QuestionsWho am I, really?I am the character in the story I tell
Who am I, really?A self to build

I am the character in the story I tell

Narrative identity (idem and ipse, sameness and selfhood)

Paul Ricœur 1913 · 2005We are the same in two ways: by our character, and by keeping our word; the story of our life holds the two together.
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What it claims

My identity is narrative: I am the character of the story I tell and revise. This story holds together what stays (idem) and what I maintain (ipse), and it avoids the dilemma of a fixed self or a mere flow of states.

Why

To say who acted, we must tell a life story, and a story can hold together a person who changes.

The same idea through history
Aristotle335 BCIn the Poetics, Aristotle calls "emplotment" (muthos) the arrangement of events into a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. Ricœur draws from it the idea that a narrative gathers scattered events into a unity.
Alasdair MacIntyre1981MacIntyre argues in After Virtue that a human life has the unity of a narrative quest, and that I can answer "what should I do?" only by knowing what story I am part of.
Paul Ricœur1985Ricœur gives this idea the name narrative identity (Time and Narrative III), then ties it to the distinction between idem and ipse (Oneself as Another, 1990).
In short

"I am the character in the story I tell" is an argument by Paul Ricœur (Time and Narrative III, 1985; Oneself as Another, 1990, 1985) on the question "Who am I, really?" (answer: a self to build). Its claim: My identity is narrative: I am the character of the story I tell and revise. This story holds together what stays (idem) and what I maintain (ipse), and it avoids the dilemma of a fixed self or a mere flow of states. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P6). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 0 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Time and Narrative III, 1985; Oneself as Another, 1990
Valid with an implicit premise

You no longer have the body you had at six, nor the same tastes, nor perhaps the same character. Yet if you promise something today and keep it in ten years, you have stayed "you". So Ricœur distinguishes two ways of being the same: staying alike (like a character trait, which the Romans called idem) and holding on (like keeping a promise, ipse). What holds the two together? His idea: narrative. To say who did an action, one must tell the story of a life, and a story can contain change. So I am the character of the story I tell, and which I can tell differently.

P1There are two senses of "staying the same". Sameness (idem) is the permanence of what does not change: a character, habits, traits. Selfhood (ipse) is the fact of maintaining oneself, for example by keeping one's word, even after having changed.
P2To impute actions to someone, to ask them to answer for their promises, we must be able to say who acted. The question "who?" is not reduced to "what qualities does he have?".
P3To answer the question "who?" is to tell the story of a life. It cannot be answered in any other way than by a narrative.
P4A narrative gives a plot to diverse events. It can include change and duration within the cohesion of a life, which an abstract identity that stays the same cannot do.
P5A story of oneself is never fixed: one can always tell one's own life with different, even opposite, plots. Narrative identity is made and unmade.
P6 · implicit premiseIf only a narrative answers "who?", then a person's identity is the identity of a story: that of a character who is told and who can be told differently.
So my identity is narrative: I am the character of the story I tell and revise. This story holds together what stays (idem) and what I maintain (ipse), and it avoids the dilemma of a fixed self or a mere flow of states.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P6, the computer finds a case where a narrative answers "who?" and holds change together, but where identity is not narrative: the story would only describe an identity that exists without it.
The argument is valid with P6. Without it, we know that a narrative answers "who?" and holds change together, but nothing forces us to say that the person's identity is itself narrative: one could think the story is only a way to discover an identity that already exists otherwise. P6 says that when only a story can answer, there is no other identity hidden behind it.
Analogy. Think of a series whose characters change from season to season: first a shy child, then a gang leader. We still say it is the same character, because the story links the seasons. Ricœur says the same goes for you: what makes you you is not a trait that never moves, it is the story that links your seasons, and that you can still rewrite.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Derek Parfit 1984 · attacks premise 2

Parfit imagines cases where the question "will it be me?" has no answer (a teleporter that copies, a brain divided in two). He concludes that identity is not what matters: what matters is the continuity of memories and character. If the question "who?" can be empty, we do not need a narrative to answer it.

no reply
see the argument
Ricœur did reply, but that text is not yet in our corpus.
The debate goes on (our summary) Ricœur himself discusses these "puzzling cases" in the 5th study of Oneself as Another (1990). We could not read that chapter, so we do not summarise his answer. The point at stake is clear: if a life can be described without asking "who?", selfhood is no longer necessary.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Disagreement of substance: is the question "who?" a real question that matters, or an illusion that psychological continuity can replace? Still debated.
Galen Strawson 2004 · attacks the conclusion

Strawson argues that the idea "everyone constructs and lives a narrative of their life" is false as a description of all humans. He distinguishes "Episodic" people who do not experience themselves as a self that existed in the past and will exist in the future. He concludes that there are deeply non-narrative people, and good ways of living that are not narrative.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 2004, after the author's death (2005).
The debate goes on (our summary) Strawson writes fourteen years after Oneself as Another, and Ricœur dies in 2005: we have no answer from him. Ricœur himself writes that narrative identity "is constantly made and unmade" and that it does not exhaust the question of the selfhood (Time and Narrative III, pp. 357-358). But he maintains that to answer "who?" is to tell a life, which Strawson refuses for Episodic people.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Disagreement of substance: is the story of oneself a fact of human nature, or only one way of living among others? Strawson says: one way among others.
Daniel Dennett 1992 · attacks the conclusion

Dennett agrees that we constantly tell our story, but he draws a harder conclusion: the "self" is only a "center of narrative gravity", a convenient abstraction like an object's center of gravity. There is no real subject behind the narrative that would maintain itself.

no reply
see the argument
We have not yet found a direct reply by Ricœur in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Dennett writes two years after Oneself as Another. We found no reply from Ricœur. The two agree about narrative; they differ on what lies behind it: for Ricœur, a self that maintains itself and can answer for its actions; for Dennett, a useful fiction.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Disagreement of substance: is the self that keeps its promise real, or is it a useful fiction produced by the narrative? Open point.