(Explorations in Narrative Psychology) Hanna Meretoja - The Ethics of Storytelling - Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and The Possible-Oxford University Press (2018)

The Ethics of Storytelling
ii
Explorations in Narrative Psychology
Mark Freeman
Series Editor
Books in the Series

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Sara Cobb
Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life
Molly Andrews
Narratives of Positive Aging: Seaside Stories
Amia Lieblich
Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and
the Autobiographical Process
Jens Brockmeier
The Narrative Complexity of Ordinary Life: Tales from the Coffee Shop
William L. Randall
Rethinking Thought: Inside the Minds of Creative Scientists and Artists
Laura Otis
Life and Narrative: The Risks and Responsibilities of Storying Experience
Edited by Brian Schiff, A. Elizabeth McKim, and Sylvie Patron
Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility
After the Holocaust
Roger Frie
A New Narrative for Psychology
Brian Schiff
Decolonizing Psychology: Globalization, Social Justice,
and Indian Youth Identities
Sunil Bhatia
Entangled Narratives: Collaborative Storytelling and
the Re-Imagining of Dementia
Lars- Christer Hydén
The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History,
and the Possible
Hanna Meretoja
The Ethics
of Storytelling
Narrative Hermeneutics, History,
and the Possible
Hanna Meretoja
1
iv
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Meretoja, Hanna, 1977– author.
Title: The Ethics of storytelling : narrative hermeneutics, history,
and the possible / Hanna Meretoja.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2018. |
Series: Explorations in narrative psychology |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017028106 | ISBN 9780190649364 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Storytelling. | Narration (Rhetoric)—Moral and ethical aspects. |
Narration (Rhetoric)—Psychological aspects. | Narration (Rhetoric)—Social aspects. |
Self-perception in literature. | Social perception in literature. | Awareness in literature. |
Imagination in literature. | BISAC: PSYCHOLOGY / Social Psychology. |
PHILOSOPHY / Mind & Body. | LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory.
Classification: LCC PN56.S7357 M47 2017 | DDC 808/.036—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017028106
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
To Alma and Eliel, my beloved storytelling animals
vi
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
1. Introduction: Toward an Ethics of Storytelling 1

2. Narrative Hermeneutics 43
3. Storytelling and Ethics 89
4. The Uses and Abuses of Narrative for Life: Julia Franck’s
Die Mittagsfrau 149
5. Narrative Ethics of Implication: Günter Grass and Historical
Imagination 179
6. Narrative Dynamics, Perspective-Taking, and Engagement:
Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes 217
7. Transforming the Narrative In-Between: Dialogic Storytelling and
David Grossman 255
8. Conclusion: Struggles over the Possible 299
References 309
Index 333
vi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
One of the guiding ideas of this book is that people and narratives become
who and what they are in dialogue with other people and their stories. This
is true of this book as well. It has taken shape in a conversation with innu-
merable people whose stories, thoughts, affection, and support have made
its writing possible. I can here name only some of those to whom I am most
indebted.
The relationship between storytelling and ethics has occupied my mind
for such a long time that it is difficult to say when exactly I began work on
this book. I was reflecting on these issues already when writing my pre-
vious book, The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory (Palgrave Macmillan,
2014), and while finishing it, I felt compelled to develop a more systematic
and more broadly interdisciplinary account of narrative hermeneutics and
a hermeneutic narrative ethics. This book seeks to provide such a system-
atic account of the project of narrative hermeneutics that I have begun in
my earlier work and to zoom in on its ethical implications. The feedback
I received on my first book has helped me enormously to give shape to
this book.
I owe a special gratitude to my colleagues who have read and provided
insightful comments on parts of the manuscript: Eneken Laanes, Erin
McGlothlin, Frans Svensson, Henrik Skov Nielsen, Marco Caracciolo,
Maria Mäkelä, Robert Eaglestone, and my colleagues at the Department of
Comparative Literature (University of Turku), in particular Aino Mäkikalli,
Jouni Teittinen, Kaisa Ilmonen, Liisa Steinby, Lotta Kähkönen, Tiina
Käkelä-Puumala, and Tintti Klapuri. I wrote a first draft of the Grass chap-
ter (Chapter 5) in the spring of 2011 as part of the Academy of Finland
research project Literature and Time: Time and Agency in Modern Literature
(led by Liisa Steinby); the feedback from that research group informs my
analyses of temporality in this book. Members of the research project The
Ethics of Storytelling and the Experience of History in Contemporary Literature
and Visual Arts (Emil Aaltonen Foundation), which I had the honor to lead
x
in 2013–2016, Kaisa Kaakinen, Ilona Hongisto, Mia Hannula, and Riitta

Jytilä, have commented on earlier drafts of several chapters of the book,
and the group has provided a stimulating environment for developing this
project.
While writing this book, I have had the pleasure to work at both the
University of Turku and the University of Tampere with wonderful col-
leagues with whom I established in 2014 the interdisciplinary research center
Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies (Tampere) and in 2015
SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory (Turku).
These research communities have provided a supportive environment for my
work. In the latter, Maarit Leskelä-Kärki and Päivi Kosonen have been particu-
larly inspiring partners of dialogue. I owe a huge debt to my brilliant students
at both Tampere and Turku. A special thanks to Eevastiina Kinnunen, who has
gone through the manuscript with exceptional care and thoroughness.
Conversations with and feedback from my colleagues around the world
have contributed to this book in numerous ways: I want to thank, in par-
ticular, Molly Andrews, Aleida Assmann, Mieke Bal, Sunil Bhatia, Heidi
Bostic, Cassandra Falke, Rita Felski, Roger Frie, Jane Hiddleston, Matti
Hyvärinen, Teemu Ikonen, Stefan Iversen, Kuisma Korhonen, Liesbeth
Korthals Altes, Markku Lehtimäki, Jakob Lothe, Pirjo Lyytikäinen,
Julia Nitz, Sakari Ollitervo, Ann Phoenix, Merja Polvinen, Ann Rigney,
Michael Rothberg, Hannu Salmi, Brian Schiff, Max Silverman, Howard
Sklar, Anneke Sools, Maria Tamboukou, Pekka Tammi, Shane Weller, and
Benjamin Wihstutz. Audiences at numerous conferences and symposia
over the years have also provided valuable feedback. In particular, I want
to express my gratitude for invitations to present my research at Royal
Holloway (University of London, March 2013), The American University of
Paris (where I was a visiting professor in 2013–2014), and The Centre for
Narrative Research (University of East London, December 2015), to give a
keynote at the Narrative Matters conference in Victoria (June 2016), and to
speak at The Future of Literary Studies conference (Oslo, June 2016).
I am grateful to Matthew James and Avril Tynan for their insightful,
nuanced, and patient linguistic advice. It has been a joy to work with Abby
Gross and Courtney McCarroll of Oxford University Press; their profes-
sionalism, reliability, and support have made the whole publication process
a most enjoyable experience. I also appreciate the helpful comments pro-
vided by several anonymous readers. I am so happy that Bracha L. Ettinger
gave me the permission to use her beautiful picture (Eurydice no. 35) as the
cover of this book.
I am deeply grateful to all of my friends whose stories have inter-
sected with mine, shaping my modes of thought, perception, and affect in
[x] Acknowledgments
innumerable ways. I feel particularly privileged for the in-depth dialogue
I have been able to engage in with kindred philosophical souls over the
years on the topics of this book. A few of them have been so important for
this project that I want to thank them for giving me much more than just
valuable comments and encouragement. Jens Brockmeier, my fellow nar-
rative hermeneuticist, has commented on a large part of the manuscript
with great insight, generosity, and perceptiveness, from the broad interdis-
ciplinary perspective that is singular to him. I want to thank Anna Reading
for her warm friendship and stimulating discussions; she gave me the most
detailed comments on the Introduction that I have ever received—in my
favorite spot on the pier of our summer house. I am immensely grateful
to Mark Freeman for supporting this project from early on, for his willing-
ness to include it in his inspiring series, and for generous and thoughtful
comments at various stages of the project. I want to thank Andreea Ritivoi
for just being there and making me feel, by speaking the same philosophi-
cal language, that what I do may actually speak to someone out there. I am
inexpressibly thankful to Colin Davis for his unique friendship, affection,
and unwavering support—for helping me become more than I would have
been able to without him.
My heartfelt thanks to my parents and siblings for all their love and
support. My deepest gratitude goes to the person with whom I have shared
both my intellectual and non-intellectual life for more than 23 years.
Valtteri Viljanen has set an example for me with his courage, perseverance,
and sense of humor. This book has benefited enormously from his philo-
sophical perceptiveness and passion, and it is through our daily narrative
dialogue that I have become the thinker, writer, and person I am. Alma
and Eliel have taught me the power of narrative imagination: from them
I have learned that with enough imagination, almost anything is possible.
Ultimately, it is their love, patience, encouragement, and wisdom that has
made this book possible.
I gratefully acknowledge the permission from publishers to draw on the fol-

lowing earlier publications, although most of the material I have used from
them has been heavily revised and reworked. In Chapters 2 and 7, I have
integrated passages from “For Interpretation” (Storyworlds 8 [2]‌, 2016,
pp. 97–117). The discussion of Nussbaum in Chapter 3 owes something to
my chapter “A Sense of History—A Sense of the Possible: Nussbaum and
Hermeneutics on the Ethical Potential of Literature” in Values of Literature
(edited by Hanna Meretoja, Saija Isomaa, Pirjo Lyytikäinen, and Kristina
Malmio, Brill Rodopi, 2015, pp. 25–46), its discussion of the possible con-
tains passages from “Exploring the Possible: Philosophical Reflection,
Acknowledgments [ xi ]
xi
Historical Imagination, and Narrative Agency” (Narrative Works 6, 2016,

pp. 92–107), and its section on the non-subsumptive mode of under-
standing draws on “From Appropriation to Dialogic Exploration: A Non-
Subsumptive Model of Storytelling” in Storytelling and Ethics: Literature,
Visual Arts, and the Power of Narrative (edited by Hanna Meretoja and Colin
Davis, Routledge, 2018). Some key ideas of the chapter are presented in a
very condensed form in “Narrative Hermeneutics and the Ethical Potential
of Literature” in The Future of Literary Studies (edited by Jakob Lothe, Novus
Press, 2017, pp. 147–159). Chapter 4 grew from “On the Use and Abuse
of Narrative for Life: Toward an Ethics of Storytelling,” which appeared
in Narrative and Life: The Risks and Responsibilities of Storying Life (edited
by Brian Schiff, Sylvie Patron, and A. Elizabeth McKim, Oxford University
Press, 2017, pp. 75–97). Chapter 5 contains, in a modified form, passages
from “An Inquiry into Historical Experience and Its Narration: The Case of
Günter Grass” (Spiel: Siegener Periodicum for International Empiricist Literary
Scholarship special issue, “Towards a Historiographical Narratology,” edited
by Julia Nitz and Sandra Harbart Petrulionis, 30 [1], 2011, pp. 51–72). An
earlier version of Chapter 6 was published as “History, Fiction and the
Possible: Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes” (Orbis Litterarum 81 [5],
2016, pp. 371–404).
[ xii ] Acknowledgments
The Ethics of Storytelling
xvi
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Toward an Ethics of Storytelling
T hat stories are indispensable for human existence is an idea that reaches
back at least to One Thousand and One Nights: as Scheherazade’s fasci-
nating tales delay and ultimately prevent her murder by King Shahryar,
storytelling becomes, quite literally, an art of survival. At the same time,
entanglement in narratives has notoriously raised suspicion. In the
Western imagination, Don Quixote and Emma Bovary epitomize the dan-
gers of reading too many stories, and the crisis of European humanism,
in the wake of two world wars and the Holocaust, thoroughly problema-
tized the imposition of narrative order on history and our experience of
the world. The protagonist of Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée (1938, Nausea)
encapsulates this sensibility: “you have to choose: to live or to recount”
(1965, p. 61).1 Over the past few decades, discourse surrounding the ethi-
cal significance of narrative for human existence has gained unprecedented
urgency and intensity. As the debate on the ethics of storytelling has
become one of the liveliest in interdisciplinary narrative studies, positions
have also become increasingly polarized: as theorists of narrative argue
“for” or “against” narrativity, the quarrel tends to be whether narratives
are “good” or “bad” for us.2
As part of the “narrative turn,” the idea that stories are not only indis-
pensable but also inherently beneficial for us has become hugely popular.3
A wide range of thinkers have come to share Paul Ricoeur’s view that only
“a life narrated” can be “a life examined” and hence worth living (1991b,
p. 435). Many contemporary novelists seem to agree: while Paul Auster
2
asserts that “stories are the fundamental food for the soul” (Irwin & Auster,
2013, p. 46), Jeanette Winterson’s narrator compares storytelling to light-
housekeeping and presents “stories going out over the waves, as markers
and guides and comfort and warning” (2004, p. 41). Yet the strong nar-
rativist position has provoked a fierce counter-reaction. One of the most
outspoken representatives of the “against narrativity” movement, Galen
Strawson, argues provocatively, “the more you recall, retell, narrate your-
self, the further you risk moving away from accurate self-understanding,
from the truth of your being” (2004, p. 447).
Against the backdrop of this polarized debate, there is a need for a
theoretical-analytical framework that allows us to explore the ethical
complexity of the roles that narratives play in our lives. In this book, I set
out to develop such a framework—one that acknowledges both the eth-
ical potential and the risks of storytelling. My starting point is that a
nuanced analysis of the uses and abuses of narrative for life is possible
only when we are sensitive to the ways in which narratives as practices
of sense-making are embedded in social, cultural, and historical worlds.
We are always already entangled in webs of narratives. They are integral
to the world that precedes us, and they make it possible for us to develop
into subjects who are capable of narrating their experiences, sharing
them with others, and telling their own versions of the stories they have
inherited. Each cultural and historical world functions as a space of possi-
bilities that encourages certain modes of experience, thought, and action,
and discourages or disallows others, and stories play a constitutive role
in establishing the limits of these worlds—both enabling experience and
delimiting it.
This book aims to develop an approach that invites analyzing both how
narratives enlarge the dialogic spaces of possibilities in which we act, think,
and reimagine the world together with others, and how they restrain or
impoverish these spaces. Precisely this, I argue, is a crucial but generally
overlooked dimension of the ethics of storytelling: narratives both expand
and diminish our sense of the possible. I call my approach a narrative her-
meneutics because it treats narratives as culturally mediated practices of
(re)interpreting experience, and I will explore its ethical implications.4 It
aims to provide a philosophically rigorous, historically sensitive, and ana-
lytically subtle approach to the ethical stakes of the debate on the narrative
dimension of human existence. On the basis of narrative hermeneutics,
I propose a hermeneutic narrative ethics, which acknowledges that narrative
practices can be oppressive, empowering, or both, and provides resources
for analyzing the different dimensions of the ethical potential and dangers
of storytelling.
[2] The Ethics of Storytelling

Narrative hermeneutics emphasizes that interpretation does not con-
cern only our engagement with texts; it characterizes our whole being in
the world and is the basic structure of experience, narrative, and memory.
When we go through meaningful experiences, weave them into stories, and
remember them in a certain light and from a certain perspective, we engage
in interpretative processes of sense-making. It is as “self-interpreting ani-
mals” (Taylor, 1985) that we narrate our experiences and fashion our lives.
Narratives are interpretative practices through which we make sense of our
lives, and these meaning-making practices are ethically charged. As Ricoeur
puts it, narratives are “never ethically neutral” (1992, p. 140), and story-
telling can function as “a provocation to be and to act differently” (1988,
p. 249).
I will explore the ethical potential of storytelling with particular atten-
tion to that of narrative fiction. While it has long been taken for granted
that literature is beneficial for us, this is no longer necessarily the case.
Against the backdrop of the current crisis of the humanities, many phi-
losophers, psychologists, and literary scholars have defended the value of
narrative fiction by drawing attention to its cognitive and ethical signif-
icance for our development as human beings, moral agents, and demo-
cratic citizens, particularly insofar as it boosts our capacity for empathetic
perspective-taking. Martha Nussbaum describes such a capacity in terms
of narrative imagination, which she sees as a major counterforce to the anti-
democratic tendencies in the contemporary world:
[Narrative imagination] means the ability to think what it might be like to be

in the shoes of a person different from oneself, to be an intelligent reader of
that person’s story, and to understand the emotions and wishes and desires that
someone so placed might have. (2010, pp. 95–96)
Cognitive scientists have recently sought to provide empirical support

for such views by arguing that narrative fiction is more “transformative”
than nonfiction (Djikic et al., 2009) and has a stronger impact on our “social
perception and moral self-concept” (Hakemulder, 2000). David Comer Kidd
and Emanuele Castano’s (2013) widely reported study asserts that the affec-
tive and cognitive skills involved in understanding that others have beliefs,
desires, and intentions that are different from one’s own—what cognitive
scientists call “theory of mind”—are improved by reading literary fiction
compared with reading nonfiction, popular fiction, or nothing at all.5 The
researchers not only claim that after short-term exposure to fiction, people
do better on tests that measure empathy, social perception, and emotional
intelligence, but also suggest that in addition to temporary enhancement
Introduction [3]
4
of these skills, long-term effects could be achieved by regular engagement

with literature. Recently, Kidd and Castano (2016) have reached the same
conclusion through a different method, but other researchers have failed to
reproduce their results (Panero et al., 2016).
Irrespective of the short-term effects of reading fiction, it is far from
evident how long-term effects could be measured in reliable ways. To me
it seems far more plausible to argue that literature cultivates our ability
to perceive the world from multiple perspectives, or at least increases our
awareness of and sensitivity to such multiplicity—what I call perspective-
awareness and perspective-sensitivity—than to argue that literature makes
us ethical in the sense of causing us to engage in moral action. As many
critics have observed, there is a significant difference between embracing
the perspectives of others—or imagining what one might do in hypotheti-
cal scenarios—and actually carrying out concrete actions in the real world.
Suzanne Keen, for example, argues that “the very fictionality of novels pre-
disposes readers to empathize with characters,” because “fictional worlds
provide safe zones for readers’ feeling empathy without experiencing a
resultant demand on real-world action” (2007, p. 4). Indeed, there is ample
evidence that reading fiction is no guarantee of ethical action. As George
Steiner famously reminds us, the Holocaust seriously undermined the long
unquestioned belief in the “humanizing force” of literature: “We know now
that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach
and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning” (1967,
p. 15).
However, perspective-awareness may be a necessary condition for moral
agency, even if it is not a sufficient condition. Several moral philosophers
have argued that imagination is indispensable not only for our cognitive
and emotional development, but also for our ethical development and
agency.6 As moral agents we are capable of initiating new processes in the
world, and in making decisions and embarking on actions we must imag-
ine the myriad potential consequences of these actions—how they might
affect others and change the world we co-inhabit. Without such a power of
imagination, our existence as acting subjects would be truncated. A sense
of the possible—a sense of how things could be otherwise—is integral to
moral agency and to the ethical imagination of individuals and communi-
ties. It has transformative potential.
I will explore the capacity of narratives to expand our sense of the pos-
sible in relation to five additional aspects of the ethical potential of story-
telling: narrative’s contribution to personal and cultural self-understanding;
narrative as a non-subsumptive mode of encountering alterity; storytelling
as a way of shaping the narrative in-between; narrative as cultivating our

perspective-awareness and capacity for perspective-taking; and narrative as a
form of ethical inquiry. On the basis of these six aspects of what narratives
can do to us, ethically speaking, I propose a schematic map for exploring
and evaluating, in a differentiated manner, the ethical potential and prob-
lems of different storytelling practices. As a literary scholar, I mainly test
the model on literary narratives, but it is meant to be usable for the ethical
analysis of any narratives.
In reflecting on the sense of the possible, what interests me are real,
genuine possibilities, in contrast to merely logical possibilities.7 As Gary
Saul Morson writes, “the temporal world consists not just of actualities and
impossibilities but also of a third, in-between category: real, though unac-
tualized, possibilities” (1998, p. 602). These real possibilities often go unac-
knowledged in actual worlds, and they are linked to our power to imagine
the “what-ifs” and alternative courses of events that could make the world
utterly different. While many kinds of narratives can stimulate our capac-
ity to think beyond—and resist—the actual, this task is particularly impor-
tant for literature and other arts. As Jacques Rancière puts it, aesthetic
acts can function “as configurations of experience that create new modes
of sense perception” (2013, p. 3). In Gilles Deleuze’s terms, storytelling has
power to add to the real, for example by contributing to the invention of
new subjectivities and “a people to come” (2005, pp. 208, 264).8 Through
the exploration of human possibilities, narrative fiction opens up new per-
spectives on history, the everyday, and the yet-to-be. We engage with fic-
tional narratives as whole, embodied human beings with our own desires
and anxieties, values and beliefs, memories and fantasies. What is at stake
is not just an escape to the realm of the unreal but an exploration of the
possible. Through reading, we encounter what Ricoeur (1991a, p. 88) calls
imaginative variations of ourselves that allow us to explore—as individuals
and communities—who we are in relation to who we could be. Such explo-
ration cultivates our understanding of where we come from, where we are
now, and where we could go. This, in turn, affects who we in fact are.
TOWARD A NARRATIVE HERMENEUTICS
Hermeneutics refers to theoretical reflection on interpretation. It orig-

inates in the study of sacred and legal texts and in its modern form (at
the turn of the nineteenth century) came to signify theoretical reflection
on interpretation and understanding. In the early twentieth century, in
Martin Heidegger’s and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s work, hermeneutics went
through an “ontological turn”: while nineteenth-century hermeneutics
Introduction [5]
6
focused on interpretation and understanding as the methodological basis

of the humanities, in Sein und Zeit (1927, Being and Time) Heidegger ana-
lyzed understanding as the human mode of being in the world. This shift
expanded the scope of hermeneutics to concern human existence in gen-
eral. As Gadamer puts it, Heidegger
placed hermeneutics in the center of his analysis of existence in showing that

interpretation is not an isolated activity of human beings but the basic structure
of our experience of life. We are always taking something as something. That is
the primordial givenness of our world orientation, and we cannot reduce it to
anything simpler or more immediate. (1984, p. 58)
After the existential-ontological turn of hermeneutics, interpretation

came to refer to the sense-making process that structures our engagement
with the world. As Gadamer (1993a, p. 339) acknowledges, this turn is
indebted to Friedrich Nietzsche, who launched the antipositivistic tradi-
tion, according to which there is nothing more basic than interpretation: all
that is “given” (das Gegebene) to us is itself a result of interpretation.
Nietzsche famously argued that “facts is [sic] precisely what there is not,
only interpretations” (1968, p. 267). That interpretation is primordial—
irreducible to anything more elementary—is the most fundamental tenet
of philosophical hermeneutics. In Heidegger’s terms, our mode of being
in the world has an interpretative “as-structure” (1996, p. 140); the “her-
meneutic understanding-something-as-something [das hermeneutische
Etwas-als-etwas-Verstehen]” (Gadamer, 1993a, p. 339) is the structure of all
experience.
Narrative hermeneutics is motivated by the view that theoretical reflec-
tion on interpretation deserves a more central place in contemporary nar-
rative studies and critical theory. Instead of assuming that we all know
what interpretation means, we need more reflection on different concep-
tions, levels, and practices of interpretation. As Rita Felski observes, her-
meneutics has received surprisingly little serious consideration in critical
theory over the past few decades: “Given the surge of interest in questions
of reading—close and distant, deep and surface—the neglect of the her-
meneutic tradition in Anglo-American literary theory is little short of scan-
dalous” (2015, p. 33). This is largely due to a common misunderstanding,
particularly in poststructuralistically oriented humanities and social sci-
ences: the concept of interpretation is often taken to imply seeking a hid-
den “ultimate meaning” that waits to be discovered in the depths of the
object of interpretation (pp. 32–33).9 Such suspicion toward interpretation
has animated French poststructuralism and has exerted its influence in the

Anglo-American world through the reception of French thought—an early
example being Susan Sontag’s influential attack “Against Interpretation”
(1964).
Felski (2015, p. 33) proposes a rebranding of hermeneutics, starting
with the recognition that hermeneutics does not imply a commitment to
any particular conception of interpretation; rather, it is simply the pur-
suit of theorizing interpretation, within which many rival understandings
of interpretation can flourish and debate, and hence should be seen as a
“resource to be reimagined rather than an idol to be destroyed” (p. 34).
Such a project of reimagining is precisely what I intend to do in this book.
An important starting point for this project is the acknowledgment that
interpretation is fundamental not only to our engagement with texts, but
to our whole being in the world, and that narratives mediate and condition
our interpretative engagements with the world and other people.
Within narrative studies, narratology in particular has sought to distance
itself from interpretation, which it has associated with unscientificity and
subjectivity. As Liesbeth Korthals Altes puts it, “scientificity has often been
considered to come proportionally to one’s distancing from interpretation,
and from hermeneutics more generally”; this tendency has been coupled
with narratology’s “lack of systematic interest in the social dimensions
and, hence, the diversity of interpretive processes” (2014, p. 19). However,
as the most lucid narratologists, like Korthals Altes (2014) and Jonathan
Culler (1988, p. 279), recognize, interpretation is a key element of all nar-
rative analysis, even of the most descriptive. I suggest that we should go
one step further and acknowledge that interpretation is something that we
always already do, not only when we interpret texts, in order to be able to
rethink the relationship between different levels of interpretation.
Narrative hermeneutics approaches narrative as a culturally mediated
interpretative practice that makes someone’s experiences in a particular
situation intelligible by drawing meaningful connections between them. It
explores narrative as an activity of organizing experiences that has bearing
on our sense of who we are and who we could be. This may sound simple,
but these basic premises are far from self-evident. For example, the classi-
cal narratological tradition shaped by the legacy of French structuralism
deliberately omitted notions of experience and the experiencing subject
and instead conceptualized narrative in terms of a (quasi-causal) represen-
tation of a series of events. Today, Monika Fludernik’s (1996, p. 12) view
that experientiality—which she defines as the “quasi-mimetic evocation of
‘real-life experience’ ”—is the key feature of narrative has become one of the
widely shared premises of cognitively oriented “postclassical narratology.”10
Yet contemporary narratologists mostly rely on a conception of experience
Introduction [7]
8
that is rarely thematized but seems to be very different from a hermeneu-

tic one. Their notion is usually closer to the empiricist-positivistic belief
in “raw experience” than to the hermeneutic conception of experience as
mediated and interpretatively structured. In cognitive narratology, “expe-
riencing” is a universal cognitive frame (Fludernik, 1996), and it tends to
be linked to the ahistorical assumption that experience is something quite
unproblematic, immediately given here and now.
This ahistorical conception of experience is generally coupled with a
narrow conception of history: history is seen as something that happens
elsewhere—where the great political leaders meet and wars are fought—
rather than right here, in our everyday lives. In Fludernik’s definition, for
example, the “historical” refers to such historically “significant” events as
wars, the American moon landing, and the fall of the Berlin wall (2010,
pp. 43, 46).11 She suggests that soldiers in the battlefield have “histori-
cal experience” that can be characterized as “raw experience” (pp. 41–43),
whereas those who follow the war on television have only “mediated” his-
torical experience, as if the experience of those engaged in ordinary every-
day activities were not historical:
In order to become “historical” experience (rather than mere experience of

things happening to impinge on one), events or processes need to be cognized
as either significant (which will cause them to be experienced as historic even
though they are only just evolving) or as past. (p. 46)
What is problematic in this narrow conception is that it ignores the his-

toricity of everyday life in which apparently nothing much happens. Who
gets to decide, and how, what counts as “significant”?12 It can be legit-
imately argued that the personal, subjective, and everyday are highly
significant and just as historically constituted as the events of narrowly
conceived political history. It is rarely acknowledged in narrative studies
that history is not something external to us but constitutive of all experi-
ence.13 Despite the widespread use of the concept of experience in narrative
studies, it is wildly under-theorized, and its temporal complexity tends to
be downplayed.14
Most approaches to narrative, developed by a range of thinkers from
Hayden White (1981) to Strawson (2004) and several cognitive narratolo-
gists, rely on a hierarchical dichotomy between living and telling, based
on the assumption that there is pure or raw experience on which nar-
rative retrospectively imposes order. Narrative then easily appears as a
projection of false order, or as a distortion of the original experiences
or events. Narrative hermeneutics, in contrast, questions the dichotomy

between living and telling by stressing that experience is continuously
mediated. Its key insight is that cultural webs of narratives affect the way in
which we experience things in the first place.
In narrative psychology, there is a line of thought that recognizes
this mediatedness, or what Jerome Bruner calls the mimetic “two-way
affair”: “Narrative imitates life, life imitates narrative” (1987, p. 13).
Bruner acknowledges that our lives are a product of imagination in the
sense that they are available only through a process of recounting, which
is not a “recital of something univocally given,” but “an interpretive feat”
(p. 13). Hence, “life is not ‘how it was’ but how it is interpreted and rein-
terpreted, told and retold” (p. 31). One of Bruner’s great insights is that
the cultural “stock of canonical life narratives” affects how we tell our lives
against what we perceive as “possible lives”: these cultural narrative models
have the “power to structure perceptual experience, to organize memory,
to segment and purpose-build the very ‘events’ of a life” (p. 15). Drawing
on Bruner, much of narrative research in the social sciences emphasizes
what Ann Phoenix characaterizes as the need to “give equal importance to
individual and to social processes” and to pay attention to how “canonical
narratives provide insights into the ways in which narrators use culture in
doing narratives” (2013, pp. 74–75). Bruner’s thinking is indebted to the
hermeneutic tradition of thought, but he rarely refers to it, and the connec-
tions remain largely implicit; this is even truer of contemporary narrative
psychology and narrative social sciences. One of the aims of this book is to
explicate the relevance of hermeneutics for today’s interdisciplinary narra-
tive studies.15
Perspectivism—the recognition that we always interpret the world from a

particular perspective—is integral to narrative hermeneutics. It considers
different disciplines, for example, as practices of interpreting the world
from different perspectives and of posing different types of questions to
reality. These interpretative perspectives are primary in relation to any
propositional statements: it is a key tenet of hermeneutics that “every
statement has to be seen as a response to a question and that the only way
to understand a statement is to get hold of the question to which the state-
ment is an answer” (Gadamer, 1981, p. 106). Hence, a certain way of ask-
ing questions is more fundamental to a discipline than the propositional
claims it makes: chemistry and media studies, for example, approach the
world from different perspectives and ask it different types of questions.
As Alexander Nehamas (1985) argues, Nietzschean perspectivism and
the primordiality of interpretation implies that literary interpretation is
a relevant model for understanding not only texts but also lives. Just as
Introduction [9]
01
we can interpret literary texts “equally well in vastly different and deeply
incompatible ways,” the same is true of human lives (p. 3), but this does not
mean that all interpretations are equally good; rather, it is to acknowledge
that knowledge is never absolute and all interpretations take place from
a particular perspective.16 As Gadamer puts it, “[i]‌nterpretation is always
on the way. . . . [T]he word interpretation points to the finitude of human
being and the finitude of human knowing” (2001, p. 105). This endlessness
is linked to the unfinalizable nature of interpretation: “the key hypoth-
esis of hermeneutic philosophy is that interpretation is an open process
that no single vision can conclude” (Ricoeur, 1991a, p. 33). Interpretations
are never exhaustive, and our interpretative relationship with the world
involves ongoing engagement with its nonsemantic, material aspects.17
That narrative is seen as a cultural interpretative practice (rather than
only as a structure, like in classical and much of postclassical narratology)
means that it is perceived as a social activity, process, and interaction:
something we do together with others and through which we take part in
shaping social reality. My interest in narrative hermeneutics is animated
by the conviction that we should move beyond linking interpretation to
the idea of unveiling deep meanings; we should see interpretation as an
endless activity of (re)orientation, engagement, and sense-making, which
is thoroughly worldly, both in the sense of being embedded in a social and
historical world and in the sense of participating in performatively con-
stituting that world. Narrative is about understanding in the Gadamerian
sense of “understanding oneself in the world,” which entails comprehend-
ing one’s possibilities of acting and experiencing (Gadamer, 1993b, p. 345).
For Gadamer, our interpretative engagement with the world is pro-
foundly historical and situated. However, the level of abstraction of his phi-
losophy is such that he says little about the specific ways in which our being
in the world is situated, as multiple axes of differentiation—such as those
of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and age—intersect in particular his-
torical and cultural contexts to produce lived experience.18 Yet philosophi-
cal hermeneutics and approaches that emphasize the gendered, ethnicized,
and classed nature of our social existence are far from incompatible; indeed,
the importance of these modes of situatedness is implied in the empha-
sis of philosophical hermeneutics on the historicity of our being in the
world—on the way all actions and understandings are anchored in a par-
ticular historical situation, conditioned by the social system that imputes
identity categories on people.19 In philosophical hermeneutics, however,
too much remains implicit. In my view, hermeneutics should be developed
in a direction that is more articulate about power relations, specific modes
of situatedness, and the unequal distribution of agency and vulnerability.20
[ 10 ] The Ethics of Storytelling

