Identity and Narration

Michael Bamberg

1 Definition

Identity designates the attempt to differentiate and integrate a sense of

self along different social and personal dimensions such as gender, age,
race, occupation, gangs, socio-economic status, ethnicity, class, nation
states, or regional territory.
Any claim of identity faces three dilemmas: (a) sameness of a sense
of self over time in the face of constant change; (b) uniqueness of the
individual vis-à-vis others faced with being the same as everyone else;
and (c) the construction of agency as constituted by self (with a self-to-
world direction of fit) and world (with a world-to-self direction of fit).
Claims to identity begin with the continuity/change dilemma and from
there venture into issues of uniqueness and agency; self and sense of
self begin by constructing agency and differentiating self from others
and then go on to navigate the waters of continuity and change.
Engaging in any activity requires acts of self-identification by rely-
ing on repertoires that identify and contextualize speakers/writers along
varying socio-cultural categories, often compared to mental or linguis-
tic representations (Emmott & Alexander → Schemata) that are less
fixed depending on context and function. Narrating, a speech activity
that involves ordering characters in space and time, is a privileged gen-
re for identity construction because it requires situating characters in
time and space through gesture, posture, facial cues, and gaze in coor-
dination with speech. In addition, narrating, whether in the form of fic-
tional or factual narration (Schaeffer → Fictional vs. Factual Narra-
tion), tends toward “human life”—something more than what is
reportable or tellable (Baroni → Tellability), something that is life- and
live-worthy (Taylor 1989). Thus, narrating enables speakers/writers to
disassociate the speaking/writing self from the act of speaking, to take a
reflective position vis-à-vis self as character (Jannidis → Character).

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242 Michael Bamberg

2 Explication

Taking a reflective position on self as character has been elaborated in

the narratological differentiation between author (Schönert → Author),
narrator (Margolin → Narrator), and character. The reflective process
takes place in the present but refers to past or fictitious time-space,
making past (or imagined) events relevant for the act of telling, point-
ing toward the meaningfulness of relationships and worthwhile lives,
and exemplifying “the human good” (Aristotle 1996: 1461a). It is
against this backdrop that narrating in recent decades has established
itself as a privileged site for identity analysis—a new territory for in-
quiry (cf. Ricœur [1990] 1992; Strawson 2004).
Designing characters in fictitious timespace has the potential of
opening up territory for exploring identity, reaching beyond traditional
boundaries, and testing out novel identities. Narratives rooted in factual
past-time events, by contrast, are dominated by an opposite orientation.
The delineation of what happened, whose agency was involved, and the
potential transformation of characters from one state to another serve to
demarcate the identity of the reflective self under investigation. If past-
time narration is triggered by the question “Who am I?,” having the
narrator’s quest for identity or sense of self as its goal, the leeway for
ambiguity, transgression of boundaries, or exploration of novel identi-
ties is more restricted: the goal is rather to condense and unite, to re-
solve ambiguity, and to deliver answers that lay further inquiry into
past and identity to rest.
However, the reduction of identity to the depiction of characters and
their development in a story leaves out the communicative space within
which identities are negotiated in interaction with others. Limiting nar-
ratives to what they are about restricts identity to the referential or cog-
nitive level of speech activities and disregards real life, where identities
are under construction, formed, performed, and change over time. It is
within the space of everyday talk in interaction with others that narra-
tion plays its constitutive role in the formation and navigation of identi-
ties as part of everyday practices and that the potential for orientation
toward human values takes form. When considering the emergence of
identity, the narrating subject must be regarded: (a) as neither locked
into stability nor drifting through constant change, but rather as some-
thing that is multiple, contradictory, and distributed over time and
place, held together contextually and locally; (b) in terms of member-
ship positions vis-à-vis others that help to trace the narrator’s identity
within the context of social relationships, groups, and institutions; and
(c) as the active and agentive locus of control, though simultaneously

