Blog #10

When reading through Galen Strawson’s essay “I am not a Story” for a second time, I began to agree with his point of view and his belief that not all of us are programmed to think in a narrative way. Prior to re-reading this essay, I full-heartedly believed that we do have a life story with an internalized self-narration. My perspective started to shift when I read through Strawson’s statement saying that “Poor memory…forces him to think through things for himself because he can’t remember what others have said.” After reading through this, I see where Strawson’s point of view that not all of us are programmed to follow a narrative comes from. You can never remember all of your past experiences in a moment in order to have them dictate your life. Rather, when you are in that specific instant, in the present, you have to think things through yourself without following any narrative.

Furthermore, when I conducted a little research on a few terms, I began to understand why Strawson holds such a staunch stand against the pro-Narratives. Strawson claims that “the popularity of the narrativitst view is prima facie evidence that there are such people”. Prima facie means based on the first impression and accepted as correct until proven otherwise. People, including myself, have taken the narrativist view as correct because they have not thought about it otherwise. It was always indoctrinated within us that we follow a narrative that creates our life story, so we never considered that it may all just be a theory. Another term that helped ‘clear the fog’ when I looked it up was when Strawson says that narrativists view individuals as having a “certain curriculum vitae. Curriculum vitae, I found out, is Latin for “course of life”. So, when following the narrativisit point of view, one only has one specific “course of life” that follows one narrative. Though now I realize that this is not true. Our life cannot be summed up in one story because it is far too complex and everchanging.