Are We Just Our Stories?
Nathan Bierma, Minds editor
Perspectives

Is narrative inherent in human life or imposed on it? Is a person's life just a story? Or is story a device we place on someone's life to try to get a hold of it? Some while ago I thought about that after doing a number of personal profiles for the Chicago Tribune. One such profile was on a rabbi who was a tour guide in Israel and whose parents were Holocaust survivors; another was on a Filipino immigrant and his latest business venture in Chicago. In my articles, I introduced these individuals by describing them and quoting from them, but you can't do profiles without detailing also the when and what of their lives. In the case of the rabbi that was especially true since the theme of that particular article was how a series of unexpected occurrences had strung her life together. But is life essentially a chronology, or is it finally not a temporally defined experience at all?

READ THE FULL TEXT »