Narrative identity

Abstract

The present paper is mostly based on the ideas of those who, like Ortega, Marcel, Heidegger and Ricoeur, among others, describe the reality of the human being as a being which is built in its own history in the same way the novelist creates his characters. It is the faithfulness to his own project and his reconstruction that gives him narrative identity (Mac Intyre) which made Nietzsche say: Man is the only being that can promise. This thesis is illustrated with examples from Proust and Saramago’s narrative. Finaly, the ideas of some deconstructivists like De Man and Derrida, who seem to celebrate a language without references, without world, a great Absence, are opposed to the conception of a language that says things, which bites in reality, as it happens in all authentic poems. This contrast is shown in Borges’ poem Góngora, according to the exegesis of Ezequiel de Olaso and Carlos Pereda.