In articulating the performative dimension of narrative interpretations
and their intertwinement with relations of power, I propose a narrative
hermeneutics that synthesizes aspects of philosophical hermeneutics, on
one hand, and of Nietzschean-Bakhtinian-Foucauldian hermeneutics, on
the other. It aspires to function as a theoretical-analytical framework for
exploring narratives as interpretative practices that exist in relations of
dialogue and struggle in the world, not merely in some textual universe.
The Nietzschean-hermeneutic approach acknowledges that interpretative
practices not only represent the world, but take part in performatively
shaping it. This framework invites reflection on who gets to decide which
stories get told and how, and what worldly effects these ethically charged
storytelling practices have.
NARRATIVE, AGENCY, AND ETHICS
From the perspective of narrative hermeneutics, cultural models of narra-

tive sense-making condition—but do not straightforwardly determine—
our lives, identities, and modes of experience. Narrative hermeneutics
envisages the relationship between narrative sense-making models and the
individual subjects who interpret them as fundamentally dialogical in the
sense that while the subjects become who they are in relation to the cul-
tural models, these models only exist through being interpreted. As Jens
Brockmeier puts it, cultural meanings “signal a range of options, of pos-
sibilities for action” (2009, p. 222). He builds on Klaus Holzkamp’s idea of
how our relationship to cultural meanings is a “ ‘possibility’ relationship
[‘Möglichkeits’-Beziehung]” (1983, p. 236). The idea that cultural webs of
meanings do not determine our actions or who we become but rather indi-
cate possibilities for action suggests that we can, to some extent, detach
ourselves from them (Brockmeier, 2009, p. 222)—or at least some aspects
of them. Reinterpretations can resist and challenge culturally prevalent
narrative models, although such challenging is considerably more difficult
for precarious subjects than for those in privileged positions of power.
The notion of narrative agency designates how, as Catriona Mackenzie
puts it, “to be a person is to exercise narrative capacities for self-
interpretation,” which bring about “the integration of the self over time,”
and that such “[n]‌arrative integration is dynamic, provisional and open to
change and revision” (2008, pp. 11–12). I would like to emphasize, how-
ever, that the narrative dimension of agency is not only at play in processes
of self-interpretation but is more broadly a constitutive aspect of moral
agency as we constantly participate, through our actions and inactions,
Introduction [ 11 ]
21
in narrative practices that perpetuate and challenge social structures. The

concept of narrative agency is useful in signaling that culturally mediated
narrative (self-)interpretations take part in constituting us as subjects
capable of action, while simultaneously recognizing that as agents of nar-
rative interpretation we are both constituting and constituted. Narrative
agency can be amplified or diminished, and agentic power is unevenly dis-
tributed across the globe.
There are crucial differences in the ways in which narratives as cultural
interpretative practices affect us and our narrative agency. Often narra-
tives are so integral to one’s way of life that one is largely unaware of them,
and in fact it is impossible to become aware of all the narrative webs in
which we are entangled. Narratives can become dangerous weapons for
political ideologies when they are not presented as narratives but as neu-
tral, perspectiveless statements of how things are. This insight fueled the
attack on storytelling after the Second World War. Importantly, however,
this attack was directed not against narrative per se but against a particular
conception and function of narrative, namely, against narratives that pres-
ent themselves as the discourse of truth.21 Such narratives function accord-
ing to what Roland Barthes (1957, pp. 251–252) described as the logic of
myth: they present what is historical and human-made as if it were natural
and inevitable.
Narratives function in different ways: sometimes they perpetuate prob-
lematic stereotypical sense-making practices; at other times they encourage
critical reflection on dominant cultural narrative practices and self-reflex-
ively question the kind of naturalizing tendency that the postwar thinkers
criticized. I suggest that instead of a singular and definitive logic of narrative,
there are different logics of narrative. In particular, an important distinction
can be made between naturalizing narratives, which hide their own mediat-
ing and interpretative role, and self-reflexive narratives, which openly present
themselves as narratives, that is, as selective, perspectival interpretations that
can always be contested and told otherwise. Self-reflexive narratives overtly
raise the possibility of reinterpretation and invite the recipient to participate
in the dialogic process. I will argue that naturalizing and self-reflexive narra-
tive strategies are intimately linked to ethically distinct logics manifested by
subsumptive and non-subsumptive narrative practices: while some (typically
naturalizing) narratives seek to subsume the particular under the general,
others (typically self-reflexive ones) destabilize such appropriative aspira-
tions and display a non-subsumptive logic by foregrounding the temporal
process of encountering the singularity of the narrated experiences. This
book develops an alternative to the subsumption model of narrative under-
standing and argues that the ethical potential of storytelling depends on the

possibility of non-subsumptive understanding, in which singular experi-
ences are not subsumed under what we already know, but shape and trans-
form our understanding.
Ethics explores different ways of responding to the question of how we should

live. This involves reflection on how our values and commitments affect how
we live, act, respond, and express who we are and what we value and care
about as we try to make sense of our place in the world, including our respon-
sibilities and goals. The question of how to live is intimately linked to the
question of who we are. Culturally mediated narrative practices are insepa-
rable from how we understand ourselves as moral agents and communities.
Socially and culturally oriented approaches to ethics have criticized
the dominant moral theories, such as Kantian and utilitarian approaches,
for relying on an individualist, atomistic conception of subjectivity and
neglecting how we become moral agents in social frameworks that allow
us to express and define who we are through actions and responses that
are intelligible within a moral community.22 Approaches that acknowl-
edge how moral life is thoroughly entwined with other aspects of social
life have been developed by a range of thinkers, including Gadamer (1997,
orig. 1960), Emmanuel Levinas (1980, orig. 1961), Stanley Cavell (1979),
Alasdair MacIntyre (1984), Charles Taylor (1989), Richard Rorty (1989),
Nussbaum (1990), Ricoeur (1992), Margaret Urban Walker (2007), and
Hilde Lindemann (2014).
Hermeneutic narrative ethics explores the ethical potential and risks of
narratives as culturally mediated interpretative practices. It is interested
in the ethical issues that pertain both to our relation to others and to our
sense of self. In continental ethics, the tradition inspired by Levinas focuses
on the relation to the Other,23 while the tradition that draws on Nietzsche’s
and Michel Foucault’s work places the emphasis on the cultivation of one’s
own ethos and style of existence—what Foucault calls “the aesthetics of
existence” and the “elaboration of one’s own life as a personal work of art”
(1996, p. 451). The latter tradition is relevant to a consideration of how in
narrating our lives we shape them into something akin to works of art.24
We become selves, however, only in relation to others, and it is this inter-
play between an ethics of self-realization and a relational, other-oriented
ethics that I attempt to unearth through an approach that emphasizes the
dialogical character of narrative identity, (inter)subjectivity, and agency.
This involves showing that a sense of history cultivates our sense of the
possible in ways that are ethically crucial for our capacity to imagine differ-
ent possibilities of relationality. The performative understanding of narra-
tive implies that because storytelling produces and shapes reality, we have
Introduction [ 13 ]
41
a responsibility as storytellers and should reflect on the intersubjective

implications of our storytelling activities.
My approach to ethics has four main dimensions: reflective-analytic,
transcendental, evaluative, and explorative. I reflect on, and analyze, the
ways in which the ethical potential and dangers of narrative have been
understood; I examine tacit ontological and normative assumptions under-
pinning different conceptions of narrative, and I unearth the conditions
of possibility for moral agency and ethically sustainable narrative under-
standing; I provide evaluative tools for differentiating between ethically
beneficial and problematic narrative practices; and I engage in exploring
what kinds of ethical potential storytelling might have, how it could be
realized, and how different narrative practices implicate us.
While approaches that are sensitive to the social dimension of ethics
tend to focus on how morality develops in and shapes communities, I will
explore particularly the transformative potential of literary narratives in
their power to not only manifest social morality, but also open up ways of
going beyond it. Drawing on Deleuze, Jill Bennett formulates a similar idea
in terms of a difference between morality and ethics:
An ethics is enabled and invigorated by the capacity for transforma-

tion. . . . A morality on the other hand, operates within the bounds of a given
set of conventions, within which social and political problems must be resolved.
(2005, p. 15)25
The ethos that animates my approach to ethics is that richer awareness

of how narrative webs constitute the ethical universe in which we orient
ourselves—a universe that functions as a space of possibilities—has power
to strengthen our ethically charged narrative agency and to expand our
sense of the possible. Literature can contribute to such awareness by func-
tioning as a form of ethical inquiry that reflects on the ethical complexity
of the narrative webs in which we are entangled.
THE ACTUAL AND THE POSSIBLE
Ever since Aristotle famously argued that history narrates what has hap-
pened and literature what “might happen, i.e. what is possible” (1984,
p. 4979), the Western tradition has drawn on a dichotomy between the
actual and the possible when conceptualizing the relationship between fic-
tion and history. I suggest, however, that this conceptual dichotomy has
led to a dismissal of how a sense of the possible is integral to who we

are and how it constitutes an important aspect of intersubjective reality
in every actual world. This dichotomy may hinder our understanding of
how literature provides interpretations of actual (past and present) worlds
through its own literary means and how it can enrich and expand our sense
of real worlds as spaces of possibilities. Narrative hermeneutics addresses
these issues as a framework in which history and fiction are seen as com-
plementary practices of narrative interpretation.
Most theorists of fiction share Gottlob Frege’s (2008, orig. 1892) view
that fiction lacks truth value and is hence not, as Dorrit Cohn puts it,
“subject to judgments of truth and falsity” (1999, p. 15). Given that the
language of fiction is performative in that it creates the world it refers
to precisely by referring to it (p. 13), Lubomír Doležel (2010, pp. 41–42)
claims that historical research constructs possible worlds that function as
models of actual worlds, whereas fiction constructs possible worlds that
contain fictional elements and therefore cannot function as models of any
actual world: “A possible world in which counterparts of historical persons
cohabit, interact, and communicate with fictional persons is not a histori-
cal world” (p. 36).
By characterizing fiction as “nonreferential,” theorists of fiction stress
that it does not—or does not have to—refer to the actual world. For exam-
ple, Cohn defines fiction as “nonreferential narrative” (1999, p. 9) and
argues that a fictional world “remains to its end severed from the actual
world” (p. 13). Similarly, Henrik Skov Nielsen, James Phelan, and Richard
Walsh suggest that discourse construed as fictional invites us to assume
“that it is not making referential claims” (2015, p. 68). However, they
importantly draw attention to the need to acknowledge the “seemingly
paradoxical double quality of some uses of fictionality”: “it is not meant to
be understood as true and yet is meant to shape our beliefs about the actual
world” (p. 68). They thereby acknowledge that even though fiction belongs
to the realm of the possible, it can still affect our conceptions of what is
“actual, factual, and real” (p. 71), but they do not further explicate how we
should understand the relationship between these two realms.
The way in which the relationship between the actual and the possible is
conceptualized depends on one’s assumptions concerning the basic nature
of reality and history. These assumptions, however, generally remain
highly implicit, largely because they are frequently considered to be self-
evident, even when in reality they are far from it. A theory of fictionality
necessarily implies a theory of factuality. The dominant theory of factuality
that relies on the conceptual opposition between the actual and the pos-
sible is based on the ontological assumption that the actual and the real
refer to what can be objectively observed: to actions, events, and facts that
Introduction [ 15 ]
61
can be verified with observations or documents. But what if reality—past

and present—does not consist merely of actions, events, and facts? Does
human reality not also consist in such invisible phenomena as patterns of
experience, affect, and meaning-giving? Engagement with these aspects
of reality arguably requires imagination. From such a perspective, cultural
history has challenged “historical realism,” according to which history is
composed of observable actions; it emphasizes that the past world is also
constituted by thoughts, feelings, and representations—by what is invisi-
ble and perishable—and suggests that it is crucial for the study of the past
world to map past possibilities (Salmi, 2011, pp. 173–174; Wyschogrod,
1998). In this task, the historian needs not only documentation of what
we can know for certain about that world, but also the capacity to imagine
(Corbin, 2002, p. 9; Salmi, 2011, pp. 176–177).
I suggest that both fictional and nonfictional narratives can contrib-
ute to our sense of how to live in a historical world (including our own)
is to live in a particular space of possibilities in which it is possible to
experience, perceive, think, feel, do, and imagine certain things, and dif-
ficult or impossible to experience, perceive, think, feel, do, and imagine
other things. This view of historical worlds emerges from the tradition
of thought developed by Heidegger (1996), Gadamer (1997), Reinhart
Koselleck (2004), Foucault (1966), and Rancière (2013). Heidegger
(1977b) argues that every age has an underlying metaphysic with cer-
tain presuppositions about what is real and possible; Foucault (1966)
describes such a metaphysic as the historical a priori that defines the
limits of intelligibility in a particular age, and subjectivity as a process
of taking up subject positions “within a more or less open field of pos-
sibilities” in which the “exercise of power” is “a management of possibili-
ties” (2000, p. 341). Koselleck’s (2004) concept of “space of experience”
(Erfahrungsraum) refers to how the present world is shaped by frame-
works of meaning, an important aspect of which is how it understands
the past; “horizon of expectation” (Erwartungshorizont), in turn, refers
to the way in which we orient ourselves to the future and imagine the
yet-to-be. Narrative practices shape both the space of experience and the
horizon of expectation, as well as their shifting relationship.
Neither the space of experience nor the horizon of expectation of a par-
ticular world, however, is as homogenous as Koselleck makes them sound.
As Rancière acknowledges, each age includes the “co-presence of hetero-
geneous temporalities” (2013, p. 26). A historical world always consists in
a multitude of historical worlds. Moral agents are socially situated, they
position themselves differently within a social world, and their sense of
the possible differs from one another. This plurality and heterogeneity

are implicit in my use of the notions of the historical world and the sense
of the possible. For example, in the contemporary world, acute histori-
cal consciousness exists side by side with complete dismissal of how his-
tory mediates the present. And within societies, across this shared planet,
vulnerability, agency, and possibilities are unequally distributed (Butler
2004, 2009).
Ricoeur argues that fiction can function as a “detector of possibilities
buried in the actual past” (1988, pp. 191–192): “What ‘might have been’—
the possible in Aristotle’s terms—includes both the potentialities of the
‘real’ past and the ‘unreal’ possibilities of pure fiction” (p. 192). Although
Cohn (1999, p. 9) claims to share her definition of fiction as “nonreferen-
tial narrative” with Ricoeur, in the three volumes of Time and Narrative
(Temps et récit, 1983–1985) Ricoeur moves on from this simplified starting
point to a complex reflection on how thinking based on referentiality is
insufficient for understanding the relationship between fiction and reality.
Fiction opens up the world in a certain way, and at the same time partici-
pates in transforming it: it is both disclosive and transformative. Hence,
the “critique of the naive concept of ‘reality’ applied to the pastness of the
past calls for a systematic critique of the no less naive concept of ‘unreality’
applied to the projections of fiction”; fiction is “undividedly revealing and
transforming” (1988, p. 158). Ricoeurian mimesis can be characterized as a
process that is simultaneously performative and interpretative and there-
fore cannot be captured by the conceptual dichotomy between finding and
inventing: “Here we reach the point where discovering and inventing are
indistinguishable, the point, therefore, where the notion of reference no
longer works” (p. 158).
In a similar vein, Bruner argues that while the sciences create hypoth-
eses and possible worlds that fit them, the humanities and the arts cre-
ate possible worlds that give expression to “possible alternative personal
perspectives” (1986, p. 54). Creating hypotheses of human possibilities in
a past world is an interpretative task that is in principle endless, and his-
torians, novelists, and philosophers can make equally legitimate contribu-
tions by their own means: “For the object of understanding human events
is to sense the alternativeness of human possibility. And so there will be no
end of interpretations of Charlemagne’s ascendance (or Jeanne d’Arc’s fall
or Cromwell’s rise and fall)—and not only by historians, but by novelists,
poets, playwrights, and even philosophers” (p. 53). I endeavor to further
elaborate on this interpretative dynamic through a narrative hermeneu-
tics, according to which the actual and the possible constantly interpene-
trate one another in both fiction and nonfiction and in the different modes
of engagement they invite.
Introduction [ 17 ]
81
NARRATIVE UNCONSCIOUS AND NARRATIVE IMAGINATION
In this book, I explore how storytelling practices shape our sense of the
range of possibilities that are open to us. This involves two key aspects: an
understanding of the unconscious narrative imaginaries that underpin
cultural worlds, and a sense of how it is possible to go beyond the domi-
nant imaginaries to imagine and grasp new possibilities of being, thinking,
and experiencing. Hence, I argue that the relationship between narrative
unconscious and narrative imagination is crucial in shaping our sense of the
possible.
Freeman uses the notion of narrative unconscious in reference to “those
culturally rooted aspects of one’s history that have not yet become part of
one’s story” but are “operative in our ongoing engagement with the world”
(2010, pp. 105, 120). I will suggest, however, that the narrative unconscious
affects us in many problematic ways, and we need to not only integrate it
into our self-understanding, but also engage with it critically. The concept
is useful in signaling that we are largely unaware of the cultural narrative
webs and narrative traditions that regulate how we narrate the past, under-
stand our possibilities in the present, and orient ourselves to the future.
The stories we tell are never entirely our own.
As the hermeneutic psychoanalyst Roger Frie puts it, “the narrative
and hermeneutical traditions challenge the view of the unconscious as an
individual container of experience, separate from the social and cultural
surround”; he refers to the unconscious to draw attention to how “we are
embedded in narratives whose meanings remain beyond our reflective
grasp” (2016, p. 121).26 Another approach that acknowledges how cultural
narratives shape our self-interpretations is “narrative therapy,” inspired by
Michael White and David Epston’s (1990) work. As Martin Payne (2006,
p. 21) articulates, it reflects on how culturally dominant narrative models
can be a source of distress if our experiences do not conform:
Language . . . influences . . . our interpretations of what happens to us by pro-

viding both ready-made meanings and “canonical stories”—ready-made stere-
otypical narratives into which we try to fit and story our lives. These canonical
narratives (achieving success in work, finding a permanent partner, being a par-
ent, living in gender-appropriate ways and so on) are frequently a source of dis-
tress and loss of identity when our lives fail to correspond to them.
Narrative therapy is based on the idea that when we become aware of the
culturally available stories that lead us to narrate our experiences in cer-
tain ways, we are no longer so tightly bound to them and can envisage

alternatives. When significant aspects of the experiences of persons seek-
ing therapy contradict dominant narratives, therapy aims to identify or
generate “alternative stories that enable them to perform new meanings,
bringing with them desired possibilities—new meanings that persons will
experience as more helpful, satisfying, and open-ended” (White & Epston,
1990, p. 15). As Julia Vassilieva puts it, narrative therapy is “fundamentally
concerned with using narrative for liberation,” both “from the oppressive
effects of power” and from “the tyranny of problems and predicaments
that people face” (2016, pp. 180–181).
I use the notion of narrative unconscious to signal that the cultural
mechanisms that regulate how we narrate our experiences and share them
with others affect us largely unconsciously. We can never be totally aware
of this unconscious layer, but we can become partly conscious of it, par-
ticularly by developing our awareness of the historical processes that have
shaped the narrative traditions in which we are entangled. Such awareness
can have emancipatory power because in the unconscious form, narrative
models are easily reified so that they conceal their nature as human inter-
pretations; they present themselves as if mirroring the natural order of
things, and in this reified form, they cannot be subjected to critical discus-
sion.27 In this book, I explore narratives that not only draw on the narrative
unconscious, but also thematize it and help us become aware of the ways
in which we rely on culturally mediated narrative models of sense-making,
thereby allowing us to establish critical distance from these received mod-
els and to expand our narrative imagination. Fredric Jameson opens his
influential book The Political Unconscious (1981) with the words, “Always
historicize!” (p. 9); I would like to suggest that literary narratives can them-
selves use strategies of historicizing and thereby contribute to our ability
to historicize.
The concept of narrative imagination has been used by a range of think-
ers, but in the wake of Nussbaum’s (1997, 2010) influential thinking, it is
most often used with reference to the capacity to imagine the experience
of people different from oneself—a capacity that pervades all aspects of
our lives. Drawing on John Dewey’s (1916) discussion of the relevance of
art for life, Nussbaum argues that instead of teaching that “imagination is
pertinent only in the domain of the unreal or imaginary,” children need to
“see an imaginative dimension in all their interactions, and to see works of
art as just one domain in which imagination is cultivated” (2010, p. 103).
Nussbaum focuses mainly on empathetic identification with literary char-
acters, often almost as if they were real people, and downplays our engage-
ment with different narrative forms. Her ahistorical approach also lacks
a sense of how, in reading fiction, we engage with fictional worlds from
Introduction [ 19 ]
02
the horizon of our own world. In critical dialogue with Nussbaum’s work,
I propose rethinking narrative perspective-taking in such a way that entails
both emotional engagement and the possibility of critical distance. I artic-
ulate a model in which perspective-taking does not imply the dissolution
of one’s own, historically constituted interpretative horizon, but rather
a dialogue that allows one to become aware of one’s preconceptions and
alternatives to them. I aim to show that not only empathetic feeling with
disadvantaged characters, but also imaginative engagement with ambigu-
ous or problematic perspectives, can be ethically valuable.
My work links up with that of Ricoeur (1988, 1991a), Brockmeier (2009,
2015), Freeman (2010), and Molly Andrews (2014) on the connection
between narrative and imagination. They all understand narrative imagi-
nation in wider terms than Nussbaum and emphasize its temporal multi-
directionality: it involves a “dialectical shuttling back and forth” (Freeman,
2010, p. 66), as we reinterpret the past from the perspective of the pres-
ent and project ourselves into the future. Andrews describes imagination
as a “social faculty” at work when “we think about our lives as they have
been lived, and as they might be led” (2014, pp. 7, 10). Brockmeier ana-
lyzes how “narrative imagination is pivotal in probing and extending real
and fictive scenarios of agency” (2009, p. 215). He acknowledges both that
imagination is not a faculty separate from our everyday lives—“most of
our practical actions are enmeshed with acts of imagination”—and that
it is a creative, often tentative and playful, “pathway to the construction
of new meanings” (p. 227). I focus particularly on how narrative fiction
contributes to our narrative imagination by cultivating our sense of the
possible—our capacity to imagine beyond what appears to be self-evident
in the present.
Narrative unconscious and narrative imagination are two sides of what
can be called the narrative imaginary. Cornelius Castoriadis (1975) uses the
notion of “social imaginary” to show how society and social institutions
are founded on basic assumptions about our being in the world, and Rosi
Braidotti links it to a dynamic conception of subjectivity as “a term in a
process, which is co-extensive with both power and the resistance to it”
and of narrativity as “a crucial binding force,” as a “collective, politically-
invested process of sharing in and contributing to the making of myths,
operational fictions, significant figurations of the kind of subjects we are
in the process of becoming” (2002, pp. 21–22). Taylor’s “social imaginary”
refers to the “common understanding which makes possible common prac-
tices, and a widely shared sense of legitimacy” (2007, p. 172). Michèle Le
Doeuff’s (1990) analysis of “philosophical imaginary” disentangles how
social power affects philosophical thinking. These notions of the imaginary

articulate how cultural meaning-systems have the power to shape not only
our beliefs and values, but social reality in general. The narrative imaginary
of any given society is mainly unconscious, but it also includes the ways
in which individuals and communities actively engage with, reinterpret,
and reimagine their myths, stories, and imageries. I will explore the ethical
potential of the narrative imaginary in terms of the concepts of dialogical-
ity and the narrative in-between, which foreground the relationality of our
existence as narrative agents.28
Narrative unconscious and narrative imagination are also constitutive
aspects of narrative identity, and all three are based on processes of (re)-
interpretation. Our narrative identity—our narratively mediated sense of
who we are and who we could become—is importantly shaped by telling
stories of our lives in relation to the narrative webs and traditions in which
we are entangled. We engage in a dialogue with these traditions mostly
unconsciously—through automatized interpretative processes—but some-
times in a highly conscious way. I suggest that there is a continuum from
narrative identity based on received narrative models of sense-making to
narrative identity based on self-aware narrative imagination that creatively
or subversively reinterprets these models.
BEYOND THE PERPETRATOR–V ICTIM DICHOTOMY
In order to adequately take into account the complexity of the ethical issues
of storytelling, it is important to appreciate the inseparability of the ethi-
cal dimension of narratives from the concrete situations they narrate and
in which they are used and abused. The singularity of ethical situations is
one major reason why literature provides a fertile “laboratory for thought
experiments” (Ricoeur, 1992, p. 148): by creating literary worlds in which
moral agents act in concrete situations in relation to others, narrative fic-
tion can explore the ethical complexities of the impact narratives have
on our lives in richer terms than abstract moral philosophy. After three
theoretical chapters (Chapters 1–3), I shall develop my argumentation in
relation to contemporary literary and autobiographical narratives that
deal directly or indirectly with the traumatic legacy of the Second World
War, which plays a pivotal role in contemporary narrative imaginary on a
global scale.
The Holocaust has become so central to our ethical imagination that
it is difficult to think about the ethics of storytelling without considering
how Nazism showed the terrifying power of storytelling to build a nar-
rative of “us” and “them” and to exclude the latter from humanity. Why
Introduction [ 21 ]
2
is it that Karl Ove Knausgård ends his autobiographical series Min kamp
(2009–2011, My Struggle) with a long treatise of Hitler and Nazi Germany?
Because he realized that he cannot think through who he is without com-
ing to terms with that legacy. This is a sentiment widely shared by the
children of European humanism from the immediate postwar years to the
present: we cannot understand who we are without responding, in one way
or another, to the question of how it is possible that European humanism
could lead to Auschwitz, or at least could not stop it from happening. This
question has grown even more urgent during the period I have been final-
izing this book, as the new president of the United States, Donald Trump,
has started his term by putting in practice alarming policies that enforce
his extremist nationalist narrative of “America first.” Many commentators
draw parallels to the rise of fascism in Europe of the 1930s; others warn
against such comparisons. I agree with those who see comparison as inev-
itable, but emphasize that it should be sensitive to both continuities and
discontinuities, similarities and differences. As Michael Rothberg (2017)
puts it, in our moment, comparison is needed in the name of both “political
mobilization (e.g. anti-fascism)” and “historical understanding,” which are
different but “feed into and off of each other.”
The legacy of Auschwitz structures my ethical universe—and European
“moral topography” (Muschg, 1997)—in ways that may not apply to people
with different cultural backgrounds, but we should not think of discourses
on different historical traumas in competitive terms (Rothberg, 2009),
and rather than positing some kind of hierarchy of suffering, I use con-
temporary narrative engagements with the Second World War as a touch-
stone for exploring theoretical issues that, I hope, others can elaborate on
in relation to different kinds of material. While most of the fictional and
literary-critical work on the Holocaust focuses on the perspectives of the
victims, contemporary literary Holocaust studies is increasingly acknowl-
edging the importance of also engaging with the perspectives of the perpe-
trators.29 I aim to both contribute to the ongoing discussion on the ethics
of such engagement and analyze how the selected narratives unsettle the
perpetrator–victim dichotomy.
In Die Mittagsfrau (2007, The Blind Side of the Heart), the German novel-
ist Julia Franck (b. 1970) tells the imaginary life story of her half-Jewish
grandmother, who abandoned her seven- year-
old son (Julia Franck’s
father) at a railway station after surviving the Second World War and
Nazi persecution. The novel emerged from the need to imagine how it was
possible that anyone could do something so incomprehensible.30 Günter
Grass’s (1927–2015) semi-fictional autobiography Beim Häuten der Zwiebel
(2006, Peeling the Onion) tells the story of a young Nazi who served in the

Waffen-SS, was taken to an American re-education camp, and became an
artist. Grass delves deep into the ethical issues of remembering and forget-
ting, reflecting on how it was possible that he did what he did as a teen-
ager, and in what sense it was he who did those things. In Les Bienveillantes
(2006, The Kindly Ones), the French-American novelist Jonathan Littell (b.
1967) sets out to imagine what it might have been like if he had been born
in the historical world of Nazi-occupied Europe, what he might have done,
and who he might have become (Uni & Littell, 2008). When the Israeli
writer David Grossman’s (b. 1954) son was doing his military service in the
Israeli army, in the middle of the Israel-Palestine conflict, he wrote a novel,
To the End of the Land (2010, Isha Borachat Mi’bsora, 2008), that deals with
the agony of a mother who takes her son to the army at the start of a mili-
tary operation against the Palestinians.31 After his own son, Uri, died dur-
ing his military service, Grossman wrote Falling Out of Time (2015, Nofel
mi-huts la-zeman, 2011), a narrative that deals with the grief, loss, and guilt
of parents who have lost a child—as so many have in the Middle East and
other conflict zones.
All the preceding narratives can be linked to the phenomenon of perpe-
trator fiction or complicity fiction, but at the same time they show the inade-
quacy of the perpetrator–victim dichotomy in making sense of the ways in
which we are implicated in violent histories. Rothberg (2014) importantly
draws attention to how the victim–perpetrator imaginary “tends to polar-
ize and purify the relationship between victims and perpetrators, evacuate
the field of other crucial subject positions, and model violence on a small-
scale, decontextualized scene”; he suggests that the concepts of implication
and implicated subjects “help us better capture the conditions of possibility
of violence” and asks us “to think how we are enmeshed in histories and
actualities beyond our apparent and immediate reach, how we help produce
history through impersonal participation rather than direct perpetration.”
In thinking about this implicatedness, it is important to acknowledge, as
Judith Butler puts it, that “we each have the power to destroy and to be
destroyed, and that we are bound to one another in this power and this
precariousness” (2009, p. 43).
The narratives I have chosen for analysis make palpable the dynamics of
implication. They not only complicate our narrative imagination dominated
by the dichotomy between Nazi perpetrators and Jewish victims, but also
raise broader questions of the ways in which the narrative webs in which
we are entangled are also webs of violence—webs of meaning that enable
and perpetuate structural violence in society. They unearth the cultural con-
dition of weaving narrative identities in the contemporary post-Holocaust
world, and they explore how the traumatic legacy of the Second World War
Introduction [ 23 ]
42
implicates us. They suggest that instead of simply demonizing the Nazis as
the evil other, it is important to try to understand what made possible a his-
torical world in which ordinary people took part in industrial mass murder.
Although these narratives are written from positions of privilege—mainly
by European white men—their authors also belong to minorities: Franck,
Littell, and Grossman have a Jewish background; Grass was a refugee of
Kashubian descent.32 The three male authors have first-hand experience of
war (Littell from humanitarian missions across the world). I have chosen
these works because they are particularly ethically complex and compelling
narratives that invite reflection on the ethically charged roles that narra-
tives play in our lives.
These narratives display metanarrativity in reflecting on their own proc-
ess of narrating and in exploring the significance of narratives for human
existence.33 Therefore, they provide a fertile ground for exploring the
immersive and self-reflexive dimensions of narrative dynamics. They invite
a mode of perspective-taking characterized by an interplay between experi-
ential participation and a distanced reflection fueled by an awareness of the
constructedness of the narrative. Cognitively oriented narrative theorists
rarely acknowledge that engagement with fictional worlds can be at the
same time immersive and self-reflexive; they tend to conceptualize liter-
ary engagement in terms of an experience of being immersed in, or trans-
ported to, a fictional world, an experience allegedly interrupted by textual
self-reflexivity (Walton, 1990; Gerrig, 1998; Ryan 2003). In dialogue with
the selected narratives, I develop a conceptual framework for analyzing the
kind of engagement with historical experience—of war and trauma in par-
ticular—that is both self-reflexive and invites immersion and emotional
participation so as to produce a sense of implication.
Each of these literary works has a personal, autobiographical aspect,
but they also have broader cultural relevance. The traumatic legacy of the
Second World War and the Holocaust has shaped Western cultural memory
like no other cultural trauma and has also affected narrative imaginary on
a global scale—a phenomenon that has been discussed in relation to the
concepts of “cosmopolitan memory” (Levy & Sznaider, 2006; Beck, 2014),
“multidirectional memory” (Rothberg, 2009), “transcultural memory”
(Erll, 2011), “mnemonic imagination” (Keithley & Pickering, 2012), “pal-
impsestic memory” (Silverman, 2013), and “transnational memory” (De
Cesari & Rigney, 2014), all of which attempt to draw attention to the inter-
secting histories of violence and to the entanglement of the discourses
around them.34
The legacy of the Second World War, in its various post-Holocaust, post-
colonial, and post-communist forms, is fundamental to our sense of who

we are in the present historical world. Divergent ways of interpreting this
legacy inform different perspectives on the present age of terror and cur-
rent political ruptures, such as the wars in Ukraine and Syria, the refugee
crisis, debates that revolve around the future of the European project after
the vote of the British to leave the European Union (“Brexit”), and the global
concern about the threat to democracy and human rights presented by the
Trump administration. In these troubled times—as the tensions between
Russia and the West have reactivated Cold War mentalities, discourses, and
narrative practices, wars in the Middle East and Africa have forced millions
of people to leave their homes and seek refuge, and nationalist extremism
and xenophobic populism are rising across the Western world—it is partic-
ularly urgent to understand different narrative imaginaries and the experi-
ential realities that they reflect, produce, and shape.
That history is written from the perspective of the victors has led many
theorists who work on the ethics of remembering to argue that we have
an obligation to write history that follows “the plot of suffering rather
than that of power and glory” (Ricoeur, 1991b, p. 464). Currently, how-
ever, the increasing acknowledgment of the ethical importance of imagin-
ing not only the perspectives of victims, but also those of perpetrators and
implicated subjects, shifts attention to the conditions of possibility for good
and evil and to how their possibility within us is linked to the social world
in which we become who we are. Precisely this type of reflection lies at
the heart of the narratives analyzed in this book. They self-reflexively deal
with how the author, narrator, and/or protagonist engages in a process of
narrative imagination, conditioned by a culturally shaped narrative uncon-
scious, and reflect on the ethical issues involved. The narratives thematize
acts of storytelling, link them to broader cultural mechanisms, and bring
to light both how storytelling can perpetuate dominant social power struc-
tures (to the point of playing a pivotal role in orchestrating industrial mass
murder) and how it can be an empowering means of resistance that opens
an avenue to addressing the incomprehensible.
AN INTERDISCIPLINARY PROJECT
This book draws on, brings together, and contributes to the following,
partly overlapping fields: (1) narrative ethics, (2) literary narrative studies
and ethical criticism, (3) philosophy of narrative, (4) narrative psychology,
and (5) cultural memory studies. Narrative hermeneutics is an approach
that intersects and engages with all of these fields. By bringing them into
dialogue, I aim to shed new light on the multifaceted narrative dimension
Introduction [ 25 ]
62
of human existence and its ethical complexities. I hope this produces cross-
fertilization and intensification of some of the exchanges taking place
between these five areas of inquiry.
Narrative Ethics
First, narrative ethics is in itself an interdisciplinary area of research,

most commonly understood either as a subfield of narrative studies or
as a particular approach to ethics. It comprises a vast array of different,
partly overlapping discussions, the common denominator of which is the
view that narratives “do moral work” and are integral to “the moral life”
(Lindemann, 2001, p. 36).
Narrative approaches to ethics are mostly forms of contextual, situ-
ated ethics that emphasize the social embeddedness of moral agency. They
focus on how stories “help to define and structure our moral universe”
and how, in storytelling, “we both create and reveal who we think we are
as moral agents and as persons” (Gotlib, 2015). These approaches explore
the “interlacing of moral vocabularies and practices with other historically
and culturally embedded beliefs and social practices” (Walker, 2007, p. 62).
Narrative ethics challenges abstract, universalizing, top-down, and princi-
plist ethical theories (such as deontology and utilitarianism), which tend
to view the moral agent “as an autonomous, rational actor, deliberating
out of a calculus of utility or duty,” a “disembodied and decontextualized
ideal decision-maker,” unburdened by “the messy contextuality of an actual
lived life” (Gotlib, 2015). Many narrative approaches to ethics (including
those developed by Hannah Arendt, Taylor, MacIntyre, Ricoeur, Walker,
Lindemann) emphasize the links between narrative, identity, and ethics,
and understand morality to be a fundamentally interpersonal and dialogi-
cal practice. Narrative practices not only are entwined with ethics as an
activity of reflecting on different ways of dealing with the question of how
we should live but also shape our ethically charged intersubjective reality
and who we are as moral agents.
Nussbaum (1990, 1997, 2010) and Richard Rorty (1989) are philoso-
phers who place narrative fiction at the center of their narrative ethics.
They suggest that fiction cultivates our moral sensibility, our capacity
for empathy and solidarity, and our powers of self-invention. Nussbaum
argues that for some ethically relevant views on human life, “a literary nar-
rative of a certain sort is the only type of text that can state them fully
and fittingly, without contradiction” (1990, p. 7).35 Rorty maintains that
“detailed descriptions of particular varieties of pain and humiliation (in,