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 Identity and Narration 243

attributing agency to outside forces that are situated in a broader socio-

historical context. Along these lines, identity is not confined by just one
societal discourse but open to change. Identity is able to transform itself
and adapt to the challenges of growing cultural multiplicities in increas-
ingly globalizing environments.
Based on the assumption that narration at its origin was a verbal act
performed locally in interactional contexts and from there evolved to-
ward other, differently constituted and contextualized media (writing,
electronic, and digital media, etc.; cf. Ryan 2006), the function of narra-
tion in identity formation processes cannot be reduced to the verbal
means used or to the messages conveyed. Rather, the local interactional
environments in which narrative units emerge form the foundation for
inquiry into identity formation and the sense of self. While transfor-
mations from oral to written forms of expression have been studied
(e.g. Ong 1982) and text-critical analysis has been undertaken from the
perspective of the hermeneutic circle, work with transcripts from audio
recordings is relatively new. More recent are concerted efforts to record
narratives audio-visually and to analyze the way they emerge in interac-
tion, including the sophisticated ways in which they are performed.
Audio-visual material, of course, can be more fully (micro-analytically)
scrutinized in terms of the contextualized coordination of narrative
form, content, and performance features (Berns → Performativity) in
the service of identity formation processes.
Recently, this type of micro-analytic analysis has been applied to
identity as achieved in narration under the heading of “positioning
analysis” (Bamberg 1997, 2003; Bamberg & Georgakopoulou 2008) in
order to focus more effectively on the situated nature of identification
processes that emerge from the three identity dilemmas mentioned
above. Navigating and connecting temporal continuity and discontinui-
ty, self and other differentiation, and the direction of fit between person
and world, take place in the small stories told on everyday occasions in
which tellers affirm a sense of who they are. It is precisely this sense of
self and identity grounded in sequential, moment-by-moment interac-
tive engagements, largely undertheorized and often dismissed in tradi-
tional identity inquiry, that operates on verbal texts or cognitive repre-
sentations (Herman → Cognitive Narratology).

3 History of the Concept and its Study

Self and identity are traditionally bound up with what is taken to be the
essence of the individual person which continues over time and space in

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244 Michael Bamberg

phylo- as well as in socio- and onto-genetic terms. However, this over-

looks how conceptions of self and identity have evolved historically
and culturally and also how each individual’s personal ontogenesis un-
dergoes continuous change. In addition, essentialist views of self and
identity camouflage the links between these concepts and their counter-
parts in narration and narrative practices. Section 3.1 will further ex-
plore the connection between self and identity dilemmas (b) and (c),
while section 3.2 will be devoted to identity and dilemma (a).

3.1 Self and Narration

Although self, like “I” and “me,” are highly specific morphological
items of the English lexicon, they are commonly assumed to refer uni-
versally to corresponding concepts in other languages—an assumption
that has been contested, however. A closer look reveals that these con-
cepts most often have a history of their own that varies in illuminating
ways (cf. Heelas & Lock eds. 1981; Triandis 1989). Modern notions of
self and individuality (cf. Elias [1987] 1991; Gergen 1991) are taken to
be closely intertwined with the emergence of local communities, nation
states, new forms of knowledge and reflection (“rationalization”), feel-
ing, and perception—all in conjunction with increasing interiorization
and psychologization.
In this process of becoming individualized, self-narration (autobiog-
raphy, life-writing, autofiction) springs to the fore as the basic practice-
ground for marking the self off from “I” as speaker/agent and “me” as
character/actor (cf. the narratological distinctions between “narrating
self” and “narrated self” and between narrator and protagonist). Acts of
thematizing and displacing the self as character in past time and space
become the basis for other self-related actions such as self-disclosure,
self-reflection and self-criticism, potentially leading to self-control,
self-constraint, and self-discipline. What further comes to light in this
process is an increasing differentiation between (and integration of) “I”
and “me” (James [1890] 1989), and simultaneously between “I-we-us”
and “them-other” (Elias [1987] 1991). Thus, self, apparently, is the
product of an “I” that manages three processes of differentiation and
integration: (a) it can posit a “me” (as distinct from “I”); (b) it can posit
and balance this “I-me” distinction with “we”; and (c) it can differenti-
ate this “we” as “us” from “them” as “other.” This process of differenti-
ation must be taken into account when talking about “self” as different
from “other” and viewing self “in relation to self” (as in self-reflection
and self-control). Self, as differentiated from other by developing the
ability to account for itself (as agent or as undergoer), to self-reflect,

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 Identity and Narration 245

and to self-augment, can now begin to look for something like temporal
continuity, unity, and coherence, i.e. identity across a life (cf. Ricœur
[1990] 1992).

