Historians of the Self: Restorying Lives, Revising Identities

Abstract

In this article I discuss the dilemma in the human sciences between believing there is an objective reality to discover and the fact that information about this reality often comes already organized into narrative forms. Different researchers may tell different stories about what they claim are the same events in people's lives. In turn, research participants are the historians of their own lives. They tell and retell their stories in variant ways and, thereby, continually revise their identities. However, theories of identity development rely on the notion that there is one primary or unifying identity that will be represented in a singular storyline. This assumption implies that if one elicits someone's account of important episodes or experiences in his or her life, one has the basis for characterizing that person's identity within some framework of identity-relevant concepts. The problem is that the retellings are often quite different from each other. People story their lives differently depending on the occasion, audience, and reason for the telling. The complexity of these issues is documented in this paper through a comparative analysis of two successive stories of the same episode told by the narrator in a film, Betty Tells Her Story. Her first and second tellings are markedly different in form of presentation, affective tone, and in Betty's reflections on the meaning to her of this episode. The problematic of retellings suggests the importance, in our theories and research in "identity," of taking the plurality of "identities" into account.