humans to the realm, both divine and natural, of everlastingness.

13 The seeming
irreconcilability of these two realms notwithstanding, to what do great actions of men
owe their translatability or in other words, what characterizes mortality such that it can
be translated into a kind of immortality? Probing this question, Arendt writes: The
mortality of man lies in the fact that individual life, a bios with a recognizable life story
from birth to death, rises out of biological life, zoe. This individual life is distinguished
from all other things by the rectilinear course of its movement, which, so to speak, cuts
through the circular movements of biological life. This is mortality: to move along a
rectilinear line in a universe where everything, if it moves at all, moves in a cyclical
order (BPF 42, emphasis added).
According to this description, the formal structure of bios corresponds to that of
narrative; mortal life is not only life that is born, lives, and then passes away but is also
one whose very life span provides the key to narrative immortalization. The strong
affinities that the form of life or bios bears to a life story or plot show how difficult it is,
at a certain level, to discern life story from life: At some level, the bios of individual life is
always already biography.14
The most readily discernable temporal aspect of this movement is what Arendt, in the
preface to Between Past and Future, refers to as historical or biographical time and
describes as a unidirectional flow of time. . . . [T]he traditional image according to which
we think of time as moving in a straight line [is] a rectilinear temporal Narrative L ife Span,
in the Wake 16

movement (BPF 1113). The linear chronology implied by an unfolding or sequence is,
though, secondary in importance to what she calls in The Human Condition, birth and
death, natality and mortality.15 This general condition of human existence, she argues,
provides the structure according to which a successive series of events or episodes is
circumscribed and turned into something meaningful. In other words, the work of
memory is said to immortalize the actions and deeds of humans as it gives expression to
their emergence and their completionactions, in other words, are inscribed within a
structure bound to and by the facts of human birth and death.
Arendts description of the structure of finitude bears strong resemblances to the theory of narrative structure
advanced by Aristotle in the Poetics, in particular to the requirement that a narrative is complete only if it has a
beginning, a mi