power is its reversal. We’re used to believing characters drive stories - desire leads to action, action to consequence. Ricoeur flips that pipeline. “It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character” treats narrative as a kind of machine that produces personhood. Change the story’s architecture - what counts as a turning point, what gets omitted, where it begins and ends - and you’ve changed who the character is, not just what happens to them. Identity is a function of emplotment.
The subtext is ethical and political. If selves are narratively composed, then they’re also narratively vulnerable: to propaganda, to family mythologies, to the courtroom’s “what really happened,” to social media’s curated arcs. Ricoeur isn’t saying identity is fake; he’s saying it’s interpretive. You become legible to yourself and others through the stories you can tell coherently - and coherence is never neutral.
Context matters: postwar continental philosophy was suspicious of the sovereign, transparent subject. Ricoeur’s “narrative identity” offers a third route between rigid sameness (“I’m always the same person”) and pure fragmentation (“I’m nothing but impulses”). Continuity isn’t given; it’s narrated, revised, and argued over.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|---|
| Source | Verified source: Oneself as Another (Paul Ricoeur, 1992)
Evidence: The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character. (Chapter: The Self and Narrative Identity, pp. 147–148). This quote appears in Paul Ricoeur's own book Oneself as Another, in the section titled "The Self and Narrative Identity." The University of Chicago Press page identifies the English edition as © 1992. A searchable scan of the book shows the sentence spanning pages 147–148, with the phrase beginning at the bottom of p. 147 and continuing onto p. 148. There is evidence the book derives from Ricoeur's Gifford Lectures delivered at Edinburgh in 1986, so the idea may have been spoken earlier in lecture form, but the verifiable primary published source for this exact English wording is the 1992 book, not a later quotation website. I could not verify from the available sources that this exact sentence was published earlier than this in another Ricoeur publication. Other candidates (1) A Ricoeurian Analysis of Identity Formation in Philippians (Scott Ying Lam Yip, 2023) compilation99.9% ... The narrative constructs the identity of the character , what can be called his or her narrative identity , in co... |
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Ricoeur, Paul. (2026, March 13). The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-narrative-constructs-the-identity-of-the-24314/
Chicago Style
Ricoeur, Paul. "The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character." FixQuotes. March 13, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-narrative-constructs-the-identity-of-the-24314/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character." FixQuotes, 13 Mar. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-narrative-constructs-the-identity-of-the-24314/. Accessed 17 Mar. 2026.
