Narrative and the Self

An action can only be identified and understood within a narrative context. What am I doing? That depends entirely on which narrative I am in: if I am asking directions to the station, that is one action; if I am trying to escape from my creditors, it is another; if I am gathering material for a novel about suburban life, it is a third. Human behaviour is never a mere sequence of bodily movements — it is always already structured by intentions, by the social settings and practices that make those intentions intelligible, and by the longer-term projects and stories that give those settings their meaning.

The unity of a human life is the unity of a narrative quest. A life has a beginning, a middle, and an anticipated end; it is oriented toward goods that define what would count as going well or badly; it is lived in the context of communities and traditions that provide both the materials and the audience for its story. MacIntyre's claim is that the kind of account of virtue he is offering — in which virtues are acquired through practice, tested by adversity, and unified by practical wisdom — only makes sense if we understand a human life as a narrative rather than as a series of disconnected episodes.

Individual narratives are always embedded in the larger narratives of communities and traditions. I am born into a family, a community, a history, a set of debts and inheritances I did not choose. MacIntyre calls this being born into "a moral starting-point" — a set of obligations and expectations that I can extend, revise, or repudiate, but never simply ignore. The liberal fiction of the self as a blank slate choosing its values from scratch is not merely philosophically false; it is morally impoverishing, because it deprives the self of the resources — tradition, narrative, community — without which moral identity and practical wisdom cannot develop.

The account of narrative and selfhood occupies chapters 14–15 of After Virtue and draws on MacIntyre's reading of Aristotle, Sartre's autobiography, and narrative theory in literary criticism. It has been developed further in his later work Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990) and has influenced communitarian social philosophy, especially Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self (1989).