e.g., novels or ethnographies), rather than philosophical or religious trea-
tises, were the modern intellectual’s principal contributions to moral prog-
ress” (1989, p. 192).
Within narrative ethics developed in literary narrative studies, in con-
trast, the emphasis has been less on the relevance of narrative fiction to
moral life and more on how integral ethical issues are to the production
and reception of narrative fiction. As Jeremy Hawthorn and Jakob Lothe
put it, authors make ethical decisions when they choose their topics and
design the literary devices through which they deal with them; characters
make ethical decisions in the fictive world; and readers make ethical deci-
sions in responding to the narrative: ethical issues are not a supplement
to “be added on once processes of writing, reading, or criticism have been
completed . . . because there is no narrative that is free of ethical issues,
no reading, viewing, or listening to a narrative that does not require some
ethical sensitivity and the exercise of moral discrimination on the part of
reader, viewer or listener” (2013, pp. 5–6).
The literary narratologist James Phelan (2014) distinguishes between
four subfields of narrative ethics: “(1) the ethics of the told; (2) the eth-
ics of the telling; (3) the ethics of writing/producing; and (4) the ethics
of reading/reception.” Although Phelan’s distinction can be useful as a
heuristic tool, I see the ethics of the told and the ethics of the telling as
inseparable, in the same way as form and content are inseparable and inter-
dependent. The way in which a narrative is told crucially affects what is
being told as well as its ethical underpinnings. While according to Phelan
(2014) “the ethics of the telling” focuses on “text-internal matters” that
concern the situation of “the narrator(s) in relation to the characters and to
the narratee(s),” I want to stress that the author’s, narrator’s, and reader’s
engagement in the narrative process take place in worldly contexts, and,
hence, the ethics of storytelling—in all its dimensions—is a thoroughly
worldly affair. Storytelling is ethically loaded precisely because it is a way of
making sense of our being in the world, and narrative fiction is a particular
form of such storytelling—one that has specific ethical potential in engag-
ing us through its own literary means.
With the notion of the ethics of storytelling, I refer to an exploration
of a range of ethical issues that arise in connection to the phenomenon of
storytelling. The central issue in this book is the ethical significance of sto-
rytelling for human existence. Other relevant questions include the follow-
ing: How do ontological assumptions affect the ways in which one answers
this question and understands the relationship between living and telling?
What are the key aspects of the ethical potential and dangers of storytell-
ing, and how are they addressed within different literary narratives? How
Introduction [ 27 ]
82
does the interplay between form and content bear on literature as a mode
of ethical inquiry and on our engagement with ethically challenging narra-
tives? How is the dimension of the possible linked to the ethical relevance
of storytelling?
Although Phelan (2014) is critical of “reading for the moral message,”
which “has as its goal extracting a neatly packaged lesson from the ethics
of the told,” the focus of the rhetorical-narratological tradition on strat-
egies of persuasion (by the author) and judgment (by the reader) often
seems to be linked to the assumption that human beings are rational, self-
conscious subjects who basically already know what is right and wrong and
engage in acts of persuasion and judgment from their established value
positions.36 This assumption generally underpins “humanist ethics,” as
opposed to “poststructuralist ethics,” the former being more influential in
narratology.37
While I draw on certain aspects of both traditions, I also wish to move
beyond them. The starting point of my hermeneutic approach is that mean-
ings take shape as we engage in a dialogue with texts from the horizon of
our own sociocultural world, and narratives exist in dialogic relations to
cultural meaning-systems. The way in which a narrative signifies cannot be
reduced to how it communicates the intentions and values of the author;
authors and readers are embedded in sociocultural webs of meaning of
which they are only partly conscious and which they perpetuate and chal-
lenge through their interpretative actions. While scholarship that draws
on humanist ethics often analyzes the ethics of a certain text in terms of
a pre-given set of values, I aim to contribute to the line of narrative ethics
that foregrounds the relevance of literature as a form of ethical inquiry in
its own right. Literature does not merely illustrate or communicate pre-
given ideas and values—as a form of “moral guidance” or “moral educa-
tion,” as Wayne C. Booth has it (1988, p. 211)—but functions as a medium
of thought and imagination in which ethical questions are explored in their
complexity and messiness, often offering radically new perspectives on
them but no definitive answers.
Literary Narrative Studies and Ethical Criticism
The hermeneutic ethos implies a commitment to the view that we can

learn something from literature—that it can be a source of knowledge
and understanding. This position is far from self-evident. It is essential
to Gadamerian and Ricoeurian hermeneutics that literary interpretation
means engaging in a dialogue with the literary text and letting it transform

us, and that literature is a mode of cultural self-understanding. This way of
thinking, however, appeared rather outdated for quite some time, as liter-
ary studies were dominated by forms of critical reading that placed more
emphasis on how readers deconstruct texts and analyze them as symptoms
of social power structures than on what the readers might learn from them.
Recently, however, the situation has changed remarkably.
My work links up with such recent contributions as Felski’s Uses of
Literature (2008) and The Limits of Critique (2015), Colin Davis’s Critical
Excess (2010), Marielle Macé’s Façons de lire, manières d’être (2011), and
Cassandra Falke’s The Phenomenology of Love and Reading (2016), which
articulate, from different perspectives, dissatisfaction with the critical tra-
dition that emphasizes the poststructuralist aspiration to dismantle the
text and lay bare its underlying power structures. They argue for a dialogic
engagement with literature that moves beyond deconstruction toward a
new kind of hermeneutics, one that emphasizes the value of the ability to
be open to the text, to learn from it, to be affected and transformed by it.
Davis develops a “hermeneutics of overreading,” which “does not quite
correspond to either the recollection of meaning or the exercise of suspi-
cion” and is “motivated by a fierce commitment to the singularity of the
work of art and to its potential to transform our ways of thinking” (2010,
pp. 180–181). Macé (2011) explores how literature compels us to reinvent
ourselves by giving our existence new form and style. Falke (2016) devel-
ops an analogy between engagement with literature and the capacity to
love: at the heart of both are attention, empathy, and a willingness to be
overwhelmed. Felski articulates an expanded understanding of “use,” one
that “allows us to engage the worldly aspects of literature in a way that is
respectful rather than reductive, dialogic rather than high-handed” (2008,
p. 7). She calls for going beyond a “hermeneutics of suspicion” (2015,
p. 9): “Rather than looking behind the text—for its hidden causes, deter-
mining conditions, and noxious motives—we might place ourselves in
front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible”
(p. 12). These studies are examples of a welcome shift toward a conception
of literature that has a close affinity with the one developed by philosophi-
cal hermeneutics, even if this affinity is rarely explicated. I hope to contrib-
ute to this development and articulate its link to hermeneutics, while at
the same time moving hermeneutics in a direction of fleshing out its affec-
tive, performative, critical, and ethical aspects that have so far remained
underdeveloped.
I propose narrative hermeneutics as a path beyond the dominant
approaches of ethical criticism. These include, first, the humanist, neo-
Aristotelian strand described earlier, including the Nussbaumian approach
Introduction [ 29 ]
03
and rhetorical narratology, which perceive literature in terms of teaching

or communicating moral values. Second, they include poststructuralist
and deconstructive ethical criticism, which generally succeeds better in
giving due weight to the radicalness of literature but often problematically
mystifies literature as something radically “Other” that evades interpreta-
tion and thereby detaches it from our everyday processes of understand-
ing the world, our lives, and those of others. Cultural studies forms the
third major strand of ethical criticism. While much of this tradition is
relevant for my approach, it often risks reducing literature to symptoms
of practices of power and tends to appreciate inadequately the specific-
ity of literature and the inextricable intertwinement of literary form and
content.38
I agree with Felski that we need an “alternative to either strong claims
for literary otherness or the whittling down of texts to the bare bones of
political and ideological function” and we should acknowledge that “our
engagements with texts are extraordinarily varied, complex, and often
unpredictable in kind” (2008, pp. 7–8). I propose to contribute to this proj-
ect by developing narrative hermeneutics as a philosophically and text-
analytically rigorous approach that cultivates an ethos of dialogue and
avoids mystifying literature. By focusing on thematic analysis, the dynam-
ics of reading, and the interplay between form and content, I aim to show
how literature can be a source of ethical insight in exploring the relation-
ship between narrative and human existence.
Philosophy of Narrative
This book also contributes to philosophy of narrative or narrative philos-

ophy, by which I mean philosophical work that reflects on the nature of
narrative, its relevance for human existence, and the philosophical assump-
tions and commitments underlying different conceptions of narrative.39
My work has been motivated by the conviction that in the current phase
of narrative studies, with its increasing interdisciplinarity and expanding
scope, what is particularly needed is reflection on the philosophical presup-
positions of different traditions of theorizing narrative. While I have pre-
viously explored the philosophical underpinnings of different conceptions
of narrative in narrative theory and fiction (Meretoja, 2014a, 2014b), the
current book focuses on different aspects of the ethical potential and risks
of storytelling and analyzes the philosophical assumptions underlying var-
ious normative positions on narrative and its relation to life. At the same

time, I continue to develop narrative hermeneutics as a philosophically rig-
orous and historically sensitive approach that provides an alternative to
problematic hierarchical models of experience and narrative.
I have insisted that not only are there no ethically neutral narra-
tives, there are no ontologically or epistemologically neutral ones either
(Meretoja, 2014b, p. 219). Narratives always rest on some (mostly tacit)
presuppositions about the nature of the real and of knowledge—or at least
suggest certain perspectives on these issues. Unlike some philosophers,
most notably Strawson (2004), I do not believe that the ethical and the
ontological can be strictly separated when discussing the relationship
between life and narrative. What we take to be “real” affects our stance on
the ethical value of storytelling.
Research that makes these assumptions explicit can be linked to the
Foucauldian tradition of “historical ontology of ourselves,” in which
“the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical
analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with
the possibility of going beyond them” (Foucault, 1984, pp. 49–50). My
work can be seen as historicized transcendental inquiry that unearths
the unspoken philosophical presuppositions that undergird different
ways of seeing the relationship between narrative and experience, the
possible and the actual, and the imaginative and the historical. This
ties in with Ian Hacking’s (2004) and Jeff Sugarman’s (2013) (Foucault-
inspired) historical ontology, which explores how things—concepts,
kinds of people, institutions, psychological conditions— come into
being historically, as well as with Butler’s “relational social ontology,”
which scrutinizes the conditions of “grievability” and of “the strug-
gle for non-violence” (2009, pp. 171, 184). Rancière’s work continues
the Foucauldian tradition of historical transcendental philosophy by
exploring the “conditions immanent in a particular system of thought,
a particular system of expression” (2013, p. 50) and acknowledges that
historically constituted regimes of perception are not homogenous
spaces of possibility that would exclude one another or abolish earlier
regimes: “At a given point in time, several regimes coexist and inter-
mingle” (p. 50). I propose that the exploration of the conditions of pos-
sibility of experience, agency, and narrative identity is not the exclusive
enterprise of philosophers, but one to which literature also contrib-
utes.40 Literature lays out the world as a condition of possibility for the
characters to act, feel, experience, and think, and it can provide us with
new insights into the implicit assumptions that underpin different his-
torical and cultural worlds as spaces of possibility.
Introduction [ 31 ]
23
Narrative Psychology
This book explores key issues of narrative psychology, such as how cultural
narratives shape our sense of who we are and who we could be in relation to
others and to our personal and cultural pasts. It articulates the relevance of
the hermeneutic tradition to the inquiry into how lives are storied and the
ethical stakes of such storying, with a particular emphasis on the intersec-
tions of narrative identity and ethical identity in relation to our sense of
the possible. My work ties in with those efforts in contemporary narrative
psychology—such as Freeman’s (2014b, 2016) work on the priority of the
other and Andrews’s (2014) research on the social dimension of narrative
imagination—that shift attention from self-focused models to relational,
dialogical, and other-focused approaches.41 Such a shift foregrounds the
way in which ethics is central to psychology—not only to moral psychol-
ogy, but also to psychology more broadly, and to narrative psychology in
particular.
The worldly and historically mediated character of our narrative engage-
ments is neglected in many branches of psychology that focus on indi-
vidual lives and cognitive processes. Yet all individual experience is made
possible and is conditioned by a certain historical world. By showing the
relevance of historical imagination to our (personal and cultural) narrative
identities, my aim is to contribute to historicizing the study of the roles of
narratives in our lives. Both psychological and literary narrative studies
have been dominated by an individual-centered and ahistorical perspective
when considering the nature of experience, and they would benefit from a
richer sense of history. My book maps onto the hermeneutically oriented
strand of contemporary narrative psychology that emphasizes the worldly
dimension of experience and the ways in which individual lives are embed-
ded in social, cultural, and historical worlds—a strand in which the “capaci-
ties and dispositions of the mind traditionally defined in mentalist and
individualist terms have been re-described with respect to the narrative
fabric of meaning that underlies them and binds them into a wider social
and cultural world” (Brockmeier, 2015, p. 126).42 In dialogue with the work
of narrative psychologists such as Bruner (1986, 1990, 1991), Brockmeier
(2013, 2015), Freeman (1993, 2010, 2013), Andrews (2014), Frie (2016),
and Brian Schiff (2017), as well as with theoretical work on narrative ther-
apy,43 I propose to contribute to developing narrative hermeneutics as a
framework for exploring the ethical significance of narratives in our lives.
Moreover, my project aims to show how insights from literary studies
can contribute to our understanding of the issues of narrative psychol-
ogy that revolve around how we story our lives and construct narrative

identities.44 In this endeavor, I also discuss work in the field of cognitive
psychology, the psychology of reading, and cognitive narratology, particu-
larly insofar as it deals with empathy and the ethical value of literature.45
In discussing concepts such as imaginative resistance, engagement, and
perspective-taking, I aim to bring into dialogue cognitive psychology, her-
meneutically oriented narrative psychology, and literary narrative theory.
Cultural Memory Studies
This book also connects with recent work in cultural history that proposes
to examine history from the perspective of the possible (Wyschogrod,
1998; Koselleck, 2004; Salmi, 2011) and explores ways in which narrative
fiction contributes to cultural memory. I share with contemporary cultural
memory studies an interest in the dynamics of collective remembering as
a process of making sense of the past from the horizon of the present.46 To
use Rothberg’s (2009) term, memory is multidirectional: it is directed to
both the past and the future, and it brings together different moments of
time into new constellations. Memory work is something we do in the pres-
ent; like narrative, it is an interpretative activity. Instead of simple retrieval
of what is stored in our minds, it is a present activity that is entwined with
a narrative process of meaning-making.47
Drawing on Richard Terdiman’s view of memory as the past “made pres-
ent” (1993, p. 7), theorists of cultural memory, such as Rothberg (2009)
and Max Silverman (2013), emphasize the processuality and productivity
of memory. Rothberg argues that the “notion of a ‘making present’ has two
important corollaries: first, that memory is a contemporary phenomenon,
something that, while concerned with the past, happens in the present;
and second, that memory is a form of work, working through, labor, or
action” (2009, pp. 3–4). Silverman’s “poetics of memory” follows suit by
suggesting that the activation of an “elsewhere through memory, which
converts the blandness of the everyday into something beyond ‘common
sense,’ is a performative and transformative act in the present” (2013,
p. 23). Like narrative and experience, memory is necessarily selective and
interpretative—and it always includes forgetting. Memory presents ver-
sions of the past, never the whole truth, and it allows us to extend the pres-
ent space of experience by drawing on the possibilities “buried in the actual
past” (Ricoeur, 1988, p. 192). “Postmemory,” the memory of a past that one
has not personally lived but that is mediated transgenerationally through
cultural imagery, makes the “imaginative investment” of memory particu-
larly salient (Hirsch, 2012, p. 5), but it is also the case that all remembering
Introduction [ 33 ]
43
is mediated and involves an interpretative-imaginative aspect. Imagination

is what creatively transforms “memory into a resource for thinking about
the transactions between past, present and future” (Keithley & Pickering,
2012, p. 1).
In addition to the intertwinement of remembering and imagining, key
issues of this book include the links between cultural memory, narrative
identity, and processes of autobiographical storytelling, as all of the dis-
cussed literary texts contain an autobiographical dimension (even if indi-
rectly).48 While the past is always recalled and reconstructed in the present,
this poietic process of reinterpreting the past is part and parcel of the proc-
ess in which our narrative identities—our storied sense of who we are—
are constructed and negotiated. Remembering is not only oriented to the
past; by telling stories, we take part not just in creating a version of the
past, but also in shaping the intersubjective world that we co-inhabit and in
refiguring the ways in which we—as individuals and communities—orient
ourselves to the future. In dialogue with the notions of vulnerability and
implication, I will explore how this future-oriented narrative dimension of
our existence involves our being implicated in histories of violence as well
as in histories of resistance and solidarity, marked by unequal distribution
of vulnerability.
OUTLINE OF THE BOOK
After this introductory chapter, Chapter 2 expands upon narrative herme-

neutics as a framework for exploring the ethical complexities of the rela-
tionship between life and narrative and discusses the interconnections
between the ethical and ontological assumptions underlying different con-
ceptions of narrative. It delineates a broad Nietzschean-hermeneutic con-
ception of interpretation and focuses on its three interlaced advantages in
theorizing narrative, experience, and subjectivity. It allows us (1) to under-
stand how narrative relates to experience without seeing their relationship
as dichotomous or identifying them with each other; (2) to articulate how
life does not form one coherent narrative but is instead a process of con-
stant narrative reinterpretation; and (3) to understand the relationship
between narrative webs and the individual subjects entangled in them as
profoundly dialogical.
Chapter 3 explores the ethical implications of the hermeneutic approach
to narrative. I propose a framework for analyzing and evaluating narra-
tive practices from an ethical perspective by differentiating between six
aspects of their ethical potential. (1) I argue that the power of narratives

to cultivate and expand our sense of the possible is ethically crucial. In
relation to this key point, I suggest that narratives can (2) contribute to
personal and cultural self-understanding; (3) provide an ethical mode of
understanding other lives and experiences non-subsumptively in their
singularity; (4) create, challenge, and transform narrative in-betweens;
(5) develop our perspective-awareness and our capacity for perspective-
taking; and (6) function as a mode of ethical inquiry. Nothing in narratives,
however, guarantees that they have ethical effects, and often, in fact, the
opposite happens. The chapter elucidates how the hermeneutic approach
allows us to go beyond the dichotomous question of whether narratives are
good or bad for us and to appreciate the ethical complexity of narratives in
our lives.
In Chapter 4, I move on to testing the theoretical framework of herme-
neutic narrative ethics by using it as a lens through which to analyze the
uses and abuses of narrative for life in Julia Franck’s Die Mittagsfrau (2007,
The Blind Side of the Heart). I focus on how the novel explores storytelling
as a mode of sharing one’s life with others and lays bare the conditions
of possibility for moral agency—showing its fragility. By addressing the
transgenerational culture of silence that leads to the repetition of harmful
emotional-behavioral patterns, Franck’s novel demonstrates how history
implicates us, pervading even the most intimate aspects of our lives, and
attests to the necessity of storytelling for survival. I explore how narra-
tive practices expand and diminish the space of possibilities in which moral
agents act and suffer, and how narrative in-betweens both bind people
together, through dialogic narrative imagination, and engender exclusion
that can amount to annihilation. The chapter delineates a continuum from
being able to tell our own stories to narrative identities violently imposed
on us. It argues that moral agency requires a minimum narrative sense of
oneself as a being worthy and capable of goodness, and that the ethical
evaluation of narrative practices must be contextual—sensitive to how
they function in specific sociohistorical situations.
Chapter 5 problematizes the prevalent way of conceptualizing the rela-
tionship between fiction and history in terms of the actual and the pos-
sible, and argues that both fictional and autobiographical narratives have
the potential to cultivate our sense of history as a sense of the possible. It
examines four different aspects of their capacity to contribute to historical
imagination by analyzing (1) how Günter Grass’s Hundejahre (1963, Dog
Years) and his autobiography Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (2006, Peeling the
Onion) depict Nazi Germany as a space of possibilities; (2) how they self-
reflexively examine—against idealist and determinist conceptions—the
way history consists in concrete actions and inactions; (3) how they explore
Introduction [ 35 ]
63
the ways our narrative interpretations of the past shape our orientation
to the present; and (4) how they address the duty to remember—and to
engage with the conditions of possibility for atrocity—through a future-
oriented narrative ethics of implication. In relation to the paradoxical sta-
tus of autobiographical narratives—which are expected to be “truthful,”
although autobiographical memory is necessarily selective, interpretative,
and unable to convey an exhaustive account of a lived life—and to Marya
Schechtman’s philosophy of the narrative self, the chapter analyzes how in
autobiographical narration, too, we have access to the past only via narra-
tive imagination, and discusses the ethics of engaging with aspects of the
past that one cannot identify with.
Chapter 6 expands the discussion of how the interplay between form
and content is crucial to the ethics of storytelling by analyzing Jonathan
Littell’s Les Bienveillantes (2006, The Kindly Ones), one of the most famous
perpetrator novels, which has fueled heated controversy over the contri-
bution of literature to the understanding of the Holocaust. The chapter
discusses imaginative resistance, difficult empathy, and identification in
relation to readerly engagement and perspective-taking. It shows how the
interplay between immersiveness and critical distance can produce a nar-
rative dynamic that allows the reader to engage emotionally—but with-
out uncritically adopting the protagonist’s perspective—with an ethically
problematic life-world. It analyzes how the novel performatively shows,
through the breakdown of narrative mastery, that no exhaustive compre-
hension is possible. In relation to different logics of narrative, the chap-
ter articulates the ethical significance of self-reflexive narrative form and
relates the hermeneutic notion of docta ignorantia—knowing that one does
not know—to the novel’s way of dealing with the conditions of possibility
of the Holocaust and with the limits of narrative understanding.
Chapter 7 explores the ethical potential of dialogic storytelling and the
non-subsumptive model of narrative understanding—a model that fore-
grounds the temporal process of engaging with the singular events and
experiences that the narrative deals with—in relation to David Grossman’s
To the End of the Land (2010, Isha Borachat Mi’bsora, 2008) and Falling Out
of Time (2015, Nofel mi-huts la-zeman, 2011). It argues that Grossman’s nar-
ratives not only thematize the ethical potential of narrative interaction; in
them, dialogic storytelling structures the entire narrative in dialogue with
the literary tradition of exploring storytelling as an art of survival. The
analysis shows how storytelling animated by an ethos of dialogue—involv-
ing receptivity, responsivity, and openness—functions as a mode of non-
subsumptive understanding and how subsumptive narrative practices,
examined against the backdrop of the Israel-Palestine conflict, reinforce

harmful cultural stereotyping. In relation to theories of the dialogical self
and Bracha L. Ettinger’s and Butler’s work on trans-subjectivity and vul-
nerability, the chapter contributes to an ethics of relationality that articu-
lates the primacy of the dialogic space with respect to individual subjects,
our implicatedness in violent histories, our fundamental dependency on
one another, as beings both capable of inflicting and destructible by vio-
lence, and the potential of dialogic storytelling to create a trans-subjective
narrative in-between that makes possible new modes of experience, identi-
ties, and transformative, agency-enhancing encounter-events.
Drawing together the main lines of argumentation developed in the book,
Chapter 8 (Conclusion) synthesizes the hermeneutic ethics of storytelling as
a framework that provides theoretical and analytical resources for studying
both oppressive and empowering narrative practices and the uses and abuses
of narrative in specific cultural contexts. It summarizes narrative hermeneu-
tics as an approach that is attentive to how practices of storytelling expand
and diminish our sense of the possible and explores narrative fiction as an
inquiry into the ethics of being implicated in histories of violence, silence, and
dialogue. The Conclusion sums up how the narratives examined in the book
bring us to the limits of storytelling and reviews how they attest to the ethical
potential of storytelling in the six senses articulated in the book, in ways that
nuance the theoretical framework. It articulates a fierce commitment to non-
subsumptive narrative practices animated by an ethos of dialogue.
The organization and progression of this book aims to enact the herme-
neutic idea of a dialogue between the theoretical framework and the ana-
lyzed material. The literary narratives explored in the latter part of the book
are meant not just to illuminate and concretize, but also to test and chal-
lenge the theoretical framework that is set up in the first part of the book.
Some theoretically minded readers may want to read only the first three
chapters, and that is fine. Acknowledging this, however, I also want to signal
that my aim in the latter part of the book is to show how narrative fiction
is relevant not only for literary scholars, but to a wide range of approaches
on the relationship between life and narrative—across disciplines including
psychology, philosophy, cultural history, and the social sciences—not only
as illustrative material, but as a form of inquiry that deals with issues cen-
tral to these disciplines. As for the theoretical framework constructed in the
next two chapters, it is meant to serve a wide range of disciplines, and not
just the study of literature or narratives that bear a link to the Holocaust,
perpetration, or the experience of war and catastrophe. I have to leave it to
others, however, to test this framework in relation to other kinds of mate-
rial. Let us now embark on the journey toward an ethics of storytelling that
articulates how narratives expand and diminish our worlds.
Introduction [ 37 ]
83
NOTES
1. “[I]‌l faut choisir: vivre ou raconter” (Sartre, 1978, pp. 61–62).

2. Probably the most influential manifestos “against narrativity” are by Sartwell
(2000) and Strawson (2004); the “for narrativity” group is diverse, and
ranges from MacIntyre (1984), Taylor (1989), and Ricoeur (1988, 1992) to
contemporary narrative psychology and narrative therapy.
3. On how the narrative turn consists in several turns, see Hyvärinen (2008); on
the relationship between the narrative turn in fiction and theory, see Meretoja
(2014b).
4. On narrative hermeneutics, see Brockmeier & Meretoja (2014); Meretoja (2014a,
2014b); Brockmeier (2015); Freeman (2015); and the special issue of Storyworlds
(Brockmeier [ed.], 2016).
5. Several philosophers have convincingly argued that it is problematic to
conceptualize social cognition in terms of “theory of mind” (see, e.g., Gallagher
& Hutto, 2008; Zahavi, 2014). They argue that rather than see mental
states as “theoretical entities that we attribute to others on the basis of a
folkpsychological theory of mind” (Zahavi, 2014, p. 100), social cognition is
a practical ability that we learn through dynamic interaction with our social
environment; Gallagher and Hutto’s Narrative Practice Hypothesis argues that
“repeated encounters with narratives of a distinctive kind is the normal route
through which children acquire an understanding of the forms and norms
that enable them to make sense of actions in terms of reasons” (2008, p. 17).
Discussion of this hypothesis is beyond the scope of this book, but suffice it
to say that this hypothesis—and more broadly the philosophical movement
often referred to as “enactivism”—is based on insights that bear a remarkable
similarity to arguments advanced by the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics
much earlier; on the hermeneutic approach to narratives as part of our practical
(phronetic) engagement with the world and our dialogic relationality, see
Chapters 2 and 3.
6. See, e.g., Nussbaum (1997, p. 90; 2010); Carroll (2000, p. 362); Goldie (2012, pp.
76–97). Carroll (2000, p. 367) suggests that fictional explorations can enrich the
scope of our capacity to imagine alternative possible scenarios and particular
situations in ways that cultivate “our powers of moral judgment.”
7. Heidegger argues that “our words möglich [possible] and Möglichkeit [possibility],
under the dominance of ‘logic’ and ‘metaphysics,’ are thought solely in contrast
to ‘actuality’ . . . When I speak of the ‘quiet power of the possible’ I do not mean
the possible of a merely represented possibilitas” (1993, p. 220). As Macdonald
shows, possibility has primacy over actuality in Heidegger’s and Adorno’s
thinking, and it encompasses not only “obvious possibilities” but also the
possibilities “that actuality does not acknowledge” (2011, p. 49). On Ernst
Bloch’s distinction between theoretical and real possibilities, in relation to the
not-yet, see Bloch (1996); Levy (1997); Levitas (2010, p. 102).
8. On Deleuze’s conception of fabulation (translated as “story-telling”), see also
Bogue, 1999; Hongisto, 2018, pp. 190–192. The real possibilities that The Ethics of
Storytelling explores have an affinity with Deleuze’s (2005, pp. 150–152) view of
possibilities that are not mere logical possibilities.
9. On how this prejudice is linked to the idea of “interpretation-as-excavation,” i.e.,
interpretation as “an act of digging down to arrive at a repressed or otherwise
obscured reality,” see Felski (2015, pp. 53, 58).

10. See, e.g., Herman (2007, p. 11).
11. Fludernik distinguishes between two ways of applying the notion of historical
experience: “On the one hand, one can speak of our present-day experiencing
of the Afghan War or, in history, of the Elizabethans’ experience of the war in
Ireland. . . . Type two of historical experience, which I would like to call past
historical experience, corresponds to our present-day experience of historicity
when encountering representations of historical subjects and/or periods”
(2010, pp. 42–43). She adds that because mostly people experience “historically
relevant figurations . . . through the media, i.e. indirectly,” one may want to create
a third category for “direct physical experience of processes and events such as
raw experience,” exemplified by soldiers’ experience of war (p. 42). Underlying
this view is the empiricist-positivistic assumption that experience of events is
immediately given, raw, and not historical, except in the special cases when it
concerns “historical events” such as war.
12. On how the memorialization of the past is dominated by a male perspective
that privileges heroism in violent contexts (such as wars) at the expense of
nonviolent struggles, see Reading & Katriel (2015).
13. This applies to rhetorical narratology, too, although it acknowledges that
experience has different layers (intellectual, emotive, ethical, aesthetic). It
focuses on how authorial strategies and textual phenomena affect these layers of
the reading experience (Phelan, 2007, p. xiii), but it tends to take the concept of
experience largely for granted and to neglect its worldly, historically, and socially
mediated nature.
14. For example, Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory has no entry for
experience, only a very short entry on experientiality, in which Fludernik (2005,
p. 155) cites her own work.
15. Ever since Bruner (1986, 1990; see also Sarbin [ed.], 1986), narrative
psychologists have referred to hermeneutic thinkers, to Ricoeur in particular,
but they rarely articulate or engage in depth with the philosophical
underpinnings and theoretical complexities of the hermeneutic tradition.
16. This view entails “relativism” only in the sense that all statements are relative
to their underlying approach to reality, not in the sense that they would all be
equally valid (their validity is assessed intersubjectively). The relativism debate,
however, is beyond the scope of this book.
17. Gumbrecht (2004) posits a dichotomy between hermeneutic approaches that, in
his view, seek to reduce everything to meaning and non-hermeneutic approaches
that rehabilitate “what meaning cannot convey” (as his subtitle has it). Unlike
he suggests, however, hermeneutics does not imply a neglect of the material,
real world, and, in fact, Gumbrecht acknowledges the way in which Gadamer
suggests “a greater acknowledgment of the nonsemantic, that is, material
components of literary texts” (p. 64).
18. This is more or less the definition of intersectionality put forward by Avtar Brah
and Ann Phoenix: “We regard the concept of ‘intersectionality’ as signifying the
complex, irreducible, varied, and variable effects which ensue when multiple
[axes] of differentiation—economic, political, cultural, psychic, subjective and
experiential—intersect in historically specific contexts” (2004, p. 76).
19. A hermeneutic approach could also be used to analyze how non-human agents
orient themselves in the world and interpret it in different ways. Birds, dogs, and
humans all engage in interpretative sense-making activities. The focus of this
book is on human narrative practices, but I see no theoretical reason why one
Introduction [ 39 ]
04
could not develop a hermeneutic approach to the interpretative engagements

of non-human actors. Herman (2016) uses narrative hermeneutics to develop a
“trans-species hermeneutics.”
20. Hermeneutics that moves in this direction is often called “critical hermeneutics”;
see Kögler (1999); Pappas & Cowling (2003); Vasterling (2003); Ritivoi (2006);
Mootz & Taylor (2011); Roberge (2011); Meretoja (2014b). On the unequal
distribution of vulnerability, see Butler (2004, 2009).
21. For a more detailed discussion of the postwar crisis of storytelling, see Meretoja
(2014b, 53–118).
22. Kantians and utilitarians are primarily concerned with trying to formulate a
plausible criterion of right conduct (i.e., a criterion specifying the property or
properties in virtue of which all right conduct is right). Strictly speaking, that
endeavor leaves open the question of how we should go about our lives to behave
in ways that exhibit the relevant property or properties (to behave rightly), and
it does not necessarily rule out the possibility that reading literature may be one
of the relevant ways to learn how to live well. I thank Frans Svensson for this
observation.
23. In the poststructuralist tradition inspired by Levinas’s work, the other is usually
spelled with a capital, but because it can contribute to mystifying the other,
I refrain from using the capital.
24. This parallel underlies, for example, the work of William L. Randall and
A. Elizabeth McKim (2008) on the poetics of our lives. See also Randall (2015);
McAdams (2015).
25. Along these lines, I follow the convention of referring with morality to
prescriptive, collectively shared moral norms, values, and principles that
regulate conduct in communities and with ethics to critical reflection on different
approaches to ethical issues (concerning issues of right and wrong, justice, and
the good life).
26. Frie’s (2016) approach is similar to the cultural psychologist Katherine Ewing’s
conceptualization of the unconscious as “the implicit”; his analytical practice
is “concerned with how our emotional lives are guided by interpersonally
generated” narrative frameworks that are mainly “outside our awareness”
(pp. 120–121).
27. For a discussion of such reification of cultural narratives, see Berger &
Luckmann (1987, pp. 106–108, 192); Habermas (1984, pp. 47–51); Meretoja
(2014b, pp. 181–182, 207–208).
28. I will deal with dialogicality particularly in Chapters 2, 4, and 7; the concept of
“narrative in-between” will be introduced in Chapter 3.
29. On the ethics of engaging with perpetrators, see Adams (2013); Sanyal (2015);
McGlothlin (2016); Pettitt (2016).
30. On the autobiographical background of the novel, see Geu (2007); Meretoja &
Franck (2010).
31. I read Franck’s, Grass’s, and Littell’s work in the original (German and French)
but Grossman in English translation. While reading in the original must remain
an insurmountable ideal for a literary scholar, I consider Grossman so important
from the perspective of my approach that I want to include him at the risk of the
failure to do full justice to his work.
32. To be precise, Grossman, as a Jew, is not part of a minority in Israel, but he is a
descendant of Polish Jews, and has grown up in the shadow of the Holocaust,
knowing that he must write “about what would have happened to me had I been

over there as a victim, and as one of the murderers” (2007). He deals most
directly with the Holocaust and perpetration in See Under: Love (1989, ‘Ayen
‘erekh: ahavah, 1986), but I will focus here on his less studied, more recent books.
33. “Metanarrativity” is usually taken to refer to narration in which narrators reflect
on their process of narration (see Neumann & Nünning, 2012), but as I argue
in Meretoja (2014b, p. 3) there are grounds to understand it “in a wider sense
to characterize narratives that make narrative their theme and deal with the
significance of narratives for human existence in general (for how we understand
ourselves, others, the world, history).”
34. For relevant discussion, see also Huyssen (2003); Hirsch (2012).
35. I find problematic Nussbaum’s expression “without contradiction,” for various
reasons. I will discuss my disagreements with Nussbaum in more detail in
Chapter 3; here it suffices to say that what fascinates me in literature is precisely
the way it can deal with ethical issues in their full complexity, which often means
engaging with them in all their contradictions.
36. In Phelan’s (2014) definition, narrative ethics is concerned with the
following question: “How should one think, judge, and act—as author,
narrator, character, or audience—for the greater good?” This definition
seems to imply that there is some kind of shared understanding of “the
greater good.” Nevertheless, there is a clear affinity between rhetorical
narrative studies and narrative hermeneutics in terms of their mutual
interest in processes of narrative engagement, narrative interpretation, and
narrative dynamics.
37. On this distinction, see Phelan (2014). While he situates Newton’s (1995)
narrative ethics in the “humanist ethics” camp, I would consider Newton’s
Levinasian approach closer to poststructuralist ethics. I am sympathetic
with many of Newton’s aspirations, but at times his approach appears to me
somewhat too schematically Levinasian.
38. On these main strands of ethical criticism, see Meretoja & Lyytikäinen (2015,
pp. 8–9) and Meretoja & Davis (2018).
39. Key figures of hermeneutically oriented philosophical approaches to narrative
include Ricoeur (1984, 1985, 1988) and Taylor (1989); contributions in the
tradition of analytic philosophy include Nussbaum (1990); Carroll (2000);
Velleman (2003); Strawson (2004); Currie (2010); Goldie (2012).
40. Arguably, professional philosophers have no monopoly on ethical inquiry either;
they also draw on their life experience and produce socially situated reflections
on the life forms that they are familiar with (for a discussion, see Lindemann,
2014, p. xi).
41. See also Gilligan (1982); Hermans (2001); Gergen (2009); Hermans & Hermans-
Konopka (2012); Bertau et al. (2012); Hermans & Gieser (2014); Goodman &
Freeman (2015); Vassilieva (2016).
42. The way in which socially, culturally, and historically constituted narrative
discourses condition subjectivity and identity is of course acknowledged in much
of narrative research in social sciences and in socioculturally oriented psychology
(see, e.g., Andrews et al. [eds.], 2013; Phoenix, 2013; Bhatia, 2007; Kirschner &
Martin [eds.], 2010; Frie, 2016; Schiff, 2017).
43. Like narrative hermeneutics, narrative therapy literature emphasizes how our
moral agency develops in social contexts and how we tell and retell our personal
life stories in dialogic relations with cultural narratives (see White and Epston,
1990; Payne, 2006; Vassilieva, 2016).
Introduction [ 41 ]
24
44. Work at the intersections of narrative psychology and literary studies include
White & Epston (1990); Hermans (2001); Eakin (2004); Randall & McKim
(2008); Randall (2015); Holler & Klepper (eds.) (2013); Brockmeier (2015).
45. Discussions relevant from this perspective include Hakemulder (2000); Oatley
(2011); Polvinen (2012); Caracciolo (2013); V. Nünning (2015); A. Nünning
(2015); Leake (2014); McGlothlin (2016).
46. On the “dynamics of cultural memory,” see Rigney (2012, pp. 17–19).
47. For a thorough discussion of such a conception of memory, from the perspective
of narrative psychology, see Brockmeier (2015).
48. See, e.g., Eakin (2004); Saunders (2010); Assmann (2013); Holler & Klepper (ed.)
(2013); Brockmeier (2015).

