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 completion
actions, 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 middle, and an
end.16 Notably, Ricoeur has taken up this requirement in Time and Narrative as the
pivot of Aristotles formulation, one that warrants consideration in terms of the
temporality implicit to plot structure. While Aristotle himself did not articulate poetic
structure in terms of its temporalityfor Aristotle, poetry could only teach the universal
on the condition that poetry itself maintain an achronicity (TN 170)Ricoeur draws on
the Aristotelian notion of wholeness to argue that the act of emplotment combines in
variable proportions two temporal dimensions, one chronological and the other not. The
former constitutes the episodic dimension of narrative. It characterizes the story insofar
as it is made up of events. The second is the configurational dimension properly
speaking, thanks to which the plot transforms the events into a story. This configurational
act consists of grasping together the detailed actions. . . . It draws from this manifold of
events the unity of one temporal whole (TN 66).
Ricoeur conceives of the temporality of plot structure as a unified double-time: on
the one hand, the linear succession of events that is, for Aristotle, the domain of the
plots middle (P 50b31) and, on the other hand, the logical limits of the beginning and
the end in accordance with which the contingent episodes become meaningful as part of
a temporal whole. According to Ricoeur, the unexpected, the surprising, and the
perplexing are what the plot tends to make necessary and probable. And in so doing, it
purifies them, or, better, purges them (TN 44).
While no mention of Arendt is made in the context of Ricoeurs discussion,17 her innovation is to have placed
this narrative logic in