3.2 Identity and Narration: Biography and Life-Writing

The ability to conceive of life as an integrated narrative forms the cor-

nerstone for what Erikson ([1950] 1963) called “ego identity.” The un-
derlying assumption here is that life begins to co-jell into building
blocks that, when placed in the right order, cohere: important moments
tie into important events, events into episodes, and episodes into a life
story.
It is this analogy between life and story—or better: the metaphoric
process of seeing life as storied (in narratological terms: story and dis-
course) that has given substantive fuel to the narrative turn. The
strength of how scholars (and laypeople) in the past have made use of
this connection, though, varies: on the one hand, there is a relatively
loose connection according to which we tell stories of lives by using
particular narrative formats. Lives can be told as following an epic
script or as if consisting of unconnected patches. Most often, though,
lives are told by depicting characters and how they develop. Character,
particularly in modern times, rests on an internal and an external form
of organization. The former is typically a complex interiority, a set of
traits organizing underlying actions and the course of events as out-
comes of motives that spring from this interiority. The latter, an exter-
nal condition of character development, takes plot as the overarching
principle that lends order to human action in response to the threat of a
discontinuous and seemingly meaningless life by a set of possible con-
tinuities (often referred to by cognitive narratologists as “schemata” or
“scripts”; cf. Herman 2002: chap. 3). This interplay of human (and hu-
mane) interiority and culturally available models of continuity (plots)
gives narrative a powerful role in the process of seeing life as narrative.
It also should be noted that the arrangement of interiority as governed
by the availability of plots gives answers—at least to a degree—to the
“direction-of-fit” or “agency” identity dilemma. With narration thus
defined, life transcends the animalistic and unruly body so that narra-
tion gains the power to organize “human temporality” (Punday 2003;
see also Ricœur [1985] 1990): the answer to non-human, a-temporal,
and discontinuous chaos.
Another, and probably stronger reason for employing the narrative
metaphor for life starts with the assumption of a “narrative mode of
thinking.” Bruner (1986) and Polkinghorne (1988) similarly vie for the

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246 Michael Bamberg

argument that there is a particular cognitive mode of making sense of

the (social) world which is organized “narratively” (an important theme
in cognitive psychology; cf. Herman 2002, 2009). Freeman’s (1993)
and Mishler’s (1986) work with autobiographical memories focuses
particularly on the interrelationship between memory, autobiographical
memory, and narrative. Mishler early on propagated the use of autobio-
graphic narrative interview data in the form of a “contextual approach”
which is not limited to recording data about human experience or to
looking “behind” the author, but that focuses on interaction and rela-
tionships.
McAdams (1985), building on narrative theorists such as Bruner,
Polkinghorne, and Sarbin, has turned the assumption of selves plotting
themselves in and across time into a life-story model of identity. His
model clearly states that life stories are more than recapitulations of
past events and episodes, that they have a defining character: “our nar-
rative identities are the stories we live by” (McAdams et al. 2006: 4).
McAdams’ efforts to connect the study of lives to life stories is paral-
leled in a wider turn to biographic methods in the social sciences, lead-
ing to Lieblich & Josselson’s eleven-volume series titled The Narrative
Study of Lives.
The origins of these efforts stretch across a wide range of disciplines
including psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Goodson and Sikes
(2001: 129) date the origins of life history methods in the form of auto-
biographies back to the beginning of the 20th century. Since then, life
history methods have spread from the study of attitudes in social psy-
chology to community studies in sociology, particularly within the Chi-
cago School, and forty years later back into psychology. Retrospective-
ly, it can be argued that the early studies by the members of the
Chicago School, and in particular “oral history” popularized by the
works of Studs Terkel, lacked the analytic component of modern day
narrative inquiry. However, without these origins and the works of Ber-
taux (1981) and Plummer (1983), the foundation of the Research
Committee on Biography and Society (within the International Socio-
logical Association) would have been unthinkable. The methodological
principles were laid out in the early work by Schütze (1977) and later
picked up and refined in current narrative interview approaches by
Fischer-Rosenthal & Rosenthal (1997).
Thanks to these developments, it is clearer how the relatively mas-
sive turn in the social sciences toward biography and life writing was
able to gain ground as a new approach to identity research. It emerged
as a concerted attempt to wed self-differentiation (self that can reflect
upon itself) and narration (plotting a sense of characterhood across

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 Identity and Narration 247

time)—in narratological terms: “narrating self” and “narrated self”—

into an answer that addresses the three dilemmas of identity laid out
earlier. A teller accounts for how s/he (a) has emerged (as character)
over time, (b) as different from others (but same), and simultaneously
(c) how s/he views her-/himself as a (responsible) agent. Managing
these three dilemmas in concert is taken to establish what is essential to
identity. Consequently, life-writing and biography, preferably as auto-
biography or life story, become privileged arenas for identity research.