CHAPTER 2
Narrative Hermeneutics
T o elaborate a narrative hermeneutics is to argue that interpretation

is a key concept in understanding narrative, experience, subjectivity,
memory, and their interrelations. Such a venture may seem questionable
or old-fashioned to some. Susan Sontag famously argued in her 1964 essay
“Against Interpretation” that interpretation has become “the revenge of
the intellect upon art” (1966, p. 7) and concluded, “In place of a hermeneu-
tics we need an erotics of art” (p. 14). Sontag briefly acknowledges that the
concept of interpretation also has a wider meaning, but only to signal that
her interest is narrowly defined:
Of course, I don’t mean interpretation in the broadest sense, the sense in which
Nietzsche (rightly) says, “There are no facts, only interpretations.” By interpre-
tation, I mean here a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code,
certain “rules” of interpretation. Directed to art, interpretation means pluck-
ing a set of elements (the X, the Y, the Z, and so forth) from the whole work.
The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation. The interpreter says,
Look, don’t you see that X is really—or, really means—A? (Sontag, 1966, p. 5,
emphasis added)
But if we take seriously the broader Nietzschean conception of interpre-

tation, does it really have no implications for our understanding of what
it means to interpret art? I believe it has wide-ranging ramifications for
how we understand both engagement with art and the nature of narrative,
experience, memory, subjectivity, and human reality in general. While the
latter part of this book engages with literary narratives, the focus of this
4
chapter is on the theoretical question of how to conceptualize narrative and

its relation to experience and life in terms of the notion of interpretation.
The starting point of the hermeneutic approach is that interpretation is
something that we do all the time, whether we like it or not. We always ori-
ent ourselves to the world in a certain way, and in so doing we interpret and
bestow meaning on it. According to this broad conception, interpretation
is mostly not what Sontag described in the preceding as a “conscious act of
the mind,” but rather part of the automatized interpretative practices that
largely escape our awareness. The interpretative practice at the center of this
book is narrative interpretation, which is explored in relation to other inter-
pretative practices, such as those of experiencing, remembering, and imagin-
ing. By approaching narrative as an interpretative practice, I emphasize that
it is not only an object of interpretation: narrative itself is a mode of interpre-
tation. We engage in narrative interpretation both when we narrativize our
experiences and when we engage with the narratives that surround us. When
we read narrative fiction or watch a film, we always already engage in pre-
reflective narrative interpretation. If we stop to think, talk, or write about it,
we interpret in a more conscious and explicit way. It is important to reflect
on the interrelations between these different interpretative practices.
In what follows, I will first discuss the broad Nietzschean-hermeneutic
conception of interpretation in general terms and place it in the field of
narrative studies. I will then focus on three interconnected advantages of
privileging such a conception of interpretation in theorizing narrative,
experience, and subjectivity. First, it allows us to understand that expe-
rience and narrative are neither the same nor opposed to each other, but
rather form an interpretative continuum. Second, this conception provides
a framework for articulating how life does not form one coherent narrative,
but is instead a process of constant narrative reinterpretation. Third, it
allows us to conceptualize in a non-reductive way the relationship between
narrative webs and the individual subjects entangled in them: the relation-
ship between subjects of experience and cultural narratives is dialogical
and entwined with practices of power.
INTERPRETATION: A NIETZSCHEAN-H ERMENEUTIC APPROACH
A key insight of twentieth-century phenomenological hermeneutics is

that all experience is interpretative. There is no such thing as raw or pure
sense perception. As the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl (2006, p. 250)
argued, the structure of “something as something” (etwas als etwas) is the
basic structure of experience: we always orient ourselves to the world in a

particular way and experience things from a certain interpretative hori-
zon.1 In Gadamer’s words, experience, even simple sense perception, inter-
prets reality by structuring and giving it shape and hence “always includes
meaning” (1997, p. 92): “We are interpreting in seeing, hearing, receiving”
(1984, p. 59). As Heidegger articulates, meaning-giving is primordial to
our being in the world: “ ‘Initially’ we never hear noises and complexes of
sound, but the creaking wagon, the motorcycle” (1996, p. 153). That expe-
rience involves the dimension of meaning, however, does not mean that
meanings could ever exhaust our material, embodied experiences; experi-
ence is always more than meaning. For example, the experiences of being
lost or of the meaninglessness of life involve an embodied and affective ori-
entation to the world shaped through the meaning-structures of “lostness”
and “meaninglessness,” and at the same time integral to these experiences
is what evades one’s grasp and resists sense-making.
The hermeneutic approach emphasizes that the objectifying natural sci-
entific gaze that sees the world as measurable spatiotemporal objects is sec-
ondary with respect to the pre-reflective way in which we orient ourselves
to the world, structured by a practical understanding that renders it intel-
ligible. We encounter things in the world not as geometrical shapes and
abstract qualities, but “as a table, a door, a car, a bridge”: “Any simple pre-
predicative seeing of what is at hand is in itself already understanding and
interpretative” (Heidegger, 1996, p. 140). Germane to such interpretative
understanding as our embodied way of being in the world is understanding
our possibilities: we do not primarily perceive the bridge as a geometrical
object, but rather as what makes it possible for us to cross the river. In
this sense, all understanding includes an aspect of self-understanding: “it
is true in every case that a person who understands, understands himself
[sich versteht], projecting himself upon his possibilities” (Gadamer, 1997,
p. 260). The “as-structure” of a door or a bridge conveys simple, uncontro-
versial interpretations of the world. Examples of more complex, narrative
interpretations that not only affect people’s self-understanding and pos-
sibilities in the world, but also create interpretative conflicts, include con-
temporary narratives of terrorism, migration, and refugees that the media
tells and circulates in constructing the current “migrant crisis.”2
The interpretative structure of experience implies that it is always
mediated. As Ricoeur (1991a, p. 15) puts it, hermeneutics is a philosophy
of permanent mediatedness, which emphasizes that “there is no self-
understanding that is not mediated by signs, symbols, and texts”:
A hermeneutical philosophy is a philosophy that accepts all the demands of this

long detour and that gives up the dream of a total mediation, at the end of which
N a r r at i v e H e r m e n e u t i c s [ 45 ]
64
reflection would once again amount to intellectual intuition in the transparence

to itself of an absolute subject. (p. 18)3
We may think that we experience the here and now with immediacy, but
in fact many factors, including our earlier experiences, expectations, and
cultural world, affect how we orient ourselves to our present situation and
interpret the new experiences we go through. There is no pure experience
that occurs as if in a vacuum. Nevertheless, our life history and cultural her-
itage do not inevitably determine how we interpret the new situation. We
are capable of experiencing something that is genuinely new: something
that shakes us, transforms us, and forces us to abandon our old beliefs. The
capacity to be affected in such a way is central to what it is to be human.
The possibility of and openness to being affected by the other—whether an
artwork or another person—and becoming something else with the other
are crucial for moral agency.
Interpretation is a process of (re)orientation to the world, a mode of sense-
making, engagement, and attachment, in which the cognitive and the affective
are irreducibly intertwined. With its stress on understanding, the herme-
neutic tradition may seem to pay inadequate attention to the affective and
embodied aspects of our engagement with the world. To some extent, such
a critique is based on a dismissal of how the hermeneutic notion of under-
standing is considerably wider than a narrowly cognitive one. In philosophical
hermeneutics, subjectivity and agency involve the whole embodied, emotion-
ally engaged self. Nevertheless, it could theorize more explicitly the affective
dimension of understanding. Scholars like Macé (2011) and Felski (2015) have
contributed to this effort by emphasizing that interpretation and affect should
not be opposed. Affective hermeneutics articulates this connection.4 However,
although such hermeneutic scholars as Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur did
not use the vocabulary of contemporary affect theory, affectivity is arguably an
important aspect of their conception of understanding as our mode of being
in the world. As Felski acknowledges, the Heideggerian being in the world is
characterized by “care” (Sorge) and “mood” (Stimmung), which “ ‘sets the tone’
for our engagement with the world, causing it to appear before us in a given
light” and is “a prerequisite for any form of interaction or engagement” because
there can be “no moodless or mood-free apprehension of phenomena” (2015,
p. 20). Felski observes that interpretation “constitutes one powerful mode of
attachment” (p. 175) and that not just our beliefs, but also our attachments
and moods, are transformed through interpretative processes:
It is an axiom of hermeneutics that we cannot help projecting our preexisting

beliefs onto the literary work, which are modified in the light of the words we

encounter. This hermeneutic circle, however, includes not just beliefs but also
moods, perceptions, sensibilities, attunements: not only do we bring feelings to
a text, but we may in turn be brought to feel differently by a text. (p. 178)
Felski writes this with reference to literary interpretation, but the struc-
ture of the hermeneutic circle applies to our being in the world in general as
an affective, embodied process. While we encounter new situations from
the horizon of our historically constituted pre-understanding, new expe-
riences shed fresh light on our past experiences. They can challenge and
transform our pre-understanding and our sense of who we are. Our life his-
tories attune us to orient ourselves to the world in a certain mood, and our
affective sensibility and understanding of the world are changed through
the new experiences we go through. This circle of (re)orientation is a proc-
ess of sense-making and world-making, engagement and becoming; it is
not just a cognitive operation in which we try to construct mental repre-
sentations of the world around us.5 Interpretation is never merely “repro-
ductive,” but always also a “productive activity” (Gadamer, 1997, p. 296).
Instead of being mere representations, narratives have a performative
character that is intertwined with practices of power. As interpretations
of the world, narrative practices have real-world effects. This is precisely
what their (per)formative and productive character means: they take
part in constructing, shaping, and transforming human reality. This per-
formativity is integral to—though not always explicitly articulated in—
hermeneutics in the broad sense that reaches from Nietzsche and Mikhail
Bakhtin to Ricoeur and Felski and apprehends understanding as our way
of being in the world as embodied and enfleshed subjects in the temporal
process of becoming. For Gadamer, too, ours is a “being that is becoming”
(1997, p. 312), but his hermeneutics pays little attention to the concrete
ways in which the temporal, productive activity of everyday interpretative
practices is embedded in social worlds and their power relations. In the
Nietzschean-Foucauldian tradition, in contrast, the perception of human
beings as interpretative animals is inseparable from the perception of them
as constellations of forces, as agents with the capacity for affecting and
being affected in a social world constituted through practices of power.
I suggest that weaving together aspects of philosophical, Bakhtinian,
and Nietzschean-Foucauldian hermeneutics provides a productive frame-
work for narrative hermeneutics, which explores narratives as culturally
mediated and socially embedded interpretative practices that have a pro-
ductive, dialogical, and (per)formative dimension.6 Narrative interpreta-
tions are social acts of bestowing meaning on experiences and events, and
they participate in shaping the world. They have real, material effects: they
84
perpetuate, challenge, and modify the ways in which we perceive our pos-
sibilities and act in the world.
While all ways of orienting ourselves to the world—our perceptions,
experiences, memories, attachments, actions, fantasies—have an inter-
pretative structure, not all interpretations are narrative interpretations.
Constitutive of narrative is the logic of relatedness, of meaningful con-
nections, and of perspectival interpretation. When we engage in narrative
interpretation, we interpret experiences from a certain perspective and in
so doing relate them to one another in time and forge meaningful connec-
tions between them. This does not mean that these experiences then form
a seamless continuity. Interpreting experiences as being disconnected is
also a way of relating them to one another in time. I understand narrative
in a broad sense that does not count unity, coherence, continuity, or clo-
sure among its necessary requirements.7
I propose conceptualizing narrative as a culturally mediated practice
of sense-making that involves the activities of interpreting and presenting
someone’s experiences in a specific situation to someone from a certain
perspective or perspectives as part of a meaningful, connected account, and
which has a dialogical and a productive, performative dimension and is rel-
evant for the understanding of human possibilities (past, present, and/or
future). Let me unpack this dense formulation. First of all, narrative does
not merely report what happened; it provides an interpretation of how the
events are or were experienced by someone in a particular situation. In
the case of first-person narratives, the central subject typically engages in
interpreting his or her experiences, both at the time of experiencing them
and at the time of narrating them, whereas in third-person narratives a
separate narrator (or narrative instance) interprets someone else’s (such as
the protagonist’s) experiences. Both the subject of the experiences and the
narrator (which may or may not coincide) interpret the events and expe-
riences from a particular perspective. This perspective can pretend to be
objective, neutral, or omniscient, but it is nevertheless a particular per-
spective that shapes the interpreter’s evaluative and affective engagement
with the narrated experiences.8
The concept of narrative is used with reference to both the activity of
storytelling and the product of such an activity. First, narrative as an activ-
ity and practice of sense-making involves two aspects: the activity of inter-
preting and the activity of presenting a narrative account. Narrative as an
interpretative activity is mediated by cultural models of narrative sense-
making that are often described as “cultural narratives,” “scripts,” or “sche-
mas.” This interpretative activity is frequently intertwined with the process
of experiencing because cultural narratives as interpretative models affect

how we experience things in the first place. Narrative as an activity of pre-
senting a narrative to someone in a certain situation is a form of social
interaction. Usually narratives are presented to an audience, but some-
times to oneself as part of an internal dialogue; even in the latter case,
storytelling takes place in social webs of meaning. Second, narrative as an
account communicated to someone is an artifact with a material dimen-
sion rooted in a particular medium, such as words or visual images. As an
account, narrative is typically the outcome of the activity of interpreting
and narrating experiences, and can, in turn, affect and mediate later expe-
riences. When I want to emphasize the artifactual aspect of narrative, I will
speak of a narrative or a narrative account; when emphasizing the activ-
ity aspect, I will use processual terms like storytelling, narrating, narrative
interpretation, narrative interaction, or narrative sense-making, depend-
ing on which aspect of this activity I am focusing on.
Narrative presents the narrated experiences as part of a meaningful,
connected account. Through emplotment, it renders experiences and
actions intelligible and can function “as a form of explanation that tells
us why an event happened, or why a character has behaved in a certain
way” (Ritivoi, 2009, p. 33). As J. David Velleman argues, the explana-
tory force of narrative does not have to depend on causally explaining
the narrated events; it can be based on its “power to initiate and resolve
an emotional cadence,” allowing the audience to assimilate the events
to “familiar patterns of how things feel” (2003, pp. 18–19). I would like
to emphasize, however, that the cognitive and affective aspects of the
process through which narrative renders intelligibility to the narrated
events and experiences are typically intertwined, and, as we will see,
not all narratives present the narrated events and experiences as fully
intelligible or encourage simple assimilation to pregiven cognitive or
emotional patterns. In fact, as I will argue in Chapter 3 by developing
a non-subsumptive model of narrative understanding, precisely when
simple assimilation is not an adequate response—when the narrative
unsettles our cognitive and affective categories—something ethically
valuable can happen.
The connected account can be fragmented and can foreground discon-
nection, but even so, it places the experiences in a certain relation to one
another (even a relation of disconnection is a relation) and in this sense
forms a connected account. In my view, forging meaningful connections
(in the broad sense) is essential to the evaluative activity of narrating, but
unity and coherence are not. Compelling narratives often explore possible
lives in ways that challenge our certainties, including illusions of coherence
and unity.
05
That narratives have a dialogical dimension means that they always take
shape in relation to other culturally mediated narrative models of sense-
making, which they implicitly or explicitly draw and comment on, modify,
and challenge. They are performative in their ability to create and shape
intersubjective reality. They perpetuate and transform social structures,
including structures of violence and unequal distribution of vulnerability
and privilege. Through our entanglement in narrative webs, we are impli-
cated in these social structures, which our actions as narrative agents per-
petuate, shape, or question.
Finally, narratives are relevant for the understanding of human possi-
bilities in several ways. The action and experience narrated in a narrative
imply a certain understanding of what is possible for subjects of action and
experience in a particular world: narratives provide different subject posi-
tions, and in narrative worlds, agents seize certain possibilities that are
open to them and dismiss others. By exploring these possibilities, narra-
tives can provide us with new perspectives on our own world and on how
we orient ourselves to our present and future possibilities. While historical
narratives typically focus on past possibilities and future fictions on future
possibilities, the intertwinement of the past, present, and future—in dif-
ferent forms—is germane to all narratives. Narratives frequently evoke a
sense that things could have happened differently. Morson calls sideshad-
owing this sense of “something else,” as a narrative casts a shadow “from
the other possibilities”: “Along with the event, we see its alternatives; with
each present, another possible present. Sideshadows conjure the ghostly
presence of might-have-beens or might-bes. In this way, the hypothetical
shows through the actual” (1998, pp. 601–602).
Narrative hermeneutics stresses that narratives are inevitably ethically
and politically charged. By providing certain evaluative, affectively colored
perspectives to the world and by forging meaningful connections between
experiences, they engage in a world-constituting activity that has a polit-
ical and ethical dimension. Narrative practices, however, do not merely
open up possibilities, they also close down possibilities. The latter typically
happens, for example, when cultural narratives perpetuate stereotypical
notions of what is possible for a person of a particular social status, gender,
age, ethnicity, and so on.
Here it should be noted that rather than in terms of interpretation, nar-

rative is usually conceptualized in terms of representation. According to
the standard narratological definition, “narrative is the representation of an
event or a series of events” (Abbott, 2008, p. 13). Many narratologists also
highlight that causality and chronology are interconnected in narrative

representations. Barthes famously argued that a key characteristic of nar-
rative logic is the systematic application of the logical fallacy post hoc ergo
propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this):
Everything suggests, indeed, that the mainspring of narrative is precisely the

confusion of consecution and consequence, what comes after being read in nar-
rative as what is caused by; in which case narrative would be a systematic appli-
cation of the logical fallacy denounced by Scholasticism in the formula post hoc,
ergo propter hoc—a good motto for Destiny. . . . (1982a, p. 94)
According to Marie-Laure Ryan’s definition, for example, in narrative

the “sequence of events must form a unified causal chain and lead to clo-
sure” (2007, p. 29), and in Gregory Currie’s terms, narratives represent
“sustained temporal-causal relations between particulars” (2010, p. 27).9
The notion of representation suggests that narrative represents a narrative
order that preexists its telling. As H. Porter Abbott puts it, narrative is a
representation because it conveys “a story that at least seems to pre-exist
the vehicle of conveyance” (2008, p. 15), even if the story ultimately only
exists through being narrated.
Many narrative theorists and novelists find narrative inherently suspi-
cious precisely insofar as it pretends to mirror a meaningful chronological-
causal order that can be found in the world, when in reality such order is
merely a human projection. An entire array of postwar intellectuals, from
Sartre to the nouveaux romanciers, argued that what happens in the world
is fundamentally non-narrative, so that there is something profoundly
false and dishonest in our tendency to retrospectively force events into
narratives. Such postwar thinkers as Barthes and Levinas rejected narra-
tive, regarding it as an ethically questionable mode of appropriation. For
Barthes, narrative presents historical phenomena as if they were natural
and necessary and hence speaks the language of “Destiny” (1982a, p. 94).
Levinas considers otherness “unnarratable,” “indescribable in the literal
sense of the term, unconvertible into a history”; in narratives, the essences
of beings are “fixed, assembled in a tale” (1991, pp. 42, 166).10
What most antinarrativist positions share, their differences notwith-
standing, is the view that there is a basic discrepancy between the real and
a narrative representation of the real. This binary opposition looks prob-
lematic, however, if we acknowledge that human reality is always already
constituted through human interpretations and that narrative interpreta-
tions play an important role in this process of constitution. Cultural webs
of narratives mediate the ways in which we interpret the world, ourselves,
and other people, that is, how we move in the hermeneutic circle that
25
structures our experience of being in the world. These webs also perpetu-
ate certain ways of structuring society and legitimize unequal distribution
of possibilities by strategies of naturalization.
To appreciate the world-constituting, formative dimension of storytell-
ing practices, it is important to acknowledge that they shape not only our
cognitive understanding of the world, but also our affective orientations
and our sense of the possible. They mold our range of possible affects, expe-
riences, perceptions, thoughts, actions, attachments, and relationships. If
we acknowledge that our being in the world is mediated through narrative
interpretations of what human existence is about, literary narratives can
be seen to play a crucial role in shaping these interpretations and hence our
ways of being in the world with others. When narratives are seen as inter-
pretations of the real, they are not opposed to what is actual, factual, and
real: both fictive and nonfictive narratives take part in shaping our view of
what is actual, factual, and real.
My interest in the possible ties in with the work of narrative scholars
like Ricoeur, Bruner, Brockmeier, and Andrews. For Ricoeur, to understand
a literary narrative is “not to find a lifeless sense that is contained therein,
but to unfold the possibility of being indicated by the text” (1991a, p. 66).
In a similar spirit, for Bruner narrating is being “in the subjunctive mode,”
“trafficking in human possibilities rather than in settled certainties” (1986,
p. 26). Brockmeier articulates the role of narrative imagination in envision-
ing our options for acting:
[N]‌arrative imagination enables us to probe the reach and range of our

options—in Bruner’s words, their alternativeness—both in everyday and liter-
ary discourse and thought. . . . If meanings are options for acting, then narrative
appears to be the most advanced practice by which we envision, scrutinize, and
try out these options. . . . We all continuously sort out real and fictive, contrast-
ing and competing versions of actions, or inactions; we play them through and
reflect on them, imagine possible and impossible scenarios and speculate about
their implications. (2015, pp. 120–122)
Andrews explores similar ground by drawing on the Sartrean theory of

imagination, which takes as its starting point “our ability to see things not
only as they are, but as they are not” and the insight that the “not-real
might also be the not-yet-real” (2014, pp. 5–6). As she puts it, imagination
“extends from the ‘real,’ the world as we know it, to the world of the possi-
ble” (p. 10). From a hermeneutic perspective, narrative imagination is also
a hermeneutic imagination: it provides us with hermeneutic resources for
(re)interpreting our experiences and those of others.11

The concept of narrative imagination importantly invites reflection on
the futurity of narrative thinking: narratives are not only about perpetuat-
ing what is, but also about imagining what could be. As Ricoeur puts it,
“the retrospective character of narration is closely linked to the prospective
horizon of the future” (1991b, pp. 467–468). Futurity is crucial to the proc-
ess of narrative reflection, which, as Freeman observes, concerns the values
and ethical ideals toward which we strive:
Rather than thinking of narrative mainly in terms of its orientation to the past,
I have tried to suggest that it bears upon the future as well: the process of rewrit-
ing the self is at one and the same time a process of articulating the self-to-be, or
the self that ought to be. (2014a, p. 14)
Some narrative theorists (e.g., MacIntyre, 1984) characterize the future-

oriented aspect of narratives in terms of teleology, but as there is no telos,
goal, or end that would be pregiven in any determinate form to direct our
lives, I suggest that it makes more sense to think of the futurity of our eve-
ryday narrative sense-making practices in terms of an endless explorative
search—for meaning, for direction, for what makes life worth living, for the
form and style that we want our lives to have—and an ever-shifting (re)-
orientation to the future, shaped by certain provisional goals, aims, attach-
ments, and values that are continually refigured in the very process of the
search, which is always directed simultaneously at the past, present, and
future.
This is a perspective that tends to be absent from representational
accounts of narrative. While they frequently suggest that narratives rep-
resent events as part of a chronological-causal chain that reverts “free-
dom into necessity” (Levinas, 1998, p. 138) and give events an air of
“destiny” (Barthes, 1982a, p. 94), the hermeneutic approach acknowl-
edges that narratives can make visible the openness and indeterminacy of
the moment of action. In this spirit, Brockmeier refers to “narrative’s spe-
cific sensitivity for the openness and unpredictability of human affairs”
(2015, p. 120). The hermeneutic approach also has a close affinity with
Hannah Arendt’s idea of the human condition as being characterized by
our capacity to act and thereby to bring to the world something new and
unpredictable:
To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin . . . , to set
something into motion (which is the original meaning of the Latin agere). . . . It
is in the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be
expected from whatever may have happened before. (1998, pp. 177–178)12
45
From an Arendtian perspective, we can say that narratives pervade the

speech and action through which we “insert ourselves into the human
world” to reveal our “unique distinctness” (p. 176). They are part of the
texture of the intersubjective reality that we co-inhabit. This texture both
delimits us and makes our agency possible. It is woven together with the
fabric of the narrative in-between that both binds us together and sepa-
rates us (see Chapter 3).
EXPERIENCE AND NARRATIVE: THE INTERPRETATIVE

CONTINUUM
In contemporary narrative studies, experience has become a central con-

cept. While in classical narratology the standard definition of narrative
was a representation of a series of events, today narrative is commonly
understood as a “sequential and retrospective representation of experience”
(García Landa, 2008, p. 422, emphasis added; see also Fludernik, 1996).
This view is coupled with the widely shared assumption that there is a basic
hierarchy between experience and narrative: we first have experiences,
and only retrospectively narrate them. Some narrative theorists, however,
argue that there is no such opposition, and that experience itself has a nar-
rative structure. The position of narrative hermeneutics that I embrace
problematizes both of these positions and argues that while living and tell-
ing are entangled, they should not be equated; instead, they exist in a ten-
sional but reciprocal relationship that is best understood in terms of an
interpretative continuum.
Let us first look at the hierarchical models. The most common position
in narrative studies is to understand the relationship between living and
telling in terms of a hierarchy between experience, which always comes
first, and narrative, which we produce later as we look back at our experi-
ences and organize them into a narrative representation. In this model,
experience is primary, narrative secondary. Narrative is what is projected
onto the pure, raw, disconnected experiences. Variations of this model
dominate narrative studies across disciplines.
According to the narratological dogma, it is an inherent characteristic of
narrative that it must always come afterward, as living and telling cannot
take place simultaneously. Cohn encapsulates this position as follows: “Life
tells us that we cannot tell it while we live it or live it while we tell it. Live
now, tell later” (1999, p. 96). And she is not alone: “Common sense tells
us that events may be narrated only after they happen” (Rimmon-Kenan,
2002, p. 92). Cohn proceeds to discuss a “deviant form” of simultaneous

first-person narration in which the narrating self becomes identical to the
experiencing self, but she argues that through such narration, fiction breaks
with real-world modes of experience and speech: “Its innovation . . . is to
emancipate first-person fictional narration from the dictates of formal
mimetics, granting it . . . the license to tell a story in an idiom that corre-
sponds to no manner of real-world, natural discourse” (1999, pp. 104–105).
A similar hierarchical model underlies Strawson’s (2004) approach,
which focuses on refuting two “narrativist” theses.13 First, the “psychologi-
cal Narrativity thesis” is allegedly “a descriptive, empirical thesis about the
nature of ordinary human experience,” which argues that “human beings
typically see or live or experience their lives as a narrative or story of some
sort” (p. 428). Second, the “ethical Narrativity thesis” is a normative claim
which asserts that “experiencing or conceiving one’s life as a narrative is a
good thing . . . essential to a well-lived life” (p. 428). Strawson first argues
that there are important differences in how people experience their exist-
ence in time: while “Diachronics” consider the self “as something that
was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future,”
“Episodics” have little or no sense of having a self that “persists over a long
stretch of time” (p. 430). He argues that “the fundamentals of temporal
temperament are genetically determined,” and defends the tolerant view
that neither “time-style” should be seen as “an essentially inferior form
of human life” (p. 431). This argument rests on a form of biological deter-
minism: allegedly, our genes determine our “time-style” and we should just
accept our condition as a Diachronic or Episodic.
However, Strawson then proceeds to argue that the tendency of the
Diachronics to engage in telling stories about their lives is problematic and
that “the best lives almost never involve this kind of self-telling” (p. 437).
He characterizes the psychological Narrativity thesis as purely descriptive,
and wants to keep the descriptive and the normative strictly separate, but
in fact they are firmly intertwined in his argumentation, as his ontological
commitments—his views on what really exists—lead him to strong nor-
mative arguments on how we should understand the relationship between
experience and narrative. Here we can see a conceptual slippage from the
descriptive claim that there are different temporal temperaments to the
normative claim that narrative self-reflection is inherently harmful:
The aspiration to explicit Narrative self-articulation is natural for some . . . but in

others it is highly unnatural and ruinous. My guess is that it almost always does
more harm than good—that the Narrative tendency to look for story or narrative
coherence in one’s life is, in general, a gross hindrance to self-understanding: to
a . . . real sense . . . of one’s nature. It’s well known that telling and retelling
65
one’s past leads to changes, smoothings, enhancements, shifts away from the
facts. . . . It turns out to be an inevitable consequence of the mechanics of the
neurophysiological process of laying down memories that every studied con-
scious recall of past events brings an alteration. The implication is plain: the more
you recall, retell, narrate yourself, the further you risk moving away from accurate
self-understanding, from the truth of your being. (p. 447, emphasis added)
This normative claim relies on Strawson’s tacit commitment to the onto-

logical assumption that what really exists is “unmediated” experience here
and now, and in order to be true to our “nature,” we should “alter” that “raw
experience” as little as possible.
Strawson seems to take experience to be something that we simply
undergo when something in the world impinges on us. For him, experience
does not involve any active agency or interpretation. In fact, he claims that
if we engage in processes of sense-making or even simple recollection, we
bring about problematic “alterations” to the original experience. This nor-
mative claim rests on strong metaphysical beliefs about which he is more
explicit elsewhere: Strawson (1999a, p. 7) presents himself as a “realistic
materialist” who believes that the self is a thing that ultimately exists only
during an “uninterrupted or hiatus-free period of consciousness” (p. 21) so
that a duration of “up to three seconds” is “the normal duration of human
selves” (1999b, p. 111).14 He calls this the “Pearl view, because it suggests
that many mental selves exist, one at a time and one after another, like
pearls on a string,” in the life of a human being (1999a, p. 20).
Marya Schechtman comments that this view presents selves as implau-
sibly “tidy and distinct”: “we find frequently that feelings and identifica-
tions we thought long gone reemerge” and “it is not always obvious what is
really no longer part of the self and what is” (2007, pp. 177–178). I would
emphasize, however, that Strawson dismisses a more fundamental mediat-
edness of experience. Our experiences are layered so that our past experi-
ences mediate the present ones, in ways that mostly escape our awareness.
The “alteration” that Strawson considers so problematic looks much less
questionable if we acknowledge that both sociocultural webs of narratives
and our own life history always already mediate our experience, and that
human existence is a fundamentally temporal process of constant altera-
tion in which the self is constituted through a socially embedded process
of reinterpreting experiences.15 Why should we assume that the self exists
in disconnected moments of experience, rather than through the temporal
process of relating these experiences to one another?
Here we can see how the way in which one approaches the ethical ques-
tion concerning the value of narrative for human existence is crucially

affected by one’s ontological assumptions concerning the nature of experi-
ence and what one considers to be real in general. Those arguing for and
against narrativity have very different tacit presuppositions concerning
these ontological questions. Most thinkers who emphasize the ethical
questionability of narrative see the relationship between experience and
narrative as one of imposition—of imposing order on something that inher-
ently lacks it. They tend to see life as a temporal process, flow, or flux on
which narrative imposes order, meaning, and structure, and they regard
this imposition as problematic on both ontological and ethical grounds.
This applies to even someone like Hayden White, who moves swiftly from
the ontological assertion that the logic of reality is non-narrative to the
normative claim that “[r]‌eal events should simply be; . . . they should not
pose as the tellers of a narrative” (1981, p. 4).16
Underlying most criticism “against narrativity” is the idea that the
world is given to us in raw, unmediated experience and that—by impos-
ing order—narratives falsify and distort our experience of the world.
Such arguments usually depend in one way or another on the problematic
empiricist-positivistic assumption of “pure experience,” immediately given
here and now, that is, on the “myth of the given” (Sellars, 1963, pp. 127–
196). Critics of narrativity typically believe that there are raw, disconnected
units of experience that are more real than experiences that are narratively
interpreted or remembered.17 The hermeneutic approach problematizes
precisely this assumption underlying hierarchical conceptions of narra-
tive and experience: the assumption of pure, unmediated experiences that
are retrospectively narrated. In contrast, it emphasizes that experience is
always already both temporally and culturally/historically mediated.
The fundamental temporality of experience entails that the horizons of
the past and future always already impregnate the present. There is no iso-
lated experience in the present; all experience is structured and organized
in relation to past experiences, expectations, and hopes that shape one’s
orientation to the future. Husserl’s studies on the temporality of experi-
ence show that even simple sense perception is constituted “synthetically,”
by holding together, as part of the present, the “just passed” (retention)
and the moment to come (protention) (1991, p. 49). Heidegger (1996),
Gadamer (1997), and Ricoeur (1984, 1988) develop Husserl’s view of the
temporality of experience by showing how the horizon of the present is
constituted by the historical and sociocultural traditions that condition
what we see and experience. Integral to these are the cultural narrative
webs that mediate our ways of interpreting our experiences and ascribing
meaning to them. The crucial point is that narratives as cultural interpre-
tative practices shape the way we experience things in the first place. It is
85
therefore untrue that narratives always come afterward. Surprisingly few

narrative theorists acknowledge this, but there are exceptions: Brockmeier,
for example, recognizes that instead of starting with pure experience, we
start with “a number of stories, or fragments or traces of stories because
we are born into, grow up, and live in the midst of a world of narratives
that . . . for the most part are not our own” (2015, p. 181); Randall asserts
that it is “only through my story that I experience events in the first place”
(2015, p. 41); and Frie explores, drawing on Ludwig Binswanger’s herme-
neutic psychology, how we exist in narrative frameworks or “world-designs
(or world horizons) that shape our experience” but “remain outside of our
reflective awareness” (2016, p. 129).18
That experience is historically mediated means that it always takes place
within a particular historical world that functions as a space of experience
and sets certain limits to what is experienceable, doable, and sayable in
that world. The narrative webs in which we are entangled, including their
ways of interpreting and narrating the past, shape our space of experience
in the present. To take an example of the mediatedness of experience, let
us consider the current refugee crisis. We see images of refugees on televi-
sion; some of us have encountered asylum seekers in our local community;
some of us have first-hand experience of forced migration and many of us
of voluntary migration. Our experience of refugees is culturally, histori-
cally, and socially mediated. Looking at a refugee either on television or
face to face is not a brute sense perception here and now: our life histories,
including our earlier experiences of refugees, of other people in need, and
of migrants, our own cultural situation, culturally available refugee nar-
ratives, and socially prevalent modes of talking about refugees affect our
perception. The perception—seeing someone “as a refugee”—is already an
interpretation, which includes meaning-giving and an affective orienta-
tion, ranging from an empathetic perception of another person as a fellow
human being in need to an anxiety-ridden or hateful perception of him
or her as a potential threat. It involves a certain orientation to the per-
ceived phenomenon, and the cultural webs of narratives in which we are
entangled—from narratives of terrorism and nationalism to narratives of
solidarity—shape our orientation to and our affective engagement with
what we perceive.
Hierarchical models of narrative and experience tend to dismiss how
profoundly narratives mediate our experience of being in the world with
others. Generally, theorists who take seriously the ontological significance
of narrative for human existence consider the dichotomous question of
whether we “live” or “tell” narratives to be problematic: living and tell-
ing are constantly entangled in complex ways and mutually condition one

another. Even if narration is a matter of organizing and shaping experi-
ences into meaningfully connected accounts, this does not mean that nar-
ratives necessarily falsify experience or are somehow external or secondary
with respect to it. If experience itself involves interpretation and sense-
making, one should not posit an opposition between living and telling by
arguing that only the latter involves interpretation. From this starting
point, narrative hermeneutics emphasizes the ways in which living and
telling mutually impregnate one another: there is no “pure experience,”
untainted by the structure of interpretation, and we continuously reinter-
pret our experiences by renarrating them. In Bruner’s words, “life is not
‘how it was’ but how it is interpreted and reinterpreted, told and retold”
(1987, p. 31). David Carr makes a similar point:
The actions and sufferings of life can be viewed as a process of telling our-
selves stories, listening to those stories, and acting them out or living them
through. . . . Sometimes we must change the story to accommodate the events,
sometimes we change the events, by acting, to accommodate the story. It is not
the case . . . that we first live and act and then afterward, seated around the fire
as it were, tell about what we have done. . . . (1991, p. 61)
The hermeneutic approach emphasizes that the strict narratological

separation of the “experiencing self” and the “narrating self” is an abstrac-
tion that risks obscuring their complex mutual entwinement. For example,
as we go through new experiences in the present, these experiences are
mediated through our narrative interpretations of our past experiences;
we have access to our past experiencing and narrating self only from the
perspective of our present experiencing and narrating self; and the experi-
ences that narrating selves go through in the present—also through the
very process of narrating to which others respond in divergent ways—
affect the ways in which they narratively reinterpret the experiences of
their past selves. Narrative (re)interpretation is integral to the process of
living our lives. Humans have arguably always narrated their lives in the
midst of living them, but the current age of digital storytelling has given
the phenomenon of simultaneous storytelling a whole new dimension: for
millions of people, posting social media updates is part and parcel of their
everyday stream of experience, and the new storytelling technologies affect
their modes of experience.
While the empiricist-

positivistic conception of experience has domi-
nated both mainstream psychology and narratology, narrative psychol-
ogy and hermeneutically oriented narrative studies have emphasized the
06
narratively mediated nature of experience—the way in which, as Freeman

puts it, “narrative is woven into the very fabric of experience” (2013,
p. 55).19 However, within hermeneutic approaches that acknowledge the
existential-ontological significance of narrative for identity and subjectiv-
ity, there are crucial differences in how exactly this ontological significance
is conceived.
When it comes to how narrative is seen in relation to experience, the
extreme position is that all human experience has a narrative structure.
Carr, for example, asserts that “no elements enter our experience . . . unsto-
ried or unnarrativized” (1991, p. 68), Mark Johnson writes about the “nar-
rative structure of our experience” (1993, p. 177), and Randall and McKim
argue that “[e]‌xperience itself, above all our experience of time, possesses
a fundamentally narrative quality” (2008, p. 9). While I share their con-
cern that narrative should not be seen as a matter of imposing order on
disorder, I consider the view that “there is nothing below this narrative
structure, at least nothing that is experienceable by us or comprehensible
in experiential terms” (Carr, 1991, p. 66) to be too strong and reductionist.
The position that equates narrative and experience conflates narrative
with the temporality of experience, and thus robs the concept of narra-
tive of its specificity. That all experience has an interpretative structure
does not mean that all experience has a narrative structure. If we look
at a painting of a tree, for example, our experience has an interpretative
as-structure—we interpret what we see as a painting of a tree—and it is
informed by the cultural narrative webs that make us attach certain mean-
ings to paintings of trees, but the experience of viewing the painting is not
in itself a narrative. We can provide a description of our experience, or we
can give a narrative account of it, but this makes the experience itself nei-
ther a description nor a narrative.
Some narrative scholars suggest that all experiences that can be narra-
tivized are “narrative experiences.” Brockmeier, for example, refers with
“narrative experiences” to “conscious and complex experiences that grow
out of, and are part of, lived and reflected human reality” (2015, p. 105).
To my mind, this definition is too broad. I consider it important to distin-
guish between experiences in which narratives as models of sense-making
or as an interpretative activity play a constitutive role and those in which
they do not but which can nevertheless be retrospectively narrativized in
the sense of being interpreted through narrative frameworks. Watching
a narratively structured news report on the refugee crisis would be an
example of the former, whereas the latter might include certain expe-
riences of listening to music or dancing. Ultimately, there is no experi-
ence that could not be narrativized from some perspective—one can, for

example, tell a narrative of how one experienced something inexpress-
ible that evades narrative understanding— even if narrativization is
often problematic and fails to capture the particularity of the experience.
Hence, if we count “narrativizable” experiences in the class of narrative
experiences, all experiences would be narrative experiences, and the dis-
tinction between experience and narrative collapses. Due to these prob-
lems, instead of using the notion of narrative experience, I emphasize the
way in which experiences are to varying degrees narratively mediated and
structured through the activity of narrative interpretation.
In thinking about the relationship between narrative and experience,
we should acknowledge the two sides of narrative mentioned earlier. While
narrative as an interpretative activity, mediated by cultural models of nar-
rative sense-making, is often inextricably intertwined with the process of
experiencing, narrative as an account communicated to someone is typi-
cally a retrospective interpretation of experiences (which can then shape
later experiences). Only if we think of narratives as interpretations of expe-
rience, instead of equating them with experience per se, can we compare
different interpretations of the same events, evaluate their validity, and
propose alternative interpretations. This becomes impossible if narrative is
simply identified with experience. In order to preserve the specificity of the
concepts of experience and narrative and to be attentive to their tensional
relationship, it is important to acknowledge that even if all experience has
an interpretative structure and even if narrative interpretation of experi-
ence is a crucial aspect of our being in the world, this does not make all
experience narrative.
Narrative studies would benefit from a clear alternative to approaches
that either equate narrative and experience or place them in opposition.
I propose that such an alternative is offered by a narrative hermeneutics
that foregrounds the interpretative structure of both experience and nar-
rative. It allows us to understand the relationship between experience and
narrative in terms of a continuum, rather than as an opposition. It is an
interpretative continuum that reaches from the basic interpretative struc-
ture of sense perception to more complex forms of interpretation, such as
narrative (re)interpretations. When we acknowledge that experience itself
has an interpretative structure, narrative interpretations can be concep-
tualized as interpretations of interpretations—hence in terms of a double
hermeneutic. Anthony Giddens (1976, pp. 146, 158) and Jürgen Habermas
(1984) have argued that the social sciences have, in comparison to the nat-
ural sciences, “a double hermeneutic task” (p. 110) because they interpret
interpretations, an object domain that is already symbolically structured.
What I am suggesting is that narrative also has such a double hermeneutic
26
structure—it interprets interpretations—although the human sciences

engage in more conscious, self-reflexive interpretation than, for example,
cultural narratives that circulate in the media. Narratives are second-order
interpretations that weave together experiences by showing how they are
related and by creating meaningful connections between them.
When we (re)interpret our everyday experiences, identities, and life plans
in light of cultural (literary, historical, visual, etc.) narratives, this process
manifests the dynamics of a triple hermeneutic. These three levels of interpre-
tation are parallel to Ricoeur’s (1984) three levels of mimesis. Mimesis I refers
to the pre-figurative and pre-narrative quality of everyday interpretations of
action. Mimesis II signals the configurative character of literary and histori-
cal narratives. Mimesis III is the level of refiguration in which the encounter
between the world of the reader and the world of the text leads readers to
reinterpret their experiences.20 I would add, however, that the triple herme-
neutic dynamic is at play not only when we reinterpret our experiences in
light of literary and other cultural narratives, but also in any literary, psy-
chological, philosophical, or social scientific interpretation of narratives. In a
different form, it also characterizes the way in which narratives themselves
function as interpretations of other narratives. In other words, it is inherent
to the logic of dialogical intertextuality—or internarrativity.21
The three levels of interpretation in the dynamics of the triple herme-
neutics should not be understood as temporally distinct. Although we can
analytically distinguish between them, they are at play simultaneously,
since cultural narrative webs always already mediate our experience. These
three levels of interpretation form a hermeneutic circle in which experi-
ence and cultural narratives reciprocally feed into one another.
I propose that narrative hermeneutics based on the triple hermeneutic
can articulate how narrative and interpretation are intertwined, why they
are not the same thing, and how we are constituted in a dialogic relation
to culturally mediated narrative models through which we reinterpret our
experiences. According to this approach, the reciprocal movement of rein-
terpreting cultural narratives in concrete life situations and reinterpreting
experiences in the light of cultural narrative models is constitutive of what
Bakhtin characterizes as the “dialogic fabric of human life” (1984, p. 293).
LIFE AND NARRATIVE: LIVING AS A PROCESS

OF REINTERPRETATION
Hermeneutic approaches acknowledge the existential-ontological signif-

icance of narrative—the importance of narrative for who we are—but

within these approaches there are decisive differences in how exactly this
significance is understood when it comes to the relation of narrative to life
as a whole. While some theorists suggest that the entire life of an individ-
ual takes on the form of a single narrative or narrative quest, such views
are not unproblematic. I propose that narrative hermeneutics should steer
clear of such a position and actively acknowledge the ways in which life does
not form a single, coherent narrative and, what is more, how normative
models of coherence can be potentially harmful, oppressive, or limiting.
Many hermeneutically oriented theorists of narrative and identity are
strong narrativists both in the sense of assuming that narrative automati-
cally make our lives more ethical and in taking narrative coherence and
unity as self-evident ideals.22 For example, according to Taylor, “we must
inescapably understand our lives in narrative form, as a ‘quest’ ” (1989,
p. 52). He presents this model as if it were a given, the inevitable and “ines-
capable” result of how things simply are:
We want our lives to have meaning, or weight, or substance, or to grow towards

some fulness. . . . But this means our whole lives. If necessary, we want the future
to “redeem” the past, to make it part of a life story which has sense or purpose,
to take it up in a meaningful unity. . . . [T]‌here is something like an a priori unity
of a human life through its whole extent. . . . [T]his means that we understand
ourselves inescapably in narrative. (pp. 50–51)
A similar position is embraced by MacIntyre, who argues that we must see

our life in terms of a narrative unity in order to take responsibility for our
actions. For him, the “unity of a human life is the unity of a narrative quest”
(1984, p. 219).23 MacIntyre understands human actions as “enacted narra-
tives” (p. 211) and writes about “living out” a single story that reaches from
birth to death: “I am what I may justifiably be taken by others to be in the
course of living out a story that runs from my birth to my death” (p. 217).
This vocabulary of enacted narratives and living out stories risks blurring
the conceptual differentiation between experience/action and narrative; it
suggests not only that action is an enacted narrative, but that a life in its
entirety forms one coherent narrative.
Does not life provide material for a countless number of narratives,
rather than forming a single narrative? Instead of saying that our lives
are enacted narratives, I would say that our lives are narratively mediated.
They do not follow the plot of one narrative, but are much messier. We
are entangled in a culturally and historically constituted web of narratives,
in relation to which we make sense of our possibilities. One of the main
advantages of thinking of life as a narratively mediated interpretative process
46
is precisely that it does not imply that the whole life should be seen as
enacting a single narrative or aspiring toward one.
I argue for a narrative hermeneutics that acknowledges both that we
are constituted through a continuous process of reinterpretation and that
this process rarely—if ever—leads to a single life story. It is a position that
emphasizes the processuality and performativity of narrative interpreta-
tion and the existential significance of storytelling, without assuming that
life consists of one coherent story. It suggests that a process of narrative
interpretation is integral to who we are, but that this process is endless and
open-ended as we continuously reinterpret and renarrate our past experi-
ences from the perspective of the present, in relation to the new experiences
we go through and to our divergent interlocutors in shifting storytelling
contexts. This interpretative process can consist of contradictory narrative
fragments, and it can involve radical ruptures and disconnectedness. It is
a dynamic interplay of countless story fragments that form ever new con-
stellations. These fragments engage in relations of contest, conflict, and
dialogue, and are subject to endless revisions. Rather than forming a single
coherent narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, they open up a range
of possible ways of narrating the interrelations between the past, present,
and future. Certain fragments can be foregrounded and expanded upon in
one situation, other fragments in another. This is a selective interpretative
activity that always takes place from the horizon of the present.24
Here I draw on Ricoeur but also part ways with him. I share his view that
a continuous process of reinterpretation lies at the heart of narrative iden-
tity, which is “not a stable and seamless identity” and “continues to make
and unmake itself” (1988, pp. 248–249). However, although he acknowl-
edges that discordance is integral to life stories, I have reservations about
the way in which he nevertheless tends to privilege, in many passages,
the coherence and concordance of “our own story,” to which he frequently
refers in the singular:
[W]‌e do not cease to re-interpret the narrative identity that constitutes us in

the light of stories handed down to us by our culture. . . . In this way we learn to
become the narrator of our own story without completely becoming the author of
our life. (1991b, p. 437, emphasis added)
I also want to stress that a narrative sense of self does not entail that
“one must be disposed to apprehend or think of oneself and one’s life as
fitting the form of some recognized narrative genre” (Strawson, 2004,
p. 442). This definition of what Strawson calls a Narrative type of person
is so extraordinary that I doubt whether anyone would see him-or herself

as fitting that category; at least I do not know anyone who would think
that his or her whole life is a romance or parody. What most people do, in
contrast, is to interpret their experiences situationally in light of a range
of culturally available narrative genres. If they fall ill, for example, they are
likely to draw on the cultural repertoire of illness narratives as they strug-
gle to make sense of their experience of malady.25 But more often than not,
illness is only one part of their life and does not cast their entire life in a
single genre.
I suggest that narrative identity is best understood as a non-essentialist

approach to subjectivity, which emphasizes that we exist in a state of con-
stant becoming through a temporal process of reinterpretation. Arendt
was among the first to articulate, in The Human Condition (1958), the idea
that we answer the question of “who” in narrative terms: “Who somebody
is or was we can know only by knowing the story of which he is himself the
hero—his biography, in other words” (Arendt, 1998, p. 186). In the 1980s
and 1990s, largely in response to the “death of the subject” debate, narra-
tive identity came to be perceived, as Ricoeur puts it, as a way of acknowl-
edging that “subjectivity is neither an incoherent succession of occurrences
nor an immutable substance incapable of becoming” (1991b, p. 437). It is a
way of rethinking subjectivity as dynamic, mutable, non-essentialist, rela-
tional, and interactional. Ricoeur (1992) distinguishes between identity as
sameness (idem) and identity as selfhood (ipse)—a distinction between the
what and the who, or between the subject as a noun and the subject under-
stood in terms of action. As Heidegger and Arendt already acknowledged,
the latter—the subject of action and experience—cannot be thought of in
substantialist or essentialist terms because selfhood refers to the singular-
ity of the who that only exists through the process of constant reinterpre-
tation. For Ricoeur, identity is a temporal process of refiguration in which
what he calls “identifications-with” play a pivotal role:
To a large extent, in fact, the identity of a person or a community is made up of

these identifications with values, norms, ideals, models, and heroes, in which
the person or the community recognizes itself. Recognizing oneself in contrib-
utes to recognizing oneself by. (1992, p. 121)
Narrative identity is a process that largely develops through identifications-

with, and we identify not only with people, but also with literary and other
artworks. In this notion of narrative identity, “narrative” should be under-
stood less as a noun than as a verb-like adjective that refers precisely to
the temporal, interactional process of narrative reinterpretation that is
6
constitutive of identity. As “self-

interpreting animals” (Taylor, 1985),
we are beings whose self-interpretations are constitutive of who we are,
and the narrative webs in which we are entangled crucially affect our self-
interpretations. Identity means essentially an orientation: a sense of self
that is linked to a sense of where one has come from, where one is now,
and where one is going. It hence entails the ability to orient oneself in
moral space:
To know who you are is to be oriented in moral space, a space in which ques-
tions arise about what is good or bad, what is worth doing and what not, what
has meaning and importance for you and what is trivial and secondary. . . . To
understand our predicament in terms of finding or losing orientation in moral
space is to take the space which our frameworks seek to define as ontologically
basic. (Taylor, 1989, pp. 28–29)
Taylor complements the spatial metaphor with the recognition that we are
temporal beings, always “changing and becoming,” and thus we can have
a sense of who we are only by having “a notion of how we have become,
and of where we are going” (p. 47). In other words, we can make sense
of who we are only through “narrative understanding, that I understand
my present action in the form of an ‘and then’: there was A (what I am),
and then I do B (what I project to become)” (p. 47). Such narrative under-
standing is constituted through affective attachments and identifications
with other people, artworks, cultural narratives across media, and aspects
of the past, including both personal and broader cultural past.26 Through
identifications-with, we make these things, people, and aspects of the past
our own—integral to our sense of who we are.
Narrative identity is interactional and linked to narrative agency; it is
something we do in the present in social webs of narratives, rather than a
result of what we can remember about our past. In his thorough critique of
the traditional Lockean way of conceptualizing identity in terms of autobi-
ographical memory (the view that we are what we can remember about our
lives), Brockmeier emphasizes the nature of identity as “always emergent
gestalt, its character as an ongoing undertaking, an interminable poetic
work”: it is “an inherently unstable and protean project, constantly syn-
thesizing past and present, memories and their interpretation, recollection
and imagination” (2015, p. 187).
In psychology, the prevalent tendency to link narrative to coherence and
integration draws support from the “long tradition that perceives the task
of successful self-work to be attaining an integrated ego identity around a
stable center or core” (Raggatt, 2006, p. 16). The emphasis has been on the

need to integrate lives into “self-defining life narratives” (McAdams, 2006,
p. 332). Even if studies suggest, as Peter Raggatt puts it, that individu-
als “derive happiness and a sense of purpose from the experience of inte-
grating past, present, and future into synergistic wholes,” I agree that it is
problematic to set such experiences as a norm and to disallow “multiplicity,
conflict, and even contradiction in the structure of the self, including the
storied self” (pp. 16–17).
The notion of narrative identity, however, in no way presupposes the
assumption of a stable core self or any normative idea of the good life. In
my view, narrative hermeneutics should not commit itself to the idea of a
single life story—either as an ontological assumption or as an ethical ideal.
Instead, it should acknowledge that narrative identity construction is an
ongoing, dynamic, temporal, unfinalizable process that continues throughout
our lives and that takes shape in social, interactional contexts, in a dia-
logue with cultural models of sense-making. I propose that integral to such
a notion of narrative identity is a sense of one’s possibilities. The sense of
the possible sets certain limits to one’s world, and it shapes one’s sense
of self, but it is so multifaceted that one cannot encompass it in a single
life narrative. It is inherently situational: our possibilities are always pos-
sibilities within a particular situation, and our sense of them keeps shift-
ing. It is linked to alternative visions of the directions in which one’s life
could develop: to reflection on “roads taken and not taken” (Morson, 1994,
p. 139). At the heart of narrative identity is a sense of possible lives into
which one’s life could evolve.
In this way, the sense of the possible links together the notions of nar-
rative identity and possible selves. When Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius
(1986) introduced the notion of “possible selves” to the psychology of
the self, they emphasized how possible selves “function as incentives for
future behavior (i.e., they are selves to be approached or avoided)” and
how “they provide an evaluative and interpretive context for the cur-
rent view of self” (p. 954). While they see possible selves as “the cog-
nitive manifestation of enduring goals, aspirations, motives, fears, and
threats” (p. 954), I would like to emphasize that possible selves are not
only cognitive, but also have a strong existential-ethical dimension: they
provide visions of what kind of life one could and would like to live. As
Anneke Sools articulates, possible selves can be seen to consist of “three
partly overlapping and intertwined sets of selves: the selves we deem
probable, the selves we deem believable, and the ones we deem desired or
feared”: “What we consider as probable and believable influences what we
experience and can articulate as desirable: Vice versa, what we can imag-
ine as desirable affects what we perceive to be probable and believable”
86
(Sools, 2016). These three selves, in turn, depend on how one weaves
together one’s past, present, and future. Thinking of narrative identity
in terms of the sense of the possible alerts us to the openness of life—to
the way in which every life can develop in different directions depending
on how it is narrated and what kinds of futures one projects. Identity is
always open to renarration, which implies redirection and reorientation
in terms of one’s affective identifications.
Such a conception of narrative identity should be distinguished from self-

constitution and self-authorship positions that claim that we essentially
constitute, write, or author our lives. It is one thing to say that who we are
is not separate from how we interpret our experiences, and quite another
to say that we basically decide who we are. That we are constituted by
our self-interpretations does not mean that we are nothing but our self-
interpretations. (When X is constitutive of Y, it implies that Y would not
be Y without X, but it does not imply that Y is nothing but X.) There are
material and intersubjective limits to our self-constitution (we cannot
interpret ourselves to be in excellent health if we are suffering from can-
cer, and who we are is also constituted by how others see us), and even in
our self-interpretations we are not self-transparent: our self-interpretative
habits can repeat interpretative patterns that are culturally ingrained in us
and that elude our awareness.
When Strawson (2015) attacks the idea of narrative self-constitution, or
the “narrativist thesis” according to which “all human life is, in some sense,
life-writing” (p. 295), he is arguing against the idea that we are authors of
our own lives. His own view is that “one’s life is simply one’s life, something
whose actual course is part of the history of the universe and 100 per cent
non-fictional” (p. 289). He argues that instead of “making” ourselves, we
can at most “discover” who we are (Strawson, 2012). In my view, however,
precisely such a conceptual opposition between invention and discovery is
problematic. The process of narrative self-interpretation through which we
are constituted implies neither finding nor imposing narrative order. As
Ricoeur puts it, this process can be seen as a “constructive activity” without
regarding it as a matter of “imposing” order on disorder (1991b, pp. 436,
468). It is a matter of articulating meaningful connections from an inter-
pretative horizon shaped by our present situation. The idea that identity is
something objectively given, waiting there to be discovered, is an essential-
ist position that contradicts the (hermeneutic) view of human existence as
radically temporal. It is not as if those who narrativize their experiences
engage in “invention” or “fictionalization,” while others simply adhere to
“brute facts.” This dichotomy guides Strawson’s thinking here:

if one is Narrative one will also have a tendency to engage unconsciously in
invention, fiction of some sort— falsification, confabulation, revisionism—
when it comes to one’s apprehension of one’s own life. . . . I have no doubt that
almost all human Narrativity is compromised by revision. . . . (2004, p. 443)
Dubbing almost all reinterpretation of past experiences as “revisionist”

entails blindness to the process of reinterpretation that is an inevitable
dimension of our temporal existence. If virtually all interpretation is seen
as revisionist, there is no way of distinguishing between, say, blatant self-
deception and the kind of reinterpretation that we do all the time as we
reinterpret the past in relation to new experiences we go through in the
present. However, the intersubjective dimension of narrative identity—
that we cannot compose our life narratives at will—should be acknowledged
more thoroughly than it has been by proponents of the self-constitution
thesis. (I will address this issue in connection to dialogicality in the next
section and in Chapter 7.)
Narrative hermeneutics considers subjects of experience as active
agents who engage in sense- making, but this does not entail seeing
them as “authors” of their lives. The authorship thesis should be seen in
the context of a long tradition of thought, harking back to early German
Romanticism, that draws a parallel between how novelists and other art-
ists create works of art and how ordinary people shape their lives. A central
ambition of the Romantics was to overcome the division between gen-
ius and common people and to propose that everyone has the potential
to be the creator and artist of one’s own life: “All human beings are art-
ists,” writes Schleiermacher (1843–1864, pp. 253–254).27 This Romantic
idea was radicalized by Nietzsche (2003, pp. 163, 189), who valorized those
“who create themselves” and “ ‘give style’ to one’s character” instead of
following preexisting forms, norms, and models: “we, however, want to
be poets of our lives, starting with the smallest and most commonplace
details” (p. 170). Early twentieth-century avant-garde artists shared the
Nietzschean-Romantic ambition to overcome the abyss between life and
art. For Guillaume Apollinaire, for example, the challenge of the poets is to
harbor the capacity of human beings to create themselves constantly anew
through a “perpetual renewal of ourselves, that eternal creation, that end-
less rebirth by which we live” (1982, p. 13).
In the early 1980s, Foucault developed his post-Nietzschean “aesthet-
ics of existence”: “From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think
that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves
as a work of art” (1983, p. 237). Foucault arrived at the notion of elaborat-
ing “one’s own life as a personal work of art” through his studies into how
07
morality was understood in ancient Greece: in contrast to the Christian way

of perceiving morality in terms of moral codes, rules, and laws, the Greeks
valued “knowing how to govern one’s own life in order to give it the most
beautiful form possible” (1996, p. 458). Foucault, however, reprehends the
ambition of the Greeks to make their personal style of existence common
to everyone, by elevating it to an exemplary status. For his contemporaries,
he envisages a “search for styles of existence as different as possible from
each other” (p. 473).
In recent years, narrative scholars across disciplines have elaborated on
versions of the idea that we are both narrators and authors of our lives.
Daniel Dennett argues that we author our lives by trying to “make all of
our material cohere into a single good story”: “And that story is our auto-
biography. The chief fictional character at the center of that autobiography
is one’s self” (1992, p. 114).28 Dan P. McAdams makes a similar claim in his
“life-story theory of identity,” arguing that “identity is a life story” (2003,
p. 187):
I cannot understand who I am if my life forms no narrative for me, if I am unable

to see my own life as an intelligible story that makes sense to me now and would
make sense if I were to tell it to you tomorrow. More than anything else, stories
give us our identities. (2006, p. 76)
McAdams asserts that American adults are “the real authors of their own
stories” (2006, p. 296), and, in his latest book, he elaborates the idea that
“every human life is a work of art” (2015, p. 1). Similarly, Randall and
McKim develop the thesis that we are novelists of our lives: for them, our
lives are “narratives-in-the-making that (and this is key) we are compos-
ing and comprehending from within: narratives of which we are simul-
taneously author and narrator, character and reader” (2008, p. 6). While
acknowledging the limits of the metaphor of the novel, they use it because
they believe that we are “the principal architects” (p. 16) of our lives, like a
novelist is the architect of the novel—for them, whatever difference there
may be between a life and a novel, it is “one of degree and not of kind”
(p. 41).
In contrast, Arendt, among the first to develop explicitly the idea of nar-
rative identity, clearly distinguished it from the authorship thesis:
Although everybody started his life by inserting himself into the human world
through action and speech, nobody is the author or producer of his own life
story. In other words, the stories, the results of action and speech, reveal an
agent, but this agent is not an author or producer. Somebody began it and is

its subject in the twofold sense of the word, namely, its actor and sufferer, but
nobody is its author. (1998, p. 184)
What Arendt is emphasizing here is that we have very limited power to