3.3 Problems of Linking Life, Narration, and Identity

The link between life and narration and the exploration of lives (includ-
ing selves and identity) through the exploration of narratives have tradi-
tions going back to Freud ([1900] 1913), Allport (1937), and Murray
(1938). However, this close connection between life and narrative is
said to require a particular retrospectiveness that values “life as reflect-
ed” and discredits “life as lived.” Sartwell (2000) has questioned (a)
whether life really has the purpose and meaningfulness that narrative
theorists metaphorically attempt to attribute to it and (b) whether narra-
tives themselves have the kind of coherence (Toolan → Coherence)
and telic quality that narrative theorists often assume. The problem
Sartwell sees in this kind of approach is that the lived moment, the way
it is “sensed” and experienced, is said to gain its life-worthy quality
only in light of its surrounding moments. Rather than empowering the
subject with meaning in life, Sartwell argues, narrative, conceived this
way, drains and blocks him or her from finding pleasure and joy in the
here-and-now. The subject is overpowered by narrative as a normaliz-
ing machine.
Another difficulty resulting from the close linkage between life, nar-
ration, and identity consists in what Lejeune ([1975] 1989) termed “the
autobiographical pact.” According to Lejeune, what counts as autobiog-
raphy is somewhat blurry, since it is based on a “pact” between author
and reader that is not directly traceable down into the textual qualities.
Thus, while a life story can employ the first-person pronoun to feign
the identity of author, narrator, and character, use of the third-person
pronoun may serve to camouflage this identity (cf. narrative unreliabil-
ity; Shen → Unreliability). Autobiographical fiction thrives on the
blurring of these boundaries. Of interest here are “the perennial theoret-
ical questions of authenticity and reference” (Porter 2008: 25) leading
up to the larger issue of the connection between referentiality and narra-
tion (cf. Genette’s 1990 distinction between fictional narrative and fac-
tual narrative).

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248 Michael Bamberg

While most research on biography has been quite aware of the situ-
ated and locally occasioned nature of people’s accounts (often in insti-
tutional settings) and the problems this poses for claims with regard to
the speaker/narrator’s sense of self or identity, a number of researchers
have launched a large-scale critique of the biographic turn as reducing
language to its referential and ideational functions and thereby overex-
tending (and simplifying) narration as the root metaphor for the person,
(sense of) self, and identity. At the core of these voices is the call for a
much “needed antidote to the longstanding tradition of ‘big stories’
which, be they in the form of life stories or of stories of landmark
events, have monopolized the inquiry into tellers’ representations of
past events and themselves in light of these events” (Georgakopoulou
2007: 147; cf. Strawson 2004).

3.4 Narration as Identity Formation in Narrative Practice

Attempts to transport interactional context and performance-oriented

aspects of narration into the analysis of identities reach back to Burke
(1945) and Goffman (1959) and have been reiterated repeatedly by oth-
ers in the field of biography research (e.g. Mishler 1986; Riessman
2008). More recent attempts to integrate this acknowledgment into em-
pirical analysis center around a number of key positions. First is the
proposal to resituate narration as performative moves (cf. Langellier &
Peterson 2004), calling for the analysis of embodied practices and ma-
terial conditions of narrative productions. Similarly, Gubrium and Hol-
stein (2008) argue for a narrative ethnography—one that is able to ana-
lyze the complex interplay between “experience, storying practices,
descriptive resources, purposes at hand, audiences, and the environ-
ments that condition storytelling” (250).
Georgakopoulou (2006, 2007) and Bamberg (1997, 2003; Bamberg
& Georgakopoulou 2008) have tried to develop an alternative approach
to big story narrative research that takes “narratives-in-interaction,” i.e.
the way stories surface in everyday conversation (small stories), as the
locus where identities are continuously practiced and tested out. This
approach allows for exploring self at the level of the talked-about and
at the level of tellership in the here-and-now of a storytelling situation.
Both of these levels feed into the larger project at work in the global
situatedness within which selves are already positioned, i.e. with more
or less implicit and indirect referencing and orientation to social posi-
tions and discourses above and beyond the here-and-now.
Placing emphasis on small stories allows for the study of how peo-
ple as agentive actors position themselves—and in doing so become