“design” the world in which our lives unfold or to “invent” the events of
our lives—so limited that there are no grounds for a sustained analogy
between living a life and the freedom of a novelist to invent and design the
story of characters. It is important to acknowledge that we are not only
actors, but also sufferers: “Because the actor always moves among and in
relation to other acting beings, he is never merely a ‘doer’ but always and
at the same time a sufferer” (p. 190). I would add that some are structurally
predisposed to suffer more than others: vulnerability and agency are une-
qually distributed across the globe and within societies.
Yet we are not merely actors and sufferers either, in the sense that we
are not actors in a play authored by someone else. Our lives have no sin-
gle author, and unlike fictional characters whose fate is determined by the
author, we have a certain autonomy: we take part in planning our lives and
in affecting its course, even if our plans are rarely fully fulfilled and we have
only limited power to shape the course of our lives. I agree with MacIntyre
and Kate McLean (2015) that we can be (at most) co-authors of our lives:
what the agent is able to do and say intelligibly as an actor is deeply affected
by the fact that we are never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of
our own narratives. . . . We enter upon a stage which we did not design and we
find ourselves part of an action that was not of our making. (MacIntyre, 1984,
p. 213)
It is important to acknowledge that co-authorship is linked to narrative

agency and comes in degrees: we can have more or less power to affect
the course of our lives. It is part of global injustice that co-authorship
is extremely unequally distributed. While those who are born into utter
poverty have very little co-authorship, those born into privileged condi-
tions generally have a chance to become co-authors of their lives in a much
stronger sense. The situation of privileged subjects, in turn, is complicated
by the fact that they are also implicated subjects: their heightened nar-
rative agency and their range of possibilities come at the expense of the
agency and possibilities of the underprivileged.
The narrative webs into which we are born regulate the kind of co-
authorship that we practice. MacIntyre acknowledges that learning sto-
ries and, through them, the roles that are available for us is integral to the
process of socialization: “We enter human society . . . with one or more
27
imputed characters—roles into which we have been drafted. . . . Deprive

children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in
their actions as in their words” (1984, p. 216). MacIntyre, however, does
not analyze how cultural narrative scripts can limit and oppress us, or how
learning to distance ourselves from them and finding ways of crafting our
own (counter)stories can help us gain more co-authorship in our lives. Nor
does he comment on the limits of such co-authorship established by the
uneven distribution of possibilities.
MacIntyre’s argument (presented against Louis Mink [1970] and Hayden
White [1981]) that stories “are lived before they are told” (1984, p. 212) has
become a widely shared position in narrative psychology.29 Although it is
true that actions and experiences are often first lived and later narrated,
I would not say that stories are first lived. A story refers to the sequence
of actions, experiences, or events that are narrated in a narrative account;
hence, strictly speaking, they only become a story once they have been nar-
rated, that is, selected, presented from a certain perspective, and placed in
a sequence with other experiences to which they are shown to be in a mean-
ingful relation so that the narrative forms a connected account. A narrative
account is a perspectival interpretation based on selection, and it is told by
someone to someone on some occasion. As Ruthellen Josselson and Brent
Hopkins put it, people “don’t ‘have’ stories of their lives; they create them
for the circumstance in which the story will be told” (2015, p. 226).
This does not mean that the story would always have to be told in words.
A narrative can be simply thought through, as when I weave in my mind a
narrative account of what happened to me last night, before telling it to my
friend.30 It can be presented in the form of visual narration or performed
(as in a theater piece). Some theorists of performativity argue that life itself
has a performative dimension comparable to a stage performance. Erving
Goffman (1959) famously developed this dramaturgical metaphor in sug-
gesting that the self is performed in social interaction and is constituted
through social performances that we stage in order to affect other peo-
ple’s views of ourselves in different social situations. It is now commonly
acknowledged that the construction of identity, gender, and social reality
more generally have a performative dimension; that narrative performa-
tivity is an important aspect of our lives does not mean, however, that our
whole lives would be “enacted narratives.”
We can perform narratives in the sense of playing certain roles in dif-
ferent social situations, aiming at a certain narrative sequence and (con-
sciously or unconsciously) following cultural narrative scripts or models.
But arguably we are always more than the roles we play, and we have con-
siderably less control over how others perceive our life stories than authors

of fictional stories. While a fictional narrative is shaped by a particular per-
spective, a life can be perceived and narrated from a multitude of perspec-
tives, and it makes no sense to ask whether it is “really” a first-person or a
third-person narrative: for the protagonist it is a first-person narrative, but
others take part in co-telling the protagonist’s life story through second-
and third-person narration.
Moreover, even if we acknowledge that we stage performances to others
on a daily basis (not only in social media, but also in everyday face-to-face
social interactions), our lives are still only partly “staged.” The participants
of the reality television show Big Brother literally live “on stage” for a period
of their lives, and they perform a narrative to the audience in a stronger
sense than those who are living their lives hidden from television cameras.
However, no one’s whole life forms such a staged performance.31 It is one
thing to acknowledge that our lives have a performative dimension and
another to claim that our whole lives are nothing but performances. In act-
ing we project a future, we act toward a possible future, and our actions are
guided by certain goals and values, but what ultimately happens is highly
unpredictable as we have only limited power to affect the course of events.
There is a huge—not just quantitative but qualitative—difference between
acting out a pre-written or pre-designed narrative and living a life. Only the
former follows the prior design of authors or script-writers.
Hence, instead of being narratives, lives are, first, narratively conditioned
(as cultural narratives mediate our actions, experiences, and choices) and,
second, material for narratives, turned into narratives through acts of nar-
rative interpretation. MacIntyre argues that actions are intelligible only
as “an episode in a possible history” (1984, p. 216), but one action can
be understood in numerous ways depending on what kind of narrative it
is placed in. The shape that the process of narrative interpretation takes
depends on the situations in which we tell stories and to whom we tell
them. Every life story can be told in innumerable ways.
In narratively interpreting our actions, we must take into account
the interpretations of others. Adriana Cavarero articulates how we need
the stories of others because we cannot know the beginning of our own
story: “The beginning of the narratable self and the beginning of her story
are always a tale told by others” (2000, p. 39). This perspective should be
enlarged through attention to the broader way in which we need the sto-
ries of others in order to relate our own interpretations to their interpre-
tations. This is implicit in Cavarero’s emphasis on the relationality of our
existence: “At once exposable and narratable, the existent always consti-
tutes herself in relation to an other” (p. 40). We cannot compose a life nar-
rative for ourselves at will: we have to take into account the stories told by
47
other people—their versions of what happened and how they experienced

the events. If there is such a thing as a truth about a life, it is always a prod-
uct of intersubjective dialogue. No one has a monopoly to such a truth,
whether it concerns one’s own or someone else’s life.
NARRATIVE WEBS AND SUBJECTS OF EXPERIENCE: A DIALOGICS
A crucial aspect of the narrative hermeneutics developed here is a dialog-

ical conception of narrative and subjectivity. It emphasizes that cultural
webs of narratives only exist through individual interpretations, and indi-
vidual subjects are constituted in relation to cultural narrative webs. This is
a two-way reciprocal relationship. Acknowledging this dialogical reciproc-
ity allows us to avoid reification of social systems and to account for both
the agency and the socially conditioned nature of subjectivity. I will here
focus on dialogics from an ontological perspective, analyzing the structur-
ally dialogical constitution of subjectivity; in the following chapters (par-
ticularly in Chapters 3 and 7), I will discuss dialogicality from an ethical
perspective, as a form of relationality animated by an ethos of dialogue.
Individual lives are always already embedded in sociocultural and histor-
ical worlds. Our subjectivity is from the beginning relational: we become
who we are through a dialogue with our significant others, and this dia-
logue takes place in broader social frameworks. Several hermeneutically
oriented literary and cultural theorists, psychologists, and philosophers
share this view and emphasize the “fundamentally dialogical character” of
human existence (Taylor, 1991, p. 33). One of the first thinkers to develop
an explicit account of the dialogical structure of subjectivity was the liter-
ary theorist Bakhtin, the father of “dialogism,” whose thinking is closely
linked to philosophical hermeneutics:
Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask
questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person
participates wholly and throughout his whole life. . . . He invests his entire self
in discourse, and this discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of human life, into
the world symposium. (1984, p. 293)32
A dialogical approach to narrative identity emphasizes that our actions

and identities are never entirely our own.33 We live in a social world in
which all meanings—including those of our actions and identities—are
intersubjectively negotiated and are not determined by any single individ-
ual. We are entangled in systems of meaning that precede us and shape

our experiences, thoughts, and emotions. Taylor articulates this idea by
arguing that we become who we are in “webs of interlocution”: we become
selves in “an ongoing conversation” with those around us (1989, pp. 35–
36). Seyla Benhabib (1999, 2002) emphasizes the role of narratives in these
webs and uses the terms “webs of interlocution” and “webs of narrative”
interchangeably:
We are born into webs of interlocution or into webs of narrative—from the

familial and gender narratives to the linguistic one to the macronarrative of
one’s collective identity. We become who we are by learning to be a conversation
partner in these narratives. (1999, p. 344)
According to the dialogical conception of subjectivity and identity that

emerges from this line of thought, narrative identity, agency, and subjec-
tivity take shape in a dialogic relation to cultural webs of narratives.
At play here is a multifaceted dynamic, which can be analyzed in a dif-
ferentiated manner by distinguishing between three levels of dialogical sub-
jectivity, aspects of which include narrative agency and narrative identity.
First, we are constituted through dialogic interaction with others. Second,
this interaction makes us internalize subject positions and voices so that
an internal dialogue between different voices becomes a crucial aspect of
our becoming subjects. Third, we are constituted through a dialogue with
cultural narrative models of sense-making. These three levels are interde-
pendent, but we can differentiate between them for analytical purposes.
Let us take the first and start with the observation that both in child-
hood and throughout our lives we engage in narrative sense-making that
is essentially collaborative and dialogical, a process of co-telling and co-
construction.34 As McLean (2015) puts it, identity must be constructed,
and it is always constructed with others: identities are co-authored. She
emphasizes that the need for identity, “like hunger and thirst, is part of
our survival instinct and thus a powerful compeller of human behavior”;
it underlies “many of the conflicts in the world, from simple road rage to
outright war” (pp. 2–3).
The dialogic process of social interaction is a temporal process, and it
has a developmental aspect. From the earliest infancy, our subjectivity
begins to develop through dialogic relationships with our caregivers. This
includes developing skills that we need to construct a narrative identity.
Children begin to tell stories about their lives early in development, and
parents scaffold their emerging narrative skills, thereby reinforcing their
child’s temporal sense of self (Fivush, Haden & Reese, 2006; McLean &
67
Mansfield, 2012). Narrative identity emerges in adolescence and is rooted

in the earlier development of narrative competence:
The social practice of sharing stories provides opportunities to articulate one’s

own feelings and thoughts about events, as well as opportunities for another
person to validate, challenge, or help to construct that story. A robust area of
research has shown that parents scaffold their children’s early narrative devel-
opment by helping children to organize and interpret past events by elaborat-
ing on those events with their children and by supporting the child’s point of
view via confirming the child’s contributions to the conversation. (McLean &
Mansfield, 2012, pp. 436–437)
The narrative competence that the child acquires is not merely a cognitive
competence; a complex set of interdependent factors are involved, includ-
ing aspects of affectivity, tone, and mood. Our early experiences of attach-
ment have the power to set a narrative “tone” for our future constructions
of narrative identity (McAdams, 2006, p. 217). As Lindemann analyzes, it
is in “endorsing, testing, refining, discarding, and adding stories, and then
acting on the basis of that ongoing narrative work” that families partici-
pate in constructing and maintaining their children’s narrative identities,
as well as helping them to develop into moral agents (2014, pp. 85, 89–93).
In addition to the developmental perspective, an interactional and per-
formative perspective is important for understanding the dialogical con-
stitution of subjectivity. Drawing on Goffman’s (1959) idea of the self as
performed in social interaction, contemporary conceptualizations of narra-
tive as performance of identity emphasize that identity is an ongoing proc-
ess of performing for others in social situations. As Catherine K. Riessman
puts it, “one can’t be a ‘self’ by oneself, identities must be accomplished
in ‘shows’ that persuade” (2003, p. 7). Social actors stage performances
of selves that they or others perceive as desirable in given social situa-
tions, and these performances have a narrative dimension. Emily Heavey
emphasizes that storytelling is always “an embodied process”: processes
of telling stories are “performative exchanges between the interlocutors,
and exchanges which draw on their lived, embodied experiences” (2015,
p. 430–431). Lindemann, in turn, observes that performances of narrative
identity are largely habitual and involve actors, scripts—socially shared
narratives that “govern conduct in specific situations” and show how we
are expected to act and can expect others to respond—and an audience,
which in everyday narrative interaction consists of co-actors who respond
to the identity performed to them, for example by reinforcing or challeng-
ing it (2014, p. 98).

Narrative identities are negotiated in dialogic interaction not only
with persons, but also with different kinds of others, including literary
works. Philosophical hermeneutics uses the dialogical model to emphasize
that works of art are not objects, but subject-like “partners in dialogue”
(Gadamer, 1997, pp. 358–361): they have power to disclose the world in a
certain way, and entering in a dialogue with them requires that we do not
merely appropriate them with our own theoretical-conceptual tools, but
expose ourselves to them and engage with them from a position shaped by
our own experiences, values, and beliefs. Felski, drawing on Bruno Latour’s
(2005) actor-network theory, explicates the approach to agency in which
the actor is “not a solitary self-governing subject who summons up actions
and orchestrates events”: “Rather, actors only become actors via their
relations with other phenomena, as mediators and translators linked in
extended constellations of cause and effect” (Felski, 2015, p. 164). Literary
works are actors that “ ‘make available’ certain options of moving through
them,” possibilities that are “taken up in wildly varying ways by empirical
readers” (p. 165). Aligning myself with this broad conception of agency, I
am interested in the ways in which dialogues with literary narratives can
expand our repertoire of possible selves, modes of experience, and visions
of a fulfilling life. In Chapter 3, I will analyze in more detail the ethical
potential of dialogic encounters with literary narratives for the cultivation
of self-understanding.
Second, that we are dialogically constituted refers not only to our dialogic
exchange with concrete others; the process of socialization also involves
the internalization of different voices and subject positions. We engage in
a constant dialogue between different voices and perspectives within our-
selves. It is in this sense that Gadamer writes about the “dialogical struc-
ture of thinking” (2001, p. 57). In the spirit of an affective hermeneutics,
it should be acknowledged that this structure applies not only to thinking,
but also to our affective orientations and attachments.
Psychologists who have brought Bakhtin to a psychological context,
most influentially Hubert J. M. Hermans (2001, 2015; see also Hermans
et al., 1992; Raggatt, 2006), draw on his views on the dialogic nature of
human existence and on the polyphonic novel as a narrative in which dif-
ferent voices enter into a dialogue without any one voice dominating the
others:
[W]‌e conceptualize the self in terms of a dynamic multiplicity of relatively

autonomous I positions in an imaginal landscape. . . . The I fluctuates among
different and even opposed positions. The I has the capacity to imaginatively
87
endow each position with a voice so that dialogical relations between positions
can be established. (Hermans et al., 1992, p. 28)
The polyphonic character of the dialogical self makes salient the multiplic-
ity inherent in narrative subjectivity and links it to our capacity to perceive
the world from multiple perspectives. Instead of a monologue, a life story
is, according to Raggatt, “really more like a conversation of narrators, or per-
haps a war of historians in your head,” and we should pay attention not only
to the diachronic, but also to the synchronic aspects of this dialogue (2006,
p. 16). By using positioning theory, psychologists and social scientists have
emphasized that “dialogical relationships take place between positioned
interlocutors” (Hermans, 2015, p. 280), not only between different selves,
but also within one and the same self. An important part of a child’s devel-
opment is “positioning, repositioning, and contrapositioning itself to the
world of social relationships,” which includes learning to “reverse posi-
tions” and “take the perspective of others” (p. 280). Positioning theory has
been used to theorize the self not “as a stable and continuous point of con-
sciousness but as a product of dialogical relations in a field or landscape
of I-positions” as it interacts with others in the world via a repertoire of
“internalized voices” that embody these I-positions (Raggatt, 2006, p. 18).
These affectively charged voices are frequently in conflict; unlike most
mainstream psychological theories, positioning theory acknowledges that
“conflict and opposition may be a normal part of our subjectivity” (p. 19).
These internalized voices can be our constructions of the voices of con-
crete others, such as our parents, teachers, or friends, or of a “generalized
other,” or they can be voices linked to subject positions that we have con-
structed for ourselves, such as “me as a daughter” or “me as a student.”
Our sense of different subject positions is essential to our capacity to per-
ceive the world from different perspectives. According to Hermans, Harry
Kempen, and Rens Van Loom, the “dialogical self can be seen as a multi-
plicity of I positions or as possible selves” (1992, p. 30). They argue against
the “culturally based shrinking and centralization of the self”—the ideal
of one central core self that dominates the other I-positions and reduces
“the possibility of dialogue that for its full development requires a high
degree of openness for the exchange and modification of perspectives” (p.
30)—and suggest that while “possible selves (e.g., what one would like to
be or may be afraid of becoming) are assumed to constitute part of a multi-
faceted self-concept with one centralized I position,” the “dialogical self has
the character of a decentralized, polyphonic narrative with a multiplicity of
I positions” (p. 30).35

I agree that the emphasis on dialogue functions against centralized
models of subjectivity, but I see no reason why the notion of “possible
selves” should imply the dominance of one central self. In a similar vein to
Ricoeur’s idea of the “imaginative variations” of the self (1992, p. 148) that
can give the reader an “enlarged self” (1991a, 88), possible selves can indi-
cate different possibilities of thinking, acting, and experiencing, and how
different possibilities are open to us in divergent social situations. The cul-
tivation of narrative imagination—through literature, for example, and in
a dialogue with others—can be seen as a way of expanding the repertoire
of subject positions that are available to us through the prevalent narrative
imaginary. I suggest extending the notion of internal dialogue to encom-
pass the dialogue between different possible selves that our narrative imag-
ination produces. It is also important to acknowledge that in practice the
different internalized voices or subject positions are not clear-cut or fixed
but dynamic, constantly shifting, merging into one another, and they take
shape through both conscious and unconscious interpretative processes.
This dynamic would merit more attention in positioning theory, which cur-
rently uses metaphors—most importantly that of “the self as a society of
I-positions” (Hermans, 2015, p. 291)—that seem to assume the existence
of relatively separate and stable I-positions.
Third, we become who we are in dialogue with cultural systems of meaning,

including culturally mediated models of narrative sense-making. This third
aspect is not separate from the other two: it pervades them because our
interaction with others and the subject positions that we internalize are
socioculturally mediated. We can abstract this third level from the other
two for analytical purposes, but in reality it only exists through the social
and cultural interactive processes in which cultural models of sense-making
are interpreted and internalized.
That cultural systems of meaning are dialogically constituted is a per-
spective that has not been prevalent in psychology, critical theory, social
sciences, or philosophy (other than hermeneutic philosophy). It is linked to
a particular conception of the sociocultural sphere, including language and
other social practices. Dialogic thinkers like Gadamer and Bakhtin empha-
size that language is intrinsically dialogic: it exists first and foremost con-
textually and situationally in the form of a conversation embedded in a
sociohistorical world:
Each utterance is filled with echoes and reverberations of other utter-

ances to which it is related by the communality of the sphere of speech
08
communication. . . . With meaning I give answers to questions. Anything that

does not answer a question is devoid of sense for us. (Bakhtin, 1986, pp. 91, 145)
Since language lives in and through discourse embedded in social contexts,

every word comes to us “from another context, permeated with the inter-
pretations of others” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 202).
While structuralists believed that language exists primarily in the form
of a language system (langue), for philosophical hermeneutics language only
exists through “the conversation that we ourselves are” (Gadamer, 1997,
p. 378), that is, through the intersubjective, temporal process of being used.
It exists in the dialogic interaction between individual embodied, situated
subjects with divergent “socio-linguistic points of view” (Bakhtin, 1981,
p. 273). The use of the language system can never be mechanical. In “apply-
ing” language to particular situations, we necessarily engage in interpre-
tation. Language and individual subjects are interdependent: the subjects
become who they are in and through language, and language exists through
individual subjects’ continuous interpretative processes. The same applies
to narrative webs: they only exist via individual interpretations. It is part
of “the dialogical structure of all understanding” (Gadamer, 2001, p. 57)
that general models of sense-making are interpreted in particular histori-
cal situations, and these interpretations, in turn, participate in shaping the
meaning of the general models. This is a “non-subsumptive” model of lan-
guage, the ethical implications of which I will discuss in Chapter 3.
The hermeneutic insight that social structures only exist through the
temporal process of being interpreted has emancipatory significance. As
Manfred Frank puts it, “[p]‌recisely this is the fundamental idea of hermeneu-
tics, namely, that symbolic orders, as opposed to natural laws, are founded
in interpretations; hence . . . they can be transformed and transgressed
by new projections of meaning” (1989, p. 6).36 In other words, hermeneu-
tics acknowledges the role of individual subjects in reinterpreting—and
potentially transforming—cultural systems of meaning. Narrative models
of sense-making cannot determine how we use them to make sense of our
experiences. Our relation to them is a possibility relationship, and there is
always scope for alternative, creative reinterpretations. Because they only
exist through interpretative practices, narrative models of sense-making
can be questioned and changed, even if in practice this may be difficult,
particularly in the case of naturalizing narratives that appear as inevitable,
camouflaging themselves as a simple reflection of the order of things.
The process of (re)interpreting narrative webs is mostly unconscious,
and it is inextricably linked to dynamics of power. Benhabib acknowledges
that “we do not choose the webs in whose nets we are initially caught or

select those with whom we wish to converse” (1999, p. 344), but she sug-
gests that our agency consists in our capacity to weave a unique “life story”
(p. 344) within these webs. Without subscribing to the idea of a single “life
story,” I share her view that we are not mere effects of cultural narrative
webs. However, we should also acknowledge the role of power dynamics
with regard not just to the narrative webs, but also to the constitutive role
that power relationships play when it comes to the subject who exercises
narrative agency by following and interpreting certain narrative models.
Amy Allen makes an important point in arguing that although Benhabib
“offers a rich and subtle account of the self” (2008, p. 162), she is not suf-
ficiently alert to how power not only structures the options we have in
constructing our life stories, but also constitutes the subject who chooses
between and negotiates various narratives: “After all, is not the I who asks
‘(how) ought I identify with this or that gender narrative,’ insofar as it is
embodied and concrete, already gendered?” (p. 165). As Butler puts it, “my
narrative begins in media res, when many things have already taken place to
make me and my story possible in language” (2005, p. 39). And even when
we are able to practice narrative agency in relation to our identities, life
choices, and values, we are implicated in narrative webs that perpetuate
structures of violence that most of us can only change, at best, in a very
limited way.
This does not mean, however, that the subject is a mere effect of power
structures. As Foucault articulates, power is not only constraining but also
productive, and it enables agency. This Foucauldian perspective allows us
to acknowledge that the dialogic dynamic in which we are constituted is
a process of subjectification in two senses: it makes us internalize social
power structures and become governed from within, and it makes possible
our becoming subjects and agents capable of acting in the world. While post-
structuralist theories often downplay agency and individualist-humanist
theories power and social embeddedness, a Foucauldian- hermeneutic
approach allows rethinking narrative subjectivity in nuanced terms that
give due attention to both agency and social embeddedness.37
Poststructuralist theories often prefer to talk about repetition as the
mechanism through which social practices and structures are perpetu-
ated, but this notion—by avoiding any reference to human subjectivity
or agency—fails to explain why repetition is “never merely mechanical”
(Butler, 1997, p. 16).38 The advantage of hermeneutic terminology is that
it makes explicit, through the key notions of (re)interpretation and dia-
logue, the subject’s role as an agent of (re)interpretation, and it therefore
captures how, in speech acts, we not only reiterate but also (potentially cre-
atively) reinterpret linguistic and social—including narrative—practices.39
28
Therefore, it allows us to conceptualize the relationship between individual

subjects and sociocultural structures without reifying them. Because the
sociocultural systems of meaning, including narrative webs, cannot deter-
mine how they will be interpreted, and all interpretation takes place in
different sociohistorical situations, ultimately all understanding is char-
acterized by the structure of “always-understanding-differently” (“Immer-
anders-Verstehen,” Gadamer, 1993a, p. 8). In a similar vein, Bakhtin asserts
that all understanding is “reinterpretation, in a new context” (1986, p. 161).
According to the performative conception, narrative interpretation
always takes part, through a dialogue of interpretations, in shaping reality.
Often the dialogue takes the form of a dispute or conflict. The struggle for
power is essentially a struggle of interpretations, in which narratives play a
crucial role. The individuals and communities whose versions of the world
are accepted as valid—the ones whose stories win over people’s hearts and
minds—have power, including the power to affect what is perceived as true
and false, right and wrong. Not only politicians, historians, and novelists
participate in this dialogue and dispute of interpretations; we do so in
our everyday lives, in our most mundane choices, and through our mostly
unconscious participation in cultural sense-making practices.
The dialogue with cultural narrative models is largely automatized: cul-
turally dominant narratives affect us through our narrative unconscious.
Here the unconscious is not understood as a container of repressed
thoughts (as in classical psychoanalytic thought) but as dynamic, chang-
ing, intersubjectively constituted, and narratively mediated.40 The narra-
tive unconscious exists through a process of unconscious interpretation.
Without being aware of it, we interpret and reiterate the cultural models
of sense-making ingrained in our narrative unconscious, and there is an
element of contingency and unpredictability in how they become (re)inter-
preted and reproduced in different situations. The narrative unconscious
does not predetermine our actions in any automatic way.
The narrative unconscious has both a sociocultural and an individ-
ual dimension. They interpenetrate one another, but we can distinguish
between them for analytical purposes. The sociocultural unconscious con-
sists in the culturally prevalent narrative models that shape the way people
make sense of their experiences without being aware of it. It is the basis of
the narrative imaginary of societies and communities. Through the socio-
cultural narrative unconscious, we are implicated in narrative mechanisms
that perpetuate and legitimate oppressive social systems. The individual
narrative unconscious is shaped by our earliest attachments, the internal-
ized narrative models by which we live, models that tell us what is desira-
ble and appalling, admirable and shameful, “normal” and “abnormal.” The

individual aspect also includes the level of felt, embodied experiences that
are mediated culturally and through earlier life history, but without this
mediation reaching the level of consciousness. The individual narrative
unconscious can perpetuate harmful—even traumatizing and paralyzing—
emotional patterns that we unknowingly repeat.
It is important for the dialogical conception of subjectivity and narrative
to acknowledge the normativity—and hence the potential for oppression—
inherent in cultural narratives. They present us with cultural ideals and
norms and suggest that while certain things are possible, likely, desirable,
or acceptable for us—given our gender, race, class, age, looks—others are
impossible, unlikely, undesirable, or inacceptable. Narrative identities are
ascribed to us on the basis of our visual appearance and social status. These
ascribed identities do not automatically determine who we are: it is crucial
how we respond to the labels imposed on us.41 The need to engage with
the ascribed identities, however, shows that narrative identity is not sim-
ply a matter of autonomous, self-sufficient self-interpretation. It is a dia-
logical, often highly anguished and conflicted process that involves both
self-interpretation and engagement with the identities into which we have
been “interpellated” as well as with those that we have “self-fashioned.”42
It is often painful not to conform to “cultural categories and popular story
templates”: “We often anticipate a narrative for ourselves based on what
society declares is possible for us, and we can derive great satisfaction
when we fulfill these narratives and feel crushing disappointment when we
do not” (Josselson & Hopkins, 2015, p. 223). This is one major reason why
the struggle to expand the repertoire of socially available narratives—and
hence our sense of possible selves—matters.
We are unaware of the narrative unconscious that regulates our narra-
tive interpretations, but we can become partly aware of it, and when that
happens, elements of the narrative unconscious can become an active part
of our narrative imagination. We can then critically evaluate which aspects
of our narrative unconscious we want to preserve and cherish and which
aspects we want to question and challenge. Becoming aware of our narrative
unconscious can be an avenue for breaking free from some of its delimiting
aspects and cultivating a richer narrative imagination, but we should also
acknowledge the following qualifications: it is generally easier for subjects in
privileged positions to engage in critical self-reflection; even when we reso-
lutely engage in such reflection, it is not always sufficient in freeing us from
our deep-seated affective attachments, habits, and anxieties; and even when
we succeed in self-transformation, it does not stop us from being implicated
in broader problematic narrative webs that we may object to but from which
we continue to benefit (such as those that maintain First World privilege).43
48
IN MEDIAS RES: THE STRUGGLE OF INTERPRETATIONS
In this chapter, I have outlined some of the key aspects of narrative herme-
neutics, particularly by focusing on the relationship of narrative to expe-
rience and life, as well as on the dialogic relationship between narrative
interpretation and cultural narrative webs. Not only do narrative and expe-
rience have an interpretative structure, but so do memory and imagina-
tion; I zoomed in on the relationship between experience and narrative in a
discussion that will form the basis for my later reflections on remembering,
imagining, and different practices of dialogue. The focus here was on three
advantages of privileging the hermeneutic- Nietzschean conception of
interpretation: it allows us to conceptualize the relationship between expe-
rience and narrative in terms of an interpretative continuum; it provides
a framework for seeing life as a process of constant narrative reinterpreta-
tion; and it enables us to see the relationship between subjects of experi-
ence and cultural narratives as dialogical and entwined with practices of
power. In addition to these three advantages, a fourth major advantage of
this kind of narrative hermeneutics is that it allows us to move beyond the
dichotomous question of whether narratives are good or bad for us and to
appreciate the ethical complexity of narratives in our lives. This will be the
topic of the next chapter.
In this chapter we have seen that ontological assumptions affect the
position that theorists take on the ethical significance of storytelling.
Arguments on the inherent ethical harmfulness of narrative rely on
(mostly tacit) ontological presuppositions about unmediated raw expe-
rience that is allegedly falsified by its retrospective narrative interpreta-
tion. Acknowledging the cultural, historical, and narrative mediatedness
of experience problematizes such views, but does not imply that narra-
tives should be seen as automatically good for us. I find problematic not
only the antinarrativist belief in the ethical questionability of narratives,
but also the strong narrativist contention that storytelling is inher-
ently beneficial for us. The dialogical, performative, and culture-oriented
approach of narrative hermeneutics allows us to shift attention from the
argument over whether narrative sense-making is harmful or beneficial
to the complex dynamic in which storytelling has potential for both good
and evil.
According to narrative hermeneutics, to interpret one’s life is to inter-
pret it in medias res, in the middle of the process of living it, and in the
middle of engaging in a dialogue with other people’s interpretations. Much
of this interpretative activity takes the shape of dialogic storytelling. One
of the key ideas of narrative hermeneutics is that in ethically evaluating

different narrative practices it is crucial to acknowledge their interpreta-
tive character: that every version of a story is a different interpretation,
and that these interpretations and the dialogue and struggle between
them take place in social contexts. Conceptualizing narratives as practices
of interpretation, enmeshed with other socially and historically situated
dialogical practices, allows us to see how it is an inherent feature of every
narrative that it can be told in different ways, and how our condition as
storytelling animals is one of always being in the middle of a dialogue and
struggle of interpretations. Ultimately, this dialogue is the very dialogue in
which the ethical life of society unfolds.
NOTES
1. On the notion of “etwas als etwas,” see also Heidegger (1996, pp. 58, 139) and
Gadamer (1997, p. 90).
2. Already the choice of words indicates an interpretation. For example, the
British media predominantly now refers to the “migrant crisis” instead of the
“refugee crisis” (which was in 2015 the dominant term). This discursive shift
signals a linking of the refugee crisis to broader issues of migration that the
media construes as a “migrant problem”: the “crisis” is no longer linked to the
desperate situation of the refugees, but signifies the crisis of Great Britain facing
a “swarm” of non-British people. While the “refugee crisis” was a potentially
more empathetic term (a refugee is a person in need, someone to whom we have
a responsibility), the “migrant crisis” portrays migrants as a threat and treats
as one group people—Syrian asylum seekers, Polish workforce, radicalized
Muslims—who in fact have very little in common. Particularly in the tabloids
the discourse on the “migrant crisis” was from early on blended with the
antimigration discourse that formed the foundation of the Leave campaign of
the British EU referendum.
3. Here Ricoeur distances hermeneutics from the Hegelian idea of total mediation,
a distancing that is elemental to philosophical hermeneutics in general (see
Gadamer, 1997, pp. 353–361).
4. Felski uses the notion of affective hermeneutics (2015, p. 178); I see my own
narrative hermeneutics as aligned with this project.
5. While in classical hermeneutics the hermeneutic circle signified the
methodological principle according to which we should interpret the parts of a
text in relation to the whole and the whole in relation to the parts and move in
the circle to deepen and enrich our view of both, Schleiermacher (1977) argued
that the same applies to the psychological understanding of lives: we should
interpret a particular thought or episode in the context of the whole life and
vice versa. On the hermeneutic circle in twentieth-century hermeneutics, see
Heidegger (1996, pp. 143–144); Gadamer (1997, pp. 266–269); Ricoeur (1984,
pp. 72, 76).
6. On the productivity of narratives in a Foucauldian approach to narratives,
see Tamboukou (2013). Representational approaches appear less problematic,
however, if we understand representation as a mode of reconfiguration,
68
recontextualization, and reinterpretation, rather than in terms of mirroring or

reproducing a preexisting order.
7. Many critics of narrative have in mind a much narrower conception. When
Strawson (2004), for example, attacks narrativity, he assumes that narrative
attributes a “developmental and hence temporal unity or coherence to the things
to which it is standardly applied—lives, parts of lives, pieces of writing” (p. 439).
Others use the notion of coherence in a much looser sense to define narrative.
Goldie (2012), for example, seems to mean by coherence simply some way of
“holding together” the narrated events: narrative “must be about one thing
happening after another, and the notion of coherence is concerned with how
these things happening one after another hold together in some way” (p. 14).
8. As Goldie (2012) puts it, in narrative “the evaluation and emotional response
themselves infuse the narrative, shaping and colouring it” (p. 11). They are
ingrained in the author’s, narrator’s, and reader’s narrative process.
9. See also Cohn (1999, p. 12); Herman (2006, p. 32).
10. Levinas acknowledges the possibility of language to “exceed the limits of what
is thought” as it “overflows the theme it states, the ‘all together,’ the ‘everything
included’ of the said” (1991, pp. 169–170), but he links this possibility to poetic
rather than narrative discourse. On Levinas’s relationship to narrative and
literature, see Davis (1996, p. 92, and 2018, pp. 148–162); Meretoja (2014b, p. 88).
11. On “hermeneutic imagination,” see also Gadamer (2000, pp. 16–17).
12. See also Ricoeur’s (1991a, pp. 208–222) analysis of “initiative,” which “has its
seat in the flesh,” in the “system of possibilities of the flesh” (p. 215).
13. Strawson’s article has become strikingly influential among analytical
philosophers who work on narrative. Currie, for example, writes that some
people “may think that some act of narrative production is a condition for the
flourishing, or perhaps even for the existence, of that life. Galen Strawson has
shown, I think, that this is not true” (2010, p. 24). In narrative psychology and
literary studies, in contrast, Strawson has received fierce criticism (see, e.g.,
Eakin, 2006; Battersby, 2006; Ritivoi, 2009). For philosophical refutations of his
position, see Schechtman (2007); Mackenzie (2008).
14. Schechtman observes that in “Against Narrativity,” Strawson does not explicitly
take up the issue of the relationship between ontological and phenomenological
conceptions of the self; she suggests that he must be thinking about the
phenomenological self as he discusses “how we do and should experience
ourselves” (2007, p. 174). I would argue, however, that the force of the “should”
in Strawson’s argument comes largely from his (tacit) ontological conviction
about the true nature of the self.
15. As Ritivoi asserts, the “absence of the social domain” is remarkable in Strawson’s
thinking: he fails to acknowledge that whether “an individual is more likely to
perceive herself episodically or diachronically” is “influenced by social pressures,
demands, and expectations” (2009, p. 30).
16. On the intertwinement of the ontological and ethical dimension of the question
concerning the relationship between narrative and human existence, see also
Meretoja (2014a, 2014b).
17. Freeman makes a similar point: “For those theorists who see memory and
narrative as inevitable sources of distortion and falsification, the truth is limited
to that which exists in the immediate, ostensibly unvarnished, moment” (2015,
p. 239).

18. This perspective is also implicit in the Brunerian approach to how culturally
dominant “canonical narratives” affect experience.
19. See Brockmeier & Meretoja (2014); Meretoja (2014b); Bruner (1987); Kerby
(1991, pp. 42–43); Freeman (1993, pp. 108–111, and 2013).
20. On my model of the “triple hermeneutic” and its relation to Ricoeur’s three
levels of mimesis, see also Meretoja (2014a).
21. On dialogical intertextuality, see Meretoja (2014b, pp. 131–137); on
internarrativity, see Meretoja (2018, pp. 110–118).
22. On strong narrativism, see Meretoja (2014b, pp. 198, 207).
23. The idea(l) of the unity of the life narrative also underpins the life myth theory
of McAdams (1993).
24. Both the Nietzschean and the hermeneutic traditions emphasize that the
interpretative process takes place from the horizon of the present. See, e.g.,
Nietzsche (1999b, p. 77) and Gadamer (1997, pp. 296–297).
25. Frank (1995) groups cultural illness narratives in the three broad categories of
restitution narratives, chaos narratives, and quest narratives. See also Hyvärinen
(2015, pp. 187–189).
26. Schechtman (2007) analyzes how our narrative constitution as selves involves
making certain parts of our past our own through affective identification, but
she does not consider other forms of affective identification that shape our
identities. I will discuss identification in more detail in Chapters 3, 5, and 6.
27. “Alle Menschen sind Künstler.”
28. Schechtman follows suit: “we constitute ourselves as persons by forming
a narrative self-conception according to which we experience and organize
our lives” (2007, p. 162; 1996). She elaborates on her earlier narrative self-
constitution thesis by emphasizing that it involves “no requirement that an
identity-constituting narrative have a unifying theme, or represent a quest or
have a well-defined plot arc that fits a distinct literary genera” (2007, p. 163) and
by distinguishing between the narrative constitution of personhood and of a
sense of self.
29. Randall & McKim, for example, write about a “lived story” (2008, p. 71); see also
Dwivedi & Gardner (1997, p. 21); Johnson (1993, p. 177).
30. Many narrative theorists argue that a narrative must always be told to someone,
but Goldie (2012, pp. 3–6) argues convincingly that it need only be thought
through (or told to oneself).
31. Goffman already acknowledged the limitations of the dramaturgical
metaphor: “the part one individual plays is tailored to the parts played by
the others present, and yet these others also constitute the audience” (1959,
preface).
32. For a similar dialogical position, see Gadamer (1997, pp. 369–379; 2001,
pp. 54–57).
33. Bakhtinian approaches to psychology (see Shotter & Billig, 1998, pp. 22–23) and
poststructuralist approaches to narrative (see Davis, 2004, p. 150) share this
insight.
34. On co-telling, see Ochs & Capps (2001); Schiff (2017).
35. I use the (Foucault-influenced) concept of subject position precisely because
the sociocultural approach is infused into this concept. In Chapter 7, I discuss
in more detail the need to give more weight to the sociohistorically conditioned
nature of the dialogical self.
8
36. As Gadamer articulates, the same applies to any application of rules: “there is
no doubt that the recipient of an order must perform a definite creative act in
understanding its meaning” (1997, p. 334).
37. The productive aspect of power is not widely acknowledged by mainstream
psychology, but it is integral to many socioculturally oriented approaches to
narrative (e.g., Tamboukou, 2013).
38. On the relationship between the dialectical and the dialogical in Bakhtin’s
thought, see Bakhtin (1981, p. 278; 1986, p. 147); Meretoja (2014b, pp. 167–
170, 239n18). My use of “dialogical” implies no consensus on the matter of the
dialogue.
39. For a similar position, see Benhabib (1999). For a more detailed discussion of the
exchange between Benhabib and Butler, see Meretoja (2014b, pp. 170–171).
40. See the discussion in Chapter 1, and Josselson & Hopkins (2015, p. 225).
41. As Sugarman puts it in his discussion of historical ontology, the “kinds of
persons we are told we are, told to be, treated as, by which we recognize
ourselves, with which we identify, against which we compare ourselves, and so
forth, have a constitutive influence” (2013, p. 84).
42. On the tension between these two, see Kirschner (2015, p. 303); on
interpellation, see Althusser (2014, pp. 189–196, 264–269).
43. The limits of critical self-reflection could be illustrated, for example, by a case
in which a white woman fights consciously and resolutely against racism but
nevertheless cannot help being afraid when she encounters a black man on a
quiet, dark street.

CHAPTER 3
Storytelling and Ethics
T his chapter explores the ethical implications of the hermeneutic

approach to narrative and delineates a framework for analyzing differ-
ent aspects of the ethical potential and dangers of storytelling. In the pre-
vious chapter we saw that those who agree on the ontological significance
of narrative for human existence mostly also stress the ethical potential
of storytelling, but different theorists foreground different aspects of this
potential. Arguments commonly presented on the ethical benefits of nar-
rative can be roughly grouped in the following categories: narrative is the
key to a self-examined, responsible life; narrative makes possible an ethical
relationship to the other; narrative is a means of sharing experiences in
ways that contribute to a sense of connection and community; narrative
develops our capacity for empathetic perspective-taking; and narrative is
a form of moral education or cultivates our moral powers. In this chap-
ter, I will discuss these arguments in the context of a hermeneutic nar-
rative ethics. In all five groups of arguments, I find valuable insights, but
also a need to qualify them in order to avoid a problematic idealization of
narrative.
I will develop here a hermeneutic narrative ethics that provides a sche-
matic map for differentiating between six aspects of the ethical potential
and problems of different storytelling practices. (1) I propose that a pivotal
but neglected aspect of the ethical potential of narratives is their power
to cultivate our sense of the possible: I argue that narrative form in itself
does not make narratives either good or bad, and what is ethically crucial is
whether and how they expand or diminish our sense of the possible. After
outlining this idea, I will use it as a vantage point to discuss the five other
types of ethical potential, which will also further elucidate different aspects
09
of the sense of the possible. I argue that narratives can (2) contribute to
personal and cultural self-understanding; (3) provide an ethical mode of
understanding other lives and experiences “non-subsumptively” in their
singularity; (4) establish, challenge, and transform narrative in-betweens;
(5) develop our perspective-awareness and our capacity for perspective-
taking; and (6) function as a mode of ethical inquiry.
I emphasize, however, that it is not inherent to narrative that any of
these kinds of ethical potential would be automatically realized. Narratives
can and often do have the opposite effect. The map of six types of ethical
potentials and risks is meant to provide heuristic analytical tools and cri-
teria for evaluating different narrative practices. In all six cases, we face a
differentiating continuum—not a binary—on which narrative practices can
be placed.
A SENSE OF THE POSSIBLE
Robert Musil uses the notion of a “sense of possibility” (Möglichkeitssinn)

in his novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930–1943, The Man Without
Qualities). The narrator asserts that a person who possesses a sense of pos-
sibility does not say: “Here this or that has happened, will happen, must
happen. He uses his imagination and says: Here such and such might,
should or ought to happen. And if he is told that something is the way it
is, then he thinks: Well, it could probably just as easily be some other way”
(1965, p. 12).1 Such “possibilitarians” live within “the subjunctive mood”;
their sense of the possible is not the opposite of a sense of reality, but “a
sense of possible reality” that involves sensitivity to the possibilities that
lie within reality and the ability to awaken them (pp. 12–13; Musil, 1974,
pp. 16–17). Key to the sense of possibility is the ability to see alternatives
to what is presented to us as self-evident and inevitable. While Musil’s nar-
rator suggests that people can be divided into possibilitarians and ordinary
people, I believe that we all have a sense of the possible and that there are
conditions that expand and diminish it.
One of the central claims of this book is that storytelling has ethical
potential in its capacity to expand our sense of the possible. This view is
linked to the performative approach, according to which narratives do not
merely represent reality, but take part in shaping it. The intersubjective
world they perpetuate and transform is a space of possibilities in which cer-
tain modes of experience, thought, perception, and affect are encouraged,
while others are discouraged or rendered impossible. As part of the nar-
rative unconscious, culturally mediated narrative models of sense-making

shape what we unconsciously experience to be possible or impossible.
Cultural narratives in different media can reinforce the narrative uncon-
scious, or they can play with it and challenge it. Literary narratives draw
on the narrative unconscious, but frequently they also venture beyond it,
aspiring to enrich our narrative imagination by encouraging us to imagine
alternative possibilities of co-inhabiting the world.
The relationship between the narrative unconscious and the narrative
imagination shapes our sense of the possible. There is a continuum from
blind perpetuation of the narrative unconscious—in which the narra-
tive unconscious completely dominates the narrative imagination—to an
active, explorative narrative imagination that is characterized by critical
self-reflection, ethical inquiry, and a creative exploration of new modes of
being, thinking, and experiencing. At the end of blind perpetuation, nar-
rative understanding typically functions appropriatively—by subsuming
new situations under what is already known—whereas at the explora-
tive end, narrative understanding functions non-subsumptively and dia-
logically, in the mode of a hermeneutic circle whereby encountering new
situations changes one’s preconceptions and narrative models of sense-
making. The latter, explorative mode is characterized by an openness to
the unknown and a willingness to imagine other possible ways of living,
feeling, and thinking. Hence it has power to expand the sense of the pos-
sible. Self-aware narrative imagination that critically engages with the cul-
tural narrative unconscious nourishes the process of actively constructing
one’s own narrative identity instead of remaining entrapped in an identity
imposed on oneself from without. Social conditions can foster or impede
such active narrative agency: they can empower or paralyze.
The ontological, epistemological, ethical, and social are integral, inter-
connected aspects of the sense of the possible. Let me briefly elucidate this
in relation to Miranda Fricker’s (2007) theory of epistemic injustice, which
highlights the link between epistemology and ethics. Fricker distinguishes
between two forms of distinctively epistemic injustice in which a wrong is
done “to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower”:
Testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated

level of credibility to a speaker’s word; hermeneutical injustice occurs at a prior
stage, when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair
disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences. (p. 1)
The notion of hermeneutic injustice alerts us to the way in which the interpre-
tative resources available to us place subjects of experience in unequal posi-
tions in terms of what kinds of—and whose—experiences are ones for which
S t or y t e l l i n g a n d E t hi c s [ 91 ]
29
there is a culturally available rich language for expression, communication,

articulation, and recognition. Fricker uses sexual harassment as an example.
Before the concept became culturally available, women who experienced what
is now known as sexual harassment were often unable to tell anyone what
they had experienced, or even understand for themselves what had happened.
There are inadequate social resources for understanding certain experiences,
and the subjects of those experiences are likely to suffer from hermeneutic
injustice. This injustice is predominantly structural: the experiences of mem-
bers of certain groups are ill understood without it being the fault of anyone
in particular or the result of someone’s lack of good will. Fricker shows how
relations of power can constrain not only the ability of the majority to under-
stand the experience of socially marginalized individuals, but also the ability
of these individuals to “understand their own experience” (p. 147).
From the perspective of Fricker’s theory, narrative practices appear
unethical insofar as they reinforce and perpetuate social prejudices and
stereotypes that are a source of hermeneutic injustice, and ethical insofar
as they promote hermeneutic justice by increasing the richness and com-
plexity of our hermeneutic resources, providing tools for understanding
the experiences of others and vocabularies for articulating the experiences
of socially disadvantaged people. From the perspective of narrative herme-
neutics, however, Fricker’s otherwise insightful theory of epistemic injus-
tice is ultimately too narrow in its underlying conception of epistemology
and ethics because it leaves out the ontological-existential dimension of
this problematic. What Fricker calls “epistemic injustice” is not only epi-
stemic. It has a strong existential-ontological dimension: it concerns our
very existence and modes of being, our identities and possibilities. It is not
only about conveying information and knowledge, not only an exchange of
epistemic goods, but a negotiation of styles of existence—and, at its most
extreme, a struggle over the right to exist (as for the Jews in Nazi Germany,
or gay people in contemporary Russia).
Cultural narrative models of sense-making are an important part of
this negotiation. There are socially available narratives for expressing,
communicating, and articulating certain experiences, and underdevel-
oped resources for expressing, communicating, and articulating others.
The social world and its narrative imaginary shape not only what is possi-
ble for its inhabitants to know and how they interpret the world, but also
what experiences they go through and what and who they can become. In
addition to the wrong done to certain groups and individuals in that their
experiences are ill understood, the ethical dimension of this dynamic also
concerns how certain ways of being and experiencing are privileged and
encouraged, while others are discouraged or disallowed.

Thus, I argue that crucial to the ethical potential of narratives is not
only their capacity to enrich the hermeneutic resources available for us
in understanding our own experiences and those of others, but also their
power to expand the possibilities open to us. These two are linked, as it is
difficult to experience things that we cannot name, express, or recognize,
so new vocabularies and modes of expression can also open up new possi-
bilities of experience, thought, and action. Precisely through enriching our
hermeneutic resources, storytelling practices also open up new possibili-
ties. But even narratives that simply perpetuate dominant sense-making
practices participate in defining the sense of the possible of the inhabitants
of that world.
Narrative identities not only enable agency, but also diminish our
possibilities, particularly when they are imposed on us and linked to the
essentialist idea of fixed, stable identities to which individuals are pre-
determined through their ethnicity, class, age, sexual orientation, and so
on. We also impose limitations on ourselves through our attachments to
restricting narrative identities, as when a young woman is attached to the
narrative of being too inexperienced, shy, or insecure to take up a position
of leadership. Often such identities are shaped by the affective structure of
what Lauren Berlant (2011) terms “cruel optimism,” that is, an optimistic
attachment to an object of desire that in fact impedes our flourishing, as is
frequently the case in fantasies of the good life. Such an affective structure
shapes one’s sense of the possible when the object of attachment actively
impedes the attainment of the goal that originally drew one to the object: it
simultaneously creates a sense of possibility and hinders the realization of
that possibility. Such affective structures are typically difficult to register,
but counter-narratives to dominant cultural narratives—or, in Berlant’s
terms, to the prevalent modes of the “ongoing work of storytelling . . . in
the making and mediation of worlds” (p. 8)—can generate awareness of
such affective structures and of alternatives to them. Such awareness can
help us move from narrative identities imposed on us to narratively imag-
ining possible selves, relationships, and communities, structured by alter-
native affective identifications, models of cohabitation, and visions of a
fulfilling life.
A sense of the possible is an important aspect of ethical, narrative, and

historical imagination. Rather than think of these three as separate phe-
nomena, I see them as interconnected dimensions of the multifaceted
phenomenon of imagination. More attention could be paid to their inter-
relations. When moral philosophers like Nussbaum acknowledge the nar-
rative dimension of ethical imagination, they tend to overlook its historical
49
dimension, and narrative theorists have devoted little explicit attention to

the ethical and historical dimensions of narrative imagination. Theorists of
historical imagination, like Hayden White, are alert to how narrative prac-
tices shape the ways in which historians and non-historians make sense of
the past, but they often skirt the ethical dimension of this process.
In the next chapters, I will explore particularly how the sense of the pos-
sible is linked to a sense of history, that is, how it is shaped by an under-
standing of what was possible in a particular historical and cultural world,
and how that affects our sense of what is possible for us now and in the
future. I suggest that a sense of history promotes our ability to question
the ready-made narrative identities that are imposed on us and to imagine
alternative ones. Currently, narrative ethics rarely gives proper consider-
ation to the ethical relevance of such a sense of history.
Preliminarily, we can distinguish between four interconnected, ethically
charged ways in which narratives contribute to our sense of the possible
by cultivating our historical imagination. First, narratives can provide us
with insights into what a particular historical world was/is like as a space
of possibilities in which certain things were/are possible to think, do, and
experience, and others difficult or impossible. Literary narratives, films,
television series, and other fictional narratives can function as a form of
alternative historiography that affords imaginative experiential access to
such worlds. They can self-reflexively explore how cultural narratives shape
the space of experience in which individual experience is embedded. This
process can generate awareness of the narrative unconscious of a past or
present world, that is, of the cultural narrative models that condition the
sense-making practices in that world.
Second, narratives can contribute to our sense of the possible by show-
ing how history consists in everyday actions and inactions: that history is
not taking place somewhere else, where the political leaders meet, but right
here, where our everyday lives unfold. In Claude Simon’s words, “History is
not, as the school books would like to make us think, a discontinuous series
of dates, treaties and spectacular and clanking battles . . . the dim existence
of an old lady is History itself, the very substance of History” (1960, pp. 30–
31).2 Narratives can cultivate our sense of how subjects of action are not
merely historically conditioned, but also capable of new initiatives; instead
of being destined to simply follow dominant cultural narratives, they are
capable of shaping those narratives and creating their own. Presenting sub-
jects in the temporal process of initiating action can show how lives unfold
in historical situations that function as spaces of possibilities that enable
a multitude of courses of action, leading to different futures. Narratives
can help us imagine the openness of each historical present as a time of

action: how the people of the past lived in an indeterminate present and
made choices and decisions that shaped history, that is, how their present
was not a predetermined part of a linear chain of events, but an open space
in which the future was in the process of being made. By refining our sense
of how history unfolds through moments in which different possibilities
are open to the subjects of action, fiction can work against the reifying ten-
dency to present history as a necessary development. Fiction can nourish
our sense of the unpredictability of human actions and interactions—or
what Bruner calls the “alternativeness of human possibility” (1986, p. 53)
and Bakhtin (1984, p. 61) and Morson (1994) the indeterminacy and unfi-
nalizability of human actions. Future fictions, in turn, can evoke a sense
of how the present is the past of a future present, which can heighten our
awareness of how we are now in the process of making that future past and
how we are seizing and ignoring possibilities that are open to us: we are
encouraged to look at the present in the tense of the future anterior, as the
time that will have been.3
Third, narratives can cultivate our sense of how our narrative interpre-
tations of the past shape our space of possibilities in the present and our
orientation to the future, and they can enrich our understanding of the
different ways in which the past, present, and future are intertwined in
divergent modes of experience and political discourse (such as those per-
petuating the cultural amnesia in postwar Europe). Literary and autobio-
graphical narratives shape cultural memory by interpreting the past from
the perspective of the present, but this memory work is not merely a mat-
ter of representing and understanding the past; it also shapes how we per-
ceive our possibilities in the present and for the future. The way in which
we understand and narrate what was possible for the agents of past his-
torical worlds affects how we understand what is and will be possible for
the inhabitants of the current world. For example, as Europe is now facing
the most severe refugee crisis since the Second World War, it is critical
how we understand the history of the European project and how we relate
the current crisis to forced migration and displacement after the Second
World War. In the current Finnish public debate, those who maintain that
Syrian or Iraqi asylum seekers should be deported are often reluctant to
hear their stories or to remember how Sweden welcomed 100,000 Finnish
refugees in September 1944, when the Lapland War broke out between
Finland and Germany. Narrative fiction has the potential to contribute
to our comparative imagination without positing a problematical identity
between different experiences or phenomena.4 Such an aspiration can be
seen as the driving impetus of a novel like Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging,
gegangen (2015, Go, Went, Gone), which explores the encounter between
69
African refugees in Berlin and a retired classics professor, who felt self-
alienation after the fall of the Wall: the novel suggests that different expe-
riences of self-alienation and loss, of feeling like a stranger in one’s own
life, could provide a shared starting point for understanding others, such
as the refugees who have lost their old lives and have become strangers,
not only in their new country, but also to themselves.
Fourth, critical to the ethical dimension of remembering is the way in
which it is linked to imagination and to the possibility to learn from the
past in orienting ourselves to the future. While the past places obligations
on us, the “duty to remember,” as Ricoeur puts it, “consists not only in hav-
ing a deep concern for the past, but in transmitting the meaning of past
events to the next generation” and in reflection on the ways in which “we
may prevent the same events from recurring in the future” (1999, pp. 9–
10). Ricoeur emphasizes the possibility of telling otherwise and letting
others tell their own history: “So we have here a work on memory which
reverts from past to future, . . . by way of drawing out the exemplary sig-
nificance of past events” (p. 9). This is a future-oriented vision of the duty
to remember as a duty to learn from the past, so as not to be paralyzed by
anger and hatred caused by past injustice, but rather to be able to move for-
ward and struggle against prevailing structures of violence.
The power to explore human possibilities in all their temporal dimensions

lies at the heart of narrative fiction. This power is emphasized by her-
meneutic thinkers, such as Ricoeur, whose notion of “imaginative varia-
tions” refers to the ways in which literary worlds can open up possibilities
of being that enlarge our “horizon of existence.”5 However, although the
ethical potential of storytelling is particularly salient in literary and other
artistic narratives, we should acknowledge that all narrative practices take
part in shaping our sense of the possible. For example, politicians paint
imaginative scenarios of possible futures and envision desirable or destruc-
tive versions of the world to come. They frequently use fictional narrative
scenarios as rhetorical resources for communicating their visions.
Current fictionality studies have helpfully shifted attention from genre-
based approaches to seeing fictionality as a rhetorical mode that is not
bound to the genres of fiction but refers, instead, to “intentionally sig-
nalled invention in communication,” also pervasive in non-fictional com-
munication.6 However, placing the emphasis on the invented character of
the imagined risks reinforcing the dichotomy between the actual, factual,
and real versus the possible, fictional, and unreal. Imagination plays an
important part in everything we do as moral agents, from imagining the

effects of our actions on other people to imagining the kinds of persons
we want to develop into.7 Pitting the imagined against the actual and real
impedes scrutiny of the ways in which a sense of the possible structures
our ethical universe.
I suggest that instead of linking the imaginative dimension of liter-
ary narratives to the status of the unreal, it is more productive to ana-
lyze the power of narrative fiction to explore possibilities of being in the
world in ways that can transform our sense of the possible in the actual
world. Currently the question of how the possibilities of human existence
explored in fictive worlds can feed into, shape, and transform the pos-
sibilities in our real world is lamentably marginal within literary narra-
tive studies. There are, however, also promising developments, such as
Felski’s (2015) idea of reading (reminiscent of the Ricoeurian encounter
between the world of the text and the world of the reader) as “coproduc-
tion between actors” and a recognition of “the text’s status as coactor: as
something that makes a difference, that . . . makes things happen” (p. 12).8
Placing ourselves “in front of the text” allows us to reflect on what the text
“makes possible” (p. 12).9
The ethical potential of both literary narratives and storytelling prac-
tices more broadly is linked precisely to their power to make a difference, to
make something possible, to expand our sense of what we can experience,
feel, and do. Unlike formalist approaches that see fiction as removed from
everyday life and as inviting purely aesthetic, disinterested pleasure, and
unlike cultural studies approaches that reduce literary texts to social power
structures, narrative hermeneutics entails focusing on what the encounter
with the narrative makes possible. From this perspective, ethically most
powerful are narratives that are able to enrich our ethical imagination, amplify
our moral and narrative agency, and expand our sense of the possible without
diminishing the possibilities of others. This can entail, for example, widen-
ing our comprehension of the diverse ways in which people can flourish,
love, and care, cultivate their creative powers, fight injustice, and celebrate
difference. Often it contributes to our understanding of the mechanisms
through which we are implicated in narrative webs that sustain the uneven
distribution of vulnerability, agency, and possibilities. At the other end of
the continuum are ethically problematic narratives that diminish the pos-
sibilities of individuals or communities, for example through naturalizing
strategies that reinforce harmful cultural stereotypes or fatalistic beliefs
that present lives as predestined to follow a certain, inevitable trajectory.
Ethically powerful narratives often unmask the mechanisms through
which such ethically problematic narratives operate.
89
SELF-U NDERSTANDING
Narrative hermeneutics suggests that narratives are integral both to

how we understand ourselves and to who we are. These are not separate,
because our self-interpretations play a constitutive role in who we are.
This implies that finding new ways of interpreting our lives and of nar-
rating the stories of where we might be going entails the possibility of
self-transformation.
As we saw in Chapter 2, in philosophical hermeneutics understanding
is a broad concept that has a strong ontological-existential and ethical
dimension: it encompasses all the experiential and embodied aspects of
our being and acting in the world. It is integral to this view that all under-
standing ultimately also includes a dimension of self-understanding, which
is linked to a sense of one’s possibilities in the world (Gadamer, 1997,
p. 260). Heidegger emphasizes that we understand our possibilities—and,
on the basis of them, ourselves—not by “immanent self-perception,” but
by dwelling in the world, by being thrown (geworfen) into certain concrete
possibilities (1996, p. 135). His famous example of how in “the projecting
of understanding, beings are disclosed in their possibility” (p. 141) is that
we understand what a hammer is insofar as we understand how it allows
one to hammer. In this view, understanding is not a narrowly cognitive
phenomenon but refers primarily to understanding one’s possibilities in
the world. This involves a sense of being able to navigate in “moral space”
(Taylor, 1989, pp. 27–28)—in a space of possibilities shaped by the narra-
tive webs in which we are entangled.
As we saw in Chapter 2, Taylor believes that in order to experience one’s
life as worthwhile, one needs to weave “a life story” that takes up one’s
whole life as “a meaningful unity” (p. 51). On the basis of similar reason-
ing, MacIntyre and Ricoeur suggest that narrative self-interpretation is the
condition of possibility for making sense of one’s life as a meaningful con-
tinuum for which one can take responsibility: “How, indeed, could a subject
of action give an ethical character to his or her own life taken as a whole, if
this life were not gathered together in some way, and how could this occur
if not, precisely, in the form of a narrative?” (Ricoeur, 1992, p. 158).10 In
another passage, Ricoeur identifies “a life examined, in the sense borrowed
from Socrates” with “a life narrated” (1991b, p. 435), and suggests that only
when we do not see our lives as a mere series of perceptions and events
happening to us is it possible to posit ourselves as the responsible sub-
jects of our lives. In such passages, he seems to imply that narrative self-
reflection almost automatically makes lives more responsible. MacIntyre’s
version of this argument is even more problematic: for him, accountability

requires “the unity of a narrative embodied in a single life,” and, allegedly,
“the only criteria for success or failure in a human life as a whole are the
criteria of success or failure in a narrated or to-be-narrated quest” (1984,
pp. 218–219).
However, there is abundant evidence to indicate that a strong narra-
tive identity is no guarantee of self-responsibility. The Nazis had an excep-
tionally strong narrative identity as Aryans with a special world-historical
mission, and it could be argued that their project of building their myth-
ical identity involved a form of narrative self-reflection—as part of their
conscious effort to build a narrative identity that would legitimize their
actions. As Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann analyze, Nazism also
exemplifies the way in which narrative identities become reified when they
are perceived as an “inevitable fate, for which the individual may disclaim
responsibility” (1987, p. 108).
However, although narrative self-reflection is not a sufficient condition
for taking responsibility for one’s actions, it may be a necessary condition.
It is fairly uncontroversial to suggest that narrative self-reflection is often
an avenue to richer self-understanding, although there are philosophers—
like Strawson (2004)—who would deny even this. Arguably, we always
already have some kind of implicit narrative understanding—hermeneutic
pre-understanding—of our lives in relation to those of others. For exam-
ple, one thinks of oneself as the kind of person who acts in a certain way in
certain social situations: our self-narratives include elements linked to cul-
tural narrative scripts such as those of a “devoted mother,” a “loyal friend,”
a “social phobic,” and so on. Our narrative self-understanding has direct
ethical consequences: it shapes how we act in the world. As we act, we
always already interpret (mostly automatically, without being aware of it)
cultural narrative models that are ingrained in our narrative unconscious
and that shape how we make sense of our lives.
In other words, we have always already understood in some—better or
worse—way how the events of our lives are narratively connected or dis-
connected. This understanding is mainly tacit, but it undergirds our actions.
As Georgia Warnke articulates from the perspective of Gadamerian herme-
neutics, we are “thrown” into a “set of stories that we did not start and
cannot finish, but which we must continue in one way or another,” and
so we are always already involved in the “practical task” of interpreting in
what kinds of stories we are entangled “so that we know how to go on”
(2002, pp. 79–80). To engage self-reflectively with our implicit understand-
ing of the stories that we have (largely unknowingly) woven of our lives in
a dialogical relation to cultural narratives that we may be unconsciously
re-enacting is to bring to the level of consciousness what would otherwise
01
affect us “behind our backs.”11 Such consciousness can amplify our narra-
tive agency.
Narrative self-reflection has emancipatory significance insofar as it helps
us engage critically with our narrative unconscious, that is, with the cul-
tural narrative models that regulate how we understand ourselves and oth-
ers. When Freeman refers with narrative unconscious to those “aspects
of one’s history that remain uncharted and that, consequently, have yet
to be incorporated into one’s story” (2010, p. 96), he seems to imply that
such integration, through which one sees one’s own life in the context of a
longer history, is a positive enlargement of “one’s story.” However, it is also
important to acknowledge that it is largely through the narrative uncon-
scious that social prejudices affect us and that we participate in perpetuat-
ing structures of violence without being aware of it (for example, through
narratives that legitimize the exploitation of animals or precarious subjects,
perpetuating First World privilege). Narrative self-reflection is a means of
becoming aware of problematic aspects of the narrative webs in which we
are entangled. It is a matter of not just integrating such aspects of the tradi-
tion into our “story,” but also of critically engaging with them and exploring
possibilities of resistance to and emancipation from them. Critical engage-
ment with the narrative unconscious can expand our narrative imagination
and help us find new modes of experience, thought, and action.
There are two main forms that narrative self-reflection can take: telling our
own stories and engaging with stories told by others.
First, narrative self-reflection can take place through telling one’s own
stories to others or to oneself—for example, when we reflect on our expe-
riences by writing them down in a diary, or by sharing them with friends
over dinner or in social media. As Brockmeier puts it, we engage in “cul-
turally offered options of autobiographical self-explorations because we
live in a world suffused with the assumption that we have to establish our
autobiographical identity because we do not already know who we are”
(2015, p. 192). People have always shared their experiences through story-
telling, but since the beginning of the modern age, storytelling has become
entwined with the task of making sense of who we are—constructing an
identity through narrative self-reflection.12
In weaving our experiences into stories, we make sense of them by link-
ing them together into a meaningful account, by placing them within the
context of our lives, the lives of others, and broader historical and cultural
developments, depending on the type of narrative self-reflection that we
engage in. As Freeman puts it, the “taking-stock” type of recollection is
a form of “narrative reflection” that performs important “developmental

work” that is at the same time “ethical work, oriented toward . . . how one
ought to live” (2014a, p. 16). When we make sense of our moral responses
and reflect on our moral bearings—for example, in terms of what we con-
sider important and valuable in life—this requires narrative self-reflection,
which entails a sense of where we are coming from and where we are head-
ing: “as I project my life forward and endorse the existing direction or give
it a new one, I project a future story” (Taylor, 1989, p. 48).
As Brockmeier reminds us, the autobiographical process takes shape
in our ongoing interactions with other people—not only in moments of
introspection and “taking-stock” but through embodied “interactional nar-
rative performances” in which the “action of telling short and often frag-
mented stories . . . gives space to manifold forms of social presentations
and enactments of one’s identity” (2015, pp. 179, 182). However, everyday
narrative interaction is both informed by and informs “larger identities,”
and ultimately there is no clear line of division separating “small stories”
from “big stories.”13 Most of our narrative interaction is characterized by
the interplay between the two.
Life-writing and autobiographical storytelling in its various forms are
not only about self-understanding in the sense of discovering who one is;
they are interpretative, performative activities that make it possible for us
to become more than we are now, to increase our being, and to fulfill our
potential. As Andreea Ritivoi puts it, first-person storytelling empowers
“the individual, because it affords her the ability to control her identity—
by choosing strategically which events get recounted and how—through
the story she tells” (2009, p. 27). Telling our own story is a way of being the
protagonist, the one whose voice is heard and whose experience matters.
Drawing on this insight, narrative therapy treats narrative as a tool that
“people utilize to formulate what is good for them in life and also to achieve
a greater agentic control of their lives” (Vassilieva, 2016, p. 176).
Narrative interaction is also connected to self-esteem and the ability to
value oneself. This developmental dimension of storytelling is evident in
children. Research suggests that families who are more elaborative in con-
tributing to narratively exchanging perspectives, emotional responses, and
views have children with higher self-esteem (Reese, Bird & Tripp, 2007;
Bohanek et al., 2009). Lindemann analyzes how children acquire moral
agency by developing a narratively constituted “self- conception” that
involves awareness of “what their actions say to others about who they
are” (2014, pp. 92–93):
They have to become storytellers. . . . They have to try on the moral values and
attitudes they are taught and come either to question them or to claim them as
02
1
fully their own. They have to act out of their sense of who they are and become
aware that others will identify them by how they act. (p. 93)
But this developmental perspective does not apply merely to childhood and
adolescence. Throughout our lives, we develop as storytellers, in connec-
tion to our broader personal development—including our development as
participants in ethical life. It is in this temporal process that our narra-
tive ethical identity—our shifting narrative sense of who we are as moral
agents—takes shape. Such development can never become “completed,”
because one’s sense of self is linked to understanding one’s historical
world and the narrative webs in which one’s life is enmeshed. We are impli-
cated in what is going on in the world around us, including its structures
of inequality, injustice, and violence, and narrative self-reflection can be a
means of understanding the complexity of our responsibility as implicated
subjects. Such self-reflection is also a dimension of our everyday ongoing
storytelling practices in which our big stories take shape through small sto-
ries that we exchange with family and friends.
Telling small stories in social media, for example, functions as a mode
of social interaction that serves, among other purposes, the negotiation of
our place in what is happening in the world around us, and sometimes it
also happens that we understand something about ourselves when we for-
mulate social media posts. Although I am not an active social media user,
I do occasionally write Facebook posts, and on the day I heard that the vote
to leave the European Union had won the UK referendum, I expressed my
first reaction in the following update: “Oh England, feeling like I’ve lost a
loved one.” I was unable to make a sharp political analysis of the mean-
ing of “Brexit,” but I felt devastated, and somehow almost betrayed. When
I wrote the post, I realized how my experience of disappointment, loss, and
grief was linked to my narrative sense of self. Layers of that experience
brought back memories of the time I lived, as an eight-year-old, in England
with my family for a year—a year I have always looked back on as the most
exciting, memorable, and perhaps happiest of my childhood, as the year of
our great family adventure. That year, not only did a whole new world open
up for me, but I became aware that “the world” was in fact made up of an
infinite number of worlds. I kept in touch with the British girl who was my
best friend at the time, and as a 15-year-old I told my parents that I was
going to go and live with her family for half a year. Her parents welcomed
me as their fifth child, and every morning at breakfast I looked at the map
of the European Communities on their kitchen wall, the United Kingdom
at the center and Finland cut off the map, hoping that one day the Finns
and the British would be building a shared European community.