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 Identity and Narration 249

positioned. This model of positioning affords the possibility of viewing

identity constructions as two-fold: analyzing the way the referential
world is constructed, with characters (self and others) emerging in time
and space as protagonists and antagonists. Simultaneously, it is possible
to show how the referential world (what the story is about) is construct-
ed as a function of interactive engagement, i.e. the way the referential
world is put together points to how tellers “want to be understood,”
how they index their sense of self. Consequently, it is the action orien-
tation of the participants in small story events that forms the basic point
of departure for this functionalist-informed approach to narration and,
to a lesser degree, what is represented or reflected upon in the stories
told. This seems to be what makes this type of work with small stories
crucially different from work with big stories: the aim is to analyze how
people use small stories in their interactive engagements to construct a
sense of who they are, while big story research analyzes the stories as
representations of world and identities within them.
Behind this way of approaching and working with stories is an ac-
tion orientation that urges the analyst to look at constructions of self
and identity as necessarily dialogical and relational, fashioned and re-
fashioned in local interactive practices (cf. Antaki & Widdicombe eds.
1998; Shepherd → Dialogism). At the same time, it recognizes that
small story participants generally attune their stories to various local,
interpersonal purposes, sequentially gauging themselves to prior and
upcoming talk, continuously challenging and confirming each others’
positions. It is in and through this type of relational activity that repre-
sentations in the form of content, i.e. what the talk is intended to be
about, are brought off and come into existence. By contrast, story anal-
yses that remain fixated on the represented contents of the story in or-
der to conclude from there how the teller reflects on him-/herself miss
out on the very interactive and relational constructedness of content and
reflection. Furthermore, this kind of analysis aims at scrutinizing the
inconsistencies, ambiguities, contradictions, moments of trouble and
tension, and the tellers’ constant navigation and finessing between dif-
ferent versions of selfhood and identity in local interactional contexts.
However well-established the line of identities-in-interaction may be in
the context of the analysis of conversational data, this emphasis still
contrasts with the longstanding privileging of coherence by traditional
approaches to narrative theory. Through the scrutiny of small stories in
a variety of sites and contexts, the aim becomes to legitimize the man-
agement of different and often competing and contradictory positions as
the mainstay of identity through narrative. A final aim is to advance a
project of documenting identity as a process of constant change that,

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250 Michael Bamberg

when practiced over and over again, has the potential to result in a
sense of constancy and sameness, i.e. big stories that can be elicited
under certain conditions.

4 Topics for Further Investigation

(a) Whether narratives actually constitute a privileged territory for in-

quiry into life and identity requires further theoretical and empirical
inquiry. Usually, this question is decided on the basis of a pre-
theoretical, epistemological (if not ontological) stance. But the question
itself may be open to different interpretations. (b) The use of narrative
methods in the exploration of hybrid or hyphenated identities consti-
tutes an interesting new development in recent trends of social science
research in a turn to questions of citizenship, cultural exclusion, imag-
ined communities, symbolic representations of belonging, and even
general processes of globalization. (c) Illness and traumatic experiences
are typically viewed as disruptions of continuity and coherence, posing
challenges to the formation of a sense of self and (biographic) identity
as well as to our sense of agency. Recent discussions about the plot-
types employed in illness narratives and how patients’ narrative ac-
counts can be made use of more productively in narrative medicine
bring up interesting questions with regard to the construction of paths
and trajectories of experiences, their inherent action potential, and the
relationship to mapping out possible reconstructions from being re-
active to becoming pro-active in the construction of patients’ “healing
dramas.” (d) The increasing diversification into different narrative
methods and approaches (content/thematic vs. structural/formal meth-
ods, now joined by discursive/performative approaches) has led to the
question whether there is still a common core to the original “narrative
approach” as an alternative to the study of subjectivity, self, and identi-
ty—the way, in retrospect, it seemed to have begun about thirty-five
years ago.

5 Bibliography

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Riessman, Catherine Kohler (2008). Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences. Thou-
sand Oaks: Sage.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (2006). “Narrative, Media, and Modes.” M.-L. Ryan. Avatars of
Story. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 3–30.
Sartwell, Crispin (2000). End of Story. Toward an Annihilation of Language and Histo-
ry. Albany: State U of New York P.
Schütze, Fritz (1977). Die Technik des narrativen Interviews in Interaktionsfeldstudien
dargestellt an einem Projekt zur Erforschiung von kommunikativen Machtstruk-
turen. Universität Bielefeld: Department of Sociology.
Strawson, Galen (2004). “Against Narrativity.” Ratio n.s. 17, 428–452.
Taylor, Charles (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cam-
bridge: Harvard UP.
Triandis, Harry Ch. (1989). “The Self and Social Behavior in Differing Contexts.”
Psychological Review 96, 506–520.

5.2 Further Reading

Bamberg, Michael, ed. (2007). Narrative—State of the Art. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

– et al., eds. (2007). Selves and Identities in Narrative and Discourse. Amsterdam:
Benjamins.
Brockmeier, Jens & Donal Carbaugh, eds. (2001). Narrative and Identity: Studies in
Autobiography, Self and Culture. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Fina, Anna de et al., eds. (2006). Discourse and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Holstein, James A. & Jaber F. Gubrium (2000). The Self We Live By: Narrative Identity
in a Postmodern World. New York: Oxford UP.
McAdams, Dan P. et al., eds. (2006). Identity and Story. Washington: American Psy-
chological Association.

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