As the shock of the referendum result hit me, and maps were to be
redrawn again, I was unable to say exactly what I had lost; I could only
formulate a sentimental statement about losing “England,” but what I had
actually lost, I suppose, was my idea of a multicultural, welcoming coun-
try that I had experienced—and, undoubtedly, romanticized—during my
formative years, an idea that was integral to my perception of Europe, and
an idea that I lost even more irrevocably after the post-referendum xeno-
phobic attacks in Britain against EU citizens (including Finns). I realized
how important my unarticulated sense of having a connection to Britain
as part of Europe was for my narrative identity as a European, and not just
as a contingent autobiographical connection, but as a connection through
the common European project. That aspect of my identity made it feel vital,
at the moment of the catastrophe, that social media made salient—and
contributed to—the affective connection and sense of solidarity between
people across Europe (including the British who wanted to remain in the
EU) and beyond Europe (such as the United States), who were not willing
to give up on the European project as a project of peace, human rights,
and solidarity. Similarly, being part of the Women’s March, the worldwide
anti-Trump protest on January 21, 2017, streamed online in social media,
felt like a huge source of hope—as the beginning of a new global resist-
ance movement—at a time when I was struggling with anxiety and frustra-
tion over Trump’s politics, like millions of other women and men around
the world.14 My point here is simply that, like all forms of life-writing, the
exchange of experiences and story fragments in social media, no matter
how trivial or mundane, also involves an aspect of narrative self-reflection
in which at stake are our values, what we care for, and what we identify
with—as well as a negotiation of our implicatedness in histories in which
we are entangled.
Second, narrative self-reflection and self-transformation can take place

through engagement with literary and other cultural narratives. We reflect
on our lives in relation to the narratives we hear and read. The dynamic of
the triple hermeneutic (discussed in Chapter 2) is at play as we reinterpret
or refigure our self-interpretations in dialogic encounters with literary and
other cultural narratives.
Gadamer emphasizes that it is precisely through the encounter of the
other that we can become aware of our own preconceptions, and this is cen-
tral to how literature and the other arts contribute to self-understanding:
Our experience of the aesthetic too is a mode of self-understanding. Self-

understanding always occurs through understanding something other than the
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self. . . . Since we meet the artwork in the world and encounter a world in the
individual artwork, the work of art is not some alien universe into which we are
magically transported for a time. Rather, we learn to understand ourselves in
and through it. . . . (1997, p. 97)
Narrative self-reflection based on such encounters can provide us with

richer hermeneutic resources for understanding our experiences, responses,
fears, and desires, as well as the narrative webs in which we are implicated.
From a hermeneutic perspective, the other that we encounter in reading a
literary narrative is not only a psychologically understood character with
whom we would identify as with another human being. Instead, we engage
with the otherness of the entire world projected by the literary text, its
modes of experience, its overall vision, and the possibilities it opens up.
As Ricoeur puts it, narrative fiction proposes to “the reader a vision of the
world that is never ethically neutral” (1988, p. 249).
Felski (2008) deals with the capacity of literature to promote self-
understanding under the rubric of “recognition.” The cognitive and the
affective are intertwined in this experience, which is shaped by gaining new
perspectives on aspects of oneself:
Something that may have been sensed in a vague, diffuse, or semi-conscious way
now takes on a distinct shape, is amplified, heightened, or made newly visible. In
a mobile interplay of exteriority and interiority, something that exists outside
of me inspires a revised or altered sense of who I am. (p. 25)
Felski considers recognition as an important form of identification, which

should not be seen merely in terms of empathizing with characters: iden-
tification as recognition can take place “at the level of the text’s over-all
project.”15 Acknowledging this allows us to analyze ways in which we can
identify with literary works that we admire for their narrative complexity
and intellectual design, for example, even when we find their characters
problematic.
When philosophers and psychologists discuss the ethical significance of
narrative fiction, they sometimes deal with literary characters almost as if
they were real-life people. Such an (Nussbaumian) approach seems particu-
larly problematic in much of the experimental literature that rejects realist
ideology, such as the works of Kafka, Woolf, or Beckett. In such works, the
way we encounter the vision of the world proposed by the work as a whole
is more important than our identification with the characters. In modern-
ist and contemporary fiction, it is often an alienating vision that provides
us with a fresh angle on our own world. It is in terms of such a vision of

the world that Gadamer and Ricoeur deal with the ethical dimension of
literary works. In this respect, their thinking has important points of con-
tact with that of Jacques Derrida (1992, p. 170), who refers to the “non-
psychological structure” of literature, noting how essential to the freedom
of imagination—which is at the core of the literary institution—is its way
of suspending the real and exploring the limits of what can be said and
thought. In a similar vein, Ricoeur argues that hermeneutics “depsychol-
ogizes” literary interpretation by understanding it as a process of appre-
hending a “possibility of being” explored by the text (1991a, p. 66). Yet, as
I argue throughout this book, the power of narrative fiction to expand our
sense of the possible is also highly relevant to the psychological dimension
of human existence in the broad sense, including issues such as narrative
identity, agency, and imagination.
Narrative hermeneutics draws attention to the power of literary nar-
rative to disclose reality in a particular way. For Gadamer and Ricoeur, it
achieves this by opening up a world of its own—a world characterized by
“the dimension of the possible” (Gadamer, 1993a, p. 478). Ricoeur (1976,
p. 88; 1991b, pp. 489–490) writes about the literary world as a possible
world that sheds a particular light on our actual world. The world created by
the artwork is not subordinate to the actual world, but possesses “an ‘onto-
logical’ autonomy” (Gadamer, 1993b, p. 257). The artwork discloses things
in such a way that “something new comes into existence”: it is “a thrust
that overthrows everything previously given and conventional, a thrust in
which a world never there before opens itself up” (Gadamer, 1994, pp. 104–
105). Ricoeur describes this in terms of the text’s own intentionality:
[T]‌he intended meaning of the text is not essentially the presumed intention
of the author, the lived experience of the writer. . . . The text seeks to place us
in its meaning, that is—according to another acceptation of the word sens—in
the same direction. So if the intention is that of the text, and if this intention
is the direction that it opens for thought . . . to interpret is to follow the path of
thought opened up by the text. . . . (1991a, pp. 121–122)
Such new directions of thought—and beyond that, new possibilities of

being, experiencing, and acting—may be triggered by the readers’ experi-
ences of wonder, recognition, curiosity, shock, perplexity, unsettlement,
enchantment, and awe, as they engage with the world proposed by the
text.16 While Heidegger (1977a, pp. 26–27) stresses that the work belongs
to a certain historical world—which it opens up and grounds—so that
the perishing of this world renders the artwork “worldless” and reduces
the work to the status of a mere object, Gadamer (1993a, pp. 5–6; 1997,
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p. 473) and Ricoeur (1988, p. 159) emphasize the ability of literary works
to address ever new generations and how their meanings take shape in the
encounters between the works’ and the readers’ worlds.
Randall and McKim suggest that reading good literature makes us bet-
ter readers of our own lives and allows us to imaginatively develop them
into “quasi-literary works” (2008, p. viii). Although I have reservations
about this analogy (see Chapter 2), I do share their view that narrative
fiction has the potential to make invaluable contributions to narrative
self-understanding. Literary narratives can amplify our narrative agency
and the degree of co-authorship we have in our lives, helping us move
from being enslaved by the blind perpetuation of the dominant narrative
unconscious toward greater agentic power and a richer narrative ethical
identity. This contribution concerns not only our ongoing performance
of identities and how narratives can provoke ethically valuable self-trans-
formation and self-exploration, it also concerns cultural self-understand-
ing and the power of narratives to provide new hermeneutic resources
for addressing our indirect and collective responsibility for what is hap-
pening in the world around us. For example, by providing alternative
perspectives on the refugee crisis, Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen
demonstrates how literature can participate in shaping cultural self-
understanding at times of social change, as do the narratives discussed in
the subsequent chapters.
But it is also clear that not all narratives provide us with ethically valu-
able tools for self-reflection. Excessive use of narrative in news journalism,
for example, can impede understanding, rather than enhance it, by focusing
on the moving stories of individuals at the expense of multi-faceted analy-
ses of complicated social issues. The fixation on the conventional narrative
model that involves a central subject of experience and a linear plot that
ends in closure may hinder the understanding of complex phenomena—
such as climate change—that have no single agent and/or involve a time
span that fits uneasily with traditional human-scale, experientially-driven
storytelling. We should also acknowledge, more broadly, that not all self-
reflection leads to ethical action or makes us better persons. There is no
guarantee even that deep self-understanding is necessarily linked to eth-
ical action.17 One can be deeply self-reflective and deeply immoral at the
same time.
In ethically evaluating narratives, we should be aware of the full spec-
trum from storytelling practices that impede or block personal or cultural
self-understanding to complex and nuanced narratives that enhance such
self-understanding. We can find examples of the former in women’s mag-
azines that reinforce forms of self-deception and self-delusion through

narratives that link certain looks to promises of happiness, “fake news”
that intentionally mislead and deceive people for propagandistic purposes,
or heroic nationalist narratives that perpetuate a one-sided and harmful
national mythology. Ethically complex narratives, in turn, can show the
transformative potential of narrative self-reflection when it succeeds in
giving rise to moments of insight and recognition.
A NON-S UBSUMPTIVE MODE OF UNDERSTANDING OTHERS
One of the issues on which scholars fiercely disagree is whether or not nar-
ratives enable an ethical mode of understanding others. It is one of the
key arguments of critics of storytelling that narrative is a violent form of
appropriation. This view is particularly prevalent in the Levinasian strand
of ethical criticism and in various forms of poststructuralist thought.
Arendtian approaches to narrative, in contrast, suggest that precisely sto-
rytelling allows us to avoid appropriation of the other. I argue that under-
lying these divergent approaches are drastically different conceptions of
understanding and knowledge, which can be best understood in terms of
the difference between subsumptive and non-subsumptive conceptions of
(narrative) understanding.
It has become a widely shared premise of contemporary narrative stud-
ies that narrative is a mode of understanding. Even etymology suggests
this: the Latin for narrating, narrare, derives from gnarus, which means
“having knowledge of a thing.” Storytelling has come to be viewed as “a
basic human strategy for coming to terms with time, process, and change”
(Herman, Jahn & Ryan, 2005, p. ix). Narrative as a sense-making practice
is based on relating something new and singular, an event or experience,
to something familiar that gives it a meaningful context. This activity of
relating and drawing connections is integral to storytelling as a mode of
understanding. If understanding per se is ethically problematic, the same
applies to narrative understanding.
But is understanding always violent, as Levinasian and poststructural-
ist critics suggest? An affirmative answer is connected to what can be called
a subsumption model of understanding. Such a model has dominated the
Western history of philosophy and, essentially, it envisages understanding in
terms of conceptual appropriation. For example, in the Cartesian tradition,
understanding is seen as the capacity to form clear and distinct ideas, and the
process of perception is not considered to alter the basic concepts, the innate
ideas of the mind that regulate understanding. Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der
reinen Vernunft (1781, Critique of Pure Reason, 1998) is also dominated by the
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idea of understanding as a process of organizing sense-perceptions according

to general, atemporal categories. Notwithstanding their differences, most
conceptions of understanding see it as an event in which something singu-
lar (what is to be understood) is subsumed under a general concept, law, or
model. Apparently it has gone largely unnoticed that in fact most of the post-
structuralist and other “antifoundationalist” critiques of understanding also
depend on the subsumption model when they argue not only that all under-
standing de facto lacks a solid foundation, but also that the very attempt to
understand is ethically suspicious. Such a critique of understanding can be
traced from Nietzsche to contemporary French philosophy.
Many twentieth-century philosophers who reject understanding as a
form of conceptual appropriation owe a great debt to Nietzsche and his con-
ception of language as inherently violent. Nietzsche argues that the violence
of concepts follows from their manner of masking the differences between
singular things: “Every concept comes into being by making equivalent that
which is non-equivalent” (2001, p. 145). He uses as an example the leaves
of a tree: all of them are different, but the concept of a leaf homogenizes
them and makes us forget their differences. From this perspective, it makes
sense that Nietzsche declares: “There is something insulting in being under-
stood. . . . Understanding is equalizing” (1999a, p. 51).18
This Nietzschean tradition fuels twentieth-century antinarrativism and
is an important context for making sense of such statements as Claude
Lanzmann’s view of the “obscenity of understanding” (1995, p. 200) or
Barthes’s statement that language “is quite simply fascist” (1982b, p. 461).
The most influential figure, however, in making the violence of under-
standing a key starting point for a new ethical sensibility was Levinas. He
rejected narrative as an ethically questionable mode of appropriation that
attempts to subsume the other into a coherent system of representation.
Levinas (1998, pp. 138–139) presents narrative as what turns temporal
beings into fixed, frozen images “assembled in a tale” that lends an air of
inevitability to the events recounted. Ultimately, his critique of narrative
depends on his view of understanding as violent appropriation:
In the word “comprehension” we understand the fact of taking [prendre] and of

comprehending [comprendre], that is, the fact of englobing, of appropriating.
There are these elements in all knowledge [savoir], all familiarity [connaissance],
all comprehension; there is always the fact of making something one’s own.
(1988, p. 170)
On similar grounds, Derrida suggests that language as such, due to its

universality, is inherently violent: what he calls “the originary violence of

language” (or arche-violence) is the act of classifying and naming, of inscrib-
ing “the unique within the system” (1997, p. 112).19 Derrida (1978, p. 91)
cites with approval Levinas’s Nietzschean assertion: “To possess, to know,
to grasp are all synonyms of power.” Against the violence of language and
knowledge, many postwar thinkers endeavored to develop a mode of think-
ing in which the experience of the unintelligible is valorized as an ethical
experience that fosters openness to the unknown.20
This tradition of thought posits understanding and knowledge as its vio-
lent other, as what is to be opposed and resisted. Such critique of understand-
ing has been valuable, particularly in drawing attention to how systems of
knowledge are linked to mechanisms of power, although apparently this
critique has mainly still not pervaded mainstream analytic philosophy.
Velleman (2003), for example, follows the subsumption model in arguing that
the explanatory force of narrative is based on how it allows us to assimilate
the narrated events to familiar affective patterns—apparently considering the
assimilation completely ethically unproblematic. On the other hand, the post-
structuralist critique of understanding has gone too far: it is simplistic and
reductionist to reject all attempts at understanding as inherently violent.21 In
fact, sometimes dismissing the possibility of ethical understanding can itself
be violent in ruling out or foreclosing the possibility of genuine dialogue.
I argue that insufficient attention has been paid both to how the cri-
tique of (narrative) understanding relies on the subsumption model and
to the alternatives of this model. It is primarily the phenomenological-
hermeneutic tradition that provides a valuable alternative to the subsump-
tive model by stressing the fundamental temporality of understanding.22
This tradition argues that the structure of a hermeneutic circle character-
izes all understanding, as we always understand something new in rela-
tion to our earlier conceptions, and the new, in turn, can challenge our
preconceptions. A dialectic of the general and the particular characterizes
the dynamic of the hermeneutic circle. When something is understood
as something, it is structured according to certain concepts, but at the
same time, the event of understanding leaves a mark on these concepts
and reshapes them. Understanding is successful only when the concepts
are transformed so that they do justice to whatever is being understood.
From a hermeneutic perspective, such events of understanding are possi-
ble because knowledge and language are not fixed, atemporal systems, but
only exist in the temporal process of being used. Gadamer stresses that
concepts are in a state of transformation whenever they are used:
[I]‌t is obvious that speaking cannot be thought of as the combination of these

acts of subsumption, through which something particular is subordinated to a
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general concept. A person who speaks . . . is so oriented toward the particularity

of what he is perceiving that everything he says acquires a share in the particu-
larity of the circumstances he is considering. . . . [T]he general concept meant by
the word is enriched by any given perception of a thing, so that what emerges is
a new, more specific word formation which does more justice to the particularity
of that act of perception. (1997, pp. 428–429)
In addition to this “constant process of concept formation” (p. 429),

Gadamer writes about understanding in a more radical sense: according to
him, genuine understanding only occurs through encountering the other,
that is, something so unassimilable that it requires us to transform our
preconceptions. He characterizes this as the negativity of understanding:
we properly understand only when we realize that things are not what we
thought they were (1997, pp. 353–361). As a result of this structure of neg-
ativity, the hermeneutic non-subsumptive model is radically opposed to the
subsumption model of understanding. Instead of subsuming the singular
under general concepts, in genuine understanding the singular has power to
transform the general.
Derrida’s thinking, for example, takes place within the subsumption
model when he suggests that language eliminates all singularity of things
and persons and thereby strips us of our freedom and responsibility: “By
suspending my absolute singularity in speaking, I renounce at the same
time my liberty and my responsibility. Once I speak I am never and no
longer myself, alone and unique” (1995b, p. 60). Despite his utopian dream
of liberation from the violent chains of language, however, he is fully aware
of its impossibility.23
From the perspective of the non-subsumptive model, in contrast, lan-
guage and the process of understanding are always already infused with
the unfamiliar, strange, and other: instead of being closed, fixed vehicles
of appropriation, concepts are in a process of becoming. As Gadamer puts
it, “everywhere that communication happens, language not only is used
but is shaped as well” (2001, p. 4). Gadamer does not adequately acknowl-
edge, however, that there are ethically crucial differences in the extent to
and ways in which concepts are transformed in the process of understand-
ing. In order to acknowledge these differences, it is useful to distinguish,
within the non-subsumptive model, between the structural dimension
of non-subsumption in all language-usage and a more radical sense of
non-subsumption, in which understanding is animated by a specific non-
subsumptive ethos, linked to openness to alterity. This non-subsumptive
model alerts us to acknowledge both that language and understanding can
be violent, but they are not necessarily, structurally violent, and that there

is a continuum from violent, appropriative, subsumptive sense-making
practices to ones that are affirmatively dialogical and non-subsumptive by
being open to the unassimilable otherness of the encountered experiences
or persons.
This has important implications for storytelling as a form of under-
standing. Narrative hermeneutics rejects the subsumption model of narra-
tive and provides a theoretical grounding for an ethics of storytelling that
takes into account how narrative understanding in itself is neither good
nor evil. It allows us to acknowledge that not all narratives produce totaliz-
ing explanations, or reinforce violent practices of appropriation: storytell-
ing is a temporal process that has the potential to transform our conceptual
frameworks, even if this potential often remains unrealized.
The belief in the possibility of non-subsumptive understanding under-
lies the view that storytelling can function as an ethical mode of under-
standing and dignifying the lives of others in their singularity (even if this
link is rarely articulated). It can be seen to undergird, for example, Arendt’s
contention that only storytelling allows us to acknowledge the lives of oth-
ers as significant and unique without trying to appropriate them through
abstract conceptual schemes. Acting in the world in relation to other peo-
ple is the way we reveal our uniqueness to others; while conceptual defini-
tions reduce the unique “who” to a “what,” Arendt suggests that a story in
which the “who” is presented as acting in the world can give expression to
the unique, unexchangeable “who” revealed in that action (1998, pp. 180–
181). Cavarero (2000, pp. 36–45) links the desire for narrative to this idea;
it is a desire to hear others tell stories of us in ways that give us a unique
identity and make our lives more than mere empirical existences.
Arendt and Cavarero suggest that each individual is unique in being able
to give birth to the unpredictable; we are unique in our capacity to initiate
something new as we act in the world in relation to others. In their account,
it is precisely stories that can convey this uniqueness. The key to why they
do not see narrative per se as ethically harmful is their conviction that nar-
ratives allow us to give meaning to things, events, and persons without
confining them to a definition. In this respect, their conception of narra-
tive is diametrically opposed to Levinas’s view of narrative as a violent,
appropriative form of defining the essences of things and persons (1991,
p. 42). According to Arendt, “storytelling reveals meaning without com-
mitting the error of defining it” (1968b, p. 105). In this view, narratives are
capable of presenting the temporal, individual subject acting in the world
in concrete, complex situations—in a process of becoming—rather than
as appropriated and perceived in atemporal, conceptual, abstract terms.
The idea that something is “worth telling” is also pivotal to the Arendtian
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conception of narrative. The notion that to have one’s story told is integral
to human dignity has become a key idea in various emancipatory move-
ments, which have insisted that such marginalized and silenced groups as
women and the colonized need to have their stories told and heard.24
I do not disagree with the Arendtian view that narratives can have eth-
ical potential in presenting subjects of action in the temporal process of
acting and becoming, and in giving more reality, as it were, to lives that
have been ill understood or silenced and that would otherwise vanish into
oblivion. However, it is also important to acknowledge that narratives
often have the opposite effect: they can be violent, oppressive, manipula-
tive means of appropriation that legitimate structures of violence through
strategies of naturalization.
I suggest that in evaluating and analyzing narratives in ethical terms, it
is helpful to distinguish, on a differentiating continuum, between subsump-
tive narrative practices that function appropriatively and reinforce cultural
stereotypes by subsuming singular experiences under culturally dominant
narrative scripts and non-subsumptive narrative practices that challenge
such categories of appropriation and follow the logic of dialogue and explo-
ration. This continuum must be qualified by remembering that subsump-
tive narrative practices can never be subsumptive in an absolute sense
because they take place in time and always include the possibility that the
act of subsumption leaves a mark on and changes the categories (e.g., nar-
rative models or scripts) that are used subsumptively. There is, however, an
ethically decisive difference between narratives that aim at subsumptive
appropriation and ones that are oriented toward non-subsumptive dialogic
understanding. I use the notions of subsumptive and non-subsumptive
narrative practices as a shorthand for explicating this difference. This dis-
tinction is not meant as a binary, but as a heuristic tool that helps us place
specific cases of storytelling on the continuum.
Narrative practices function subsumptively when they simply reinforce
problematic stereotypical sense-making practices. Such practices tend to
hinder our ability to encounter other people in their uniqueness and per-
petuate the tendency to see individuals as representatives of the groups to
which they belong according to gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age,
class, and so on. They frequently use what Fricker calls “identity power”
(2007, pp. 14–17) by reinforcing “negative identity-prejudicial” stereotypes,
which entail a “widely held disparaging association between a social group
and one or more attributes, where this association embodies a generaliza-
tion that displays . . . resistance to counter-evidence owing to an ethically bad
affective investment” (p. 35). Non-subsumptive narrative practices, in con-
trast, problematize simplistic categorization of experiences, persons, and

relationships, as well as control-oriented appropriation of what is unfamil-
iar, foreign, and other. They can function as counter-narratives that con-
sciously challenge stereotype-reinforcing hegemonic narrative practices.
Such counter-narratives provide us with tools to see the singularity of indi-
vidual lives beyond generalizing, subsumptive narratives.
To take an example from the realm of discourses of memory, there is
a continuum, as Rothberg (2011) shows, from practices of comparison in
which different legacies of violence (such as those of the Holocaust, slavery,
and colonialism) are equated with one another, to comparisons that are
sensitive to their differences. In terms of my model, equating discourses
exemplify the logic of subsumption, whereas differentiating discourses
function non-subsumptively. As Rothberg shows, equation and differ-
entiation can be combined with various political affects, on a continuum
from solidarity to aggressive competition. He argues that the “memory
discourses expressing a differentiated solidarity offer a greater political
potential” than those following the “logic of equation” (p. 526). I would
call this greater ethical potential, though, because presumably the political
potential depends on one’s political stance (apparently, Trump’s subsump-
tive “America first” narrative has had great political potential for the sup-
porters of his political worldview).
Although non-subsumptive narrative practices can be linked to vari-
ous political affects, particularly insofar as they are animated by a non-
subsumptive ethos of dialogue they are likely to foster solidarity and
empathy based on respect of otherness. Such practices are based on recep-
tivity to what is other and what challenges one’s beliefs. I will discuss non-
subsumptive dialogic storytelling and the dialogic ethos in more detail in
the following chapters. As I hope to show, our engagement with differ-
ent narrative strategies is ethically relevant: while subsumptive narrative
practices frequently use naturalizing strategies to mask their own nature
as interpretations and manipulate the recipients by taking on an author-
itative tone, the non-subsumptive ones are more likely to include a self-
reflexive dimension that involves reflection on their limits and fosters an
ethos of openness to the unknown.25
The non-subsumptive model has implications not only for narrative stud-
ies, but also for trauma studies, which is concerned both with the other-
ness of the other’s trauma and the otherness within (one’s own trauma
that does not feel part of one’s life), as well as for narrative therapy. It
has become a basic tenet of contemporary trauma studies that due to its
structure of “inherent latency” or belatedness, “the traumatic event is not
experienced as it occurs,” but returns to haunt the subject of experience
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through “repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors

stemming from the event” (Caruth, 1995, pp. 4, 8). Many thinkers, how-
ever, have questioned Cathy Caruth’s event-centered approach to trauma
and have emphasized the structural violence and everyday processes of
victimization that do not involve a single traumatic event.26 The everyday
experiences of millions of people in adverse conditions involve a traumatiz-
ing dimension that keeps them from flourishing. But even when traumatic
experience is so terribly painful that it resists assimilation and integration
into one’s narrative self-understanding, one can legitimately ask, is it not
an experience all the same? Such a traumatic experience marks a rupture;
it challenges one’s previous views and identity: it is a “breach in the mind’s
experience of time, self, and the world” (Caruth, 1996, p. 4). But if we say
that trauma is not experienced, this seems to rest on the assumption that
experience is something quite unproblematic, a point-like event that hap-
pens here and now to a fully conscious subject of experience. In contrast,
if we understand experience as something that is without clear temporal
boundaries, as pervaded by both the past and the future, as something that
we go through as embodied beings, as only partly accessible to conscious-
ness, and as something that is constantly reinterpreted as it becomes part
of new constellations of experience, it makes less sense to say that trauma
is not experienced, or that narrative interpretation necessarily distorts
traumatic experience.
Poststructuralistically oriented trauma theorists not only suggest that
trauma is de facto inassimilable to narrative understanding, but also that
narrative form in itself is ethically problematic in its attempt to make sense
of traumatic experience. This is because the act of storytelling is taken to
reduce an irrevocably singular event into an account that appropriates it by
giving it a general meaning or explanation. Caruth, for example, repeatedly
suggests that narrating implies forgetting the singularity of the narrated
event and that narrating is problematic as it subsumes the singular under
the general: allegedly, it implies “forgetting of the singularity” (1996, p. 32)
of experiences, events, or persons (such as the singularity of the death
of the French woman’s lover in Caruth’s analysis of Duras and Resnais’s
Hiroshima mon amour). Caruth locates the ethical potential of storytelling
in the “movement of her not knowing within the very language of her tell-
ing” (p. 37) and in “the interruption of understanding” (p. 42). Underlying
Caruth’s argumentation, like that of many other critics of narrative, is
the idea that storytelling is ethically problematic precisely insofar as it is
a form of understanding (and that it can be ethical insofar as it disrupts
understanding).

Traumatic experiences resist integration due to the inadequacy of our
earlier understanding in the face of an unbearably painful experience.
While the subsumptive model of narrative presents storytelling as a way of
assimilating new experiences into a pregiven mold, a traumatic experience
can be so shocking that it cannot be appropriated into pregiven narrative
schemes or scripts. From the perspective of narrative hermeneutics, how-
ever, narratives function as a vehicle of genuine understanding precisely
when they do not concern the comfortable subsumption of new experi-
ences into what we already know, but rather when they involve a process
that entails change (of pregiven categories, values, identity). Such change,
in turn, is often painful and difficult. It is a temporal, two-way process
that involves both interpretation of new experiences and reinterpretation
of one’s narrative schemes. Dealing with traumatic experiences is there-
fore a process of both relating them to our earlier conceptual frameworks
and re-evaluating these frameworks—whereby our narrative understand-
ing can be profoundly transformed. Several trauma scholars have stressed
that trauma is a “self-altering” experience of violence, injury, or harm
(e.g., Gilmore, 2001, p. 6). If we take seriously the negativity that lies at
the heart of the hermeneutic conception of understanding, all genuine
understanding is self-altering in some sense; traumatic experience and the
process of dealing with it, however, is self-altering in a more radical sense
because it involves confronting a wounding or even paralyzing disruption
of understanding.
When the narrative working through of a traumatic experience is about
relating a terrifying singular event to one’s previous understanding, is this
action inevitably violent and ethically problematic? Making sense of a trau-
matic experience in narrative terms is a process of making a painful, dis-
tressing experience (partly) communicable and comprehensible by relating
it to something; without some such process of relating, it would hardly be
possible to think about the experience, let alone talk about it. Such a pro-
cess of relating can be necessary for survival, as Dori Laub suggests: “The
survivors did not only need to survive so that they could tell their stories;
they also needed to tell their stories in order to survive” (1995, p. 63). The
hermeneutic conception of the temporal and interpretative nature of com-
munication implies that communication is not just about applying general
meaning-systems; rather, it is a process that can involve learning some-
thing completely new that challenges our previous conceptions and identi-
ties. It is on the possibility of such communication that therapy is based: in
helping traumatized persons tell their own stories, successful therapy
depends on the practice of non-subsumptive understanding.27
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1
In the therapeutic context, it can be seen as a major ethical strength of

narrative therapy that it privileges the particularity of each person’s story
instead of subsumptively imposing narratives on lives. In evaluating the
ethical potential of different approaches to narrative psychology, Vassilieva
distinguishes between approaches that rely on “definitive pre-outlined eth-
ics brought from without” and those that strive to articulate “ethics from
within,” as part of the “narrative processes involved in constructing the
sense of identity and self” (2016, p. 181). The latter is what animates nar-
rative therapy, which seeks to “mobilize the intrinsic potential for ‘doing
ethics’ inherent in narrative itself” (p. 188) through a search “for the par-
ticular” and a commitment to “the irreducible singularity” (p. 174) of the
clients’ stories, thereby helping them develop a richer understanding of
“what they value in life” (p. 49).28 In working with the particularity of
individual experiences and challenges, this approach uses narrative as a
means to search for new perspectives on what is good and valuable in the
individual life.
As part of this non-subsumptive process, narrative therapy aims at
retelling the stories of unique individuals in ways that problematize cul-
turally dominant narratives and power structures.29 This aims at ampli-
fying their agency in ways that allow them to (partly) “re-author” their
lives and their relationships through narrative practices that function as
“counter-practices to cultural practices that are objectifying of persons and
their bodies” (White & Epston, 1990, p. 75). Objectification of persons is
another expression for their subsumptive, appropriative categorization.
Therapeutic processes that are agency-enhancing and dialogic in ways that
do justice to the singularity of each person’s experiences can be generally
evaluated to be more ethically sustainable than ones based on subsumptive
appropriation.
The same applies to narrative practices more broadly, in various contexts
of narrative interaction and communication also beyond the therapeutic
context. At their most powerful, dialogic storytelling practices animated
by a non-subsumptive ethos prompt us to look beyond our preconceptions,
to be open to what we cannot control, to learn from the unfamiliar, and
to engage with it with wonder, empathy, and curiosity. While at the ethi-
cally problematic end of the spectrum are monological subsumptive narra-
tive practices that seek to create an illusion of being the only right account
(thereby blocking our capacity to perceive the world from multiple perspec-
tives), at the ethically sustanaible end are dialogical non-subsumptive nar-
rative practices that lay bare their own constructedness, processuality, and
the movement of the telling rather than the told.

THE NARRATIVE IN-B ETWEEN
Narratives are not only a means of understanding the self and other; they
also function as practices of social interaction that perpetuate, create, and
transform intersubjective spaces and identities. Storytelling is a mode of
interaction that makes it possible to connect with other people, share expe-
riences, and establish new communities and modes of relationality. It cre-
ates, shapes, and perpetuates both ethically productive and problematic
narrative in-betweens.
Walter Benjamin, in “The Storyteller” (“Der Erzähler,” 1936), was among
the first to conceptualize storytelling in terms of exchanging experi-
ences: “Experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth is the source
from which all storytellers have drawn” (1999, p. 84). For Benjamin, how-
ever, the rise of the modern novel is a symptom of the crisis of the art
of storytelling, a crisis of the “communicability of experience” (p. 86) wit-
nessed by the modern age—a process he describes in terms of an increas-
ing difficulty to share experiences, in response to the dissolution of shared
worldviews rooted in traditions of oral storytelling, culminating in the
aftermath of the First World War.
Arendt (1998) and Cavarero (2000) draw on Benjamin’s ideas, but do
not share his belief in the end of the era of storytelling; they reject the
view that we could ever get rid of what they see as the basic human need
and desire for stories. They suggest that storytelling is a means of cre-
ating a shared intersubjective space, a “common world” (Arendt, 1998,
pp. 50–58) that “lies between people and therefore can relate and bind
them together” (p. 182); “for all its intangibility, this in-between is no
less real than the world of things we visibly have in common” (p. 183).
As Olivia Guaraldo puts it, Arendt’s and Cavarero’s philosophy envisages
“narrative as a relational practice, as a space building activity” (2013,
p. 78). Storytelling creates a relational space—a space of possibilities—
that allows us to become heard and visible as subjects of speech and
action. The narrative in-between shapes what is thinkable and sayable,
visible and audible, experienceable and doable within different subject
positions.
The affective dimension of sharing stories is crucial to their capacity to
create a sense of connection and community. Sharing experiences through
storytelling often allows us to make sense of them in ways that make
them bearable for us; such sharing can console, comfort, and empower us.
Arendt articulates how storytelling helps us bear the experience of being in
the world in all its different—both joyous and painful—aspects:
8
1
Who says what is . . . always tells a story, and in this story the particular facts
lose their contingency and acquire some humanly comprehensible meaning. It is
perfectly true that “all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell
a story about them,” in the words of Isak Dinesen. . . . She could have added that
joy and bliss, too, become bearable and meaningful for men only when they can
talk about them and tell them as a story. (1968a, pp. 261–262)
Our ancestors gathered around the fire to share their experiences; con-
temporary families share their stories at the dinner table (or in the sauna,
in the case of Finnish families). The desire to connect through stories is also
one important reason we read literature. We read not only to understand
ourselves and others, but also to connect and belong—both when we read
quietly and when we read aloud, for or with others. I still read every eve-
ning to my nine-year-old Alma and eleven-year-old Eliel. The bedtime read-
ing is not primarily a means of educating them, but a moment of shared
intimacy, a sharing of stories that feed into our dialogic narrative imagi-
nation and shape our narrative in-between, our shared stock of stories on
which we draw in our everyday sense-making activities. I recently read to
them one of my own childhood favorites, Michael Ende’s Momo (1973), in
which the Men in Grey steal time from adults, who then feel that they have
no time for fun: the more they “save” time, the less time they have. Only
the children are immune to this logic; they have all the time in the world,
and their power of imagination makes them best equipped to fight against
the time thieves. Ende’s narrative about time, storytelling, and the mean-
ing of life is now inspiring Alma and Eliel in their imaginative play, and if
I rush them, they ask me if I am a victim of the time thieves and volunteer
to rescue me. Momo’s story has shaped our narrative in-between, and it
has become part of Alma and Eliel’s shared “mythology,” which provides
them with narrative models of sense-making and mutual reference points.
Leo Tolstoy already argued that what is most distinctive of art is its way
of joining individuals together: art functions as a “means of human com-
munion” (1995, p. 40). In the contemporary world, literature and art in
general have lost much of their community-building force, but it remains
true, nevertheless, that shared affectivity and the weaving of intersubjec-
tive narrative fabrics are central to art. Literature and the other arts have
power not only to strengthen existing social bonds but also to envision new
social formations and relationships: in Ali Smith’s words, literature “allows
us not just to imagine an unreal different world but also a real different
world” (2013, p. 188). This is the utopian dimension of art: the possibilities
it opens up can feed into and shape reality.

The hermeneutic resources provided by literary narratives also enable
us to develop shared vocabularies for experiences that have been ill under-
stood or marginalized. Felski writes about a “flash of connection” that
“leaps across the gap between text and reader” as an “affinity or an attun-
ement is brought to light” (2008, p. 23). Inviting “identification-with” is an
important way in which literature creates a sense of connection. Such iden-
tifications are unpredictable—they often refuse to follow preconceived
patterns—and they can be local, concerning a narrative fragment rather
than the whole narrative. The identity labels imposed on us are unable to
fully determine our responses. As Felski puts it, “the affinities we feel with
fictional characters can play havoc with social classifications, as when we
identify across gender, race, class, or even, in certain fictional genres, spe-
cies.”30 Such identification across differences, particularly through narra-
tives that we are not socially encouraged to identify with, is one important
way in which fiction can expand our sense of the possible. Why we feel
that particular literary narratives speak to us is unpredictable—probably a
combination of interest, openness, and receptivity is required for a genuine
dialogic encounter to take place—but when such encounters happen, they
can lead to transformative “identifications-with” that create new narrative
in-betweens.
Oral testimonies in the sphere of political activism provide another
example of the ethical and political potential of sharing experiences and
connecting with others through storytelling. With the slogan “the per-
sonal is political,” second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s and the
wider human rights movement emphasized the importance of sharing
personal stories of oppression, and consciousness-raising groups aimed
to create an intersubjective space for such sharing (Albeck, Adwan & Bar-
On, 2002; Guaraldo, 2013). The empowering potential of storytelling is
evident in such political movements, and it has proved to be a power-
ful tool of emancipation. Interest in this empowering potential has also
shaped narrative studies: several different strands of narrative research
“treat narratives as modes of resistance” to prevailing structures of power
(Andrews et al. 2013, p. 4).
Narrative in-between is both something that can be created and some-
thing in which we always already find ourselves. It plays an ontological role
in constituting social reality: narrative webs and practices are an inextrica-
ble part of the social fabric of all communities. Narrative practices of sense-
making offer certain subject positions to the inhabitants of a social world,
regulating how these positions are taken up and how people respond to
and evaluate those who take them up. Ritivoi puts this aptly:
201
The hermeneutic dimension of a story—the interpretive nature of emplotment

decisions—implies a strategic choice of events and occurrences that are inter-
preted in such a fashion as to allow individuals to negotiate social life, by letting
them occupy certain positions successfully, and then claim particular rights.
(2009, pp. 30–31)
Underlying narrative interactions are “master plots” that “bestow legiti-

macy upon beliefs, practices, institutions, and identities,” thereby function-
ing as “providers of meaning for the community that shares and believes
in them” (p. 35). Narrative fiction, in turn, can nudge our narrative imag-
ination in directions that unsettle culturally dominant master narratives.
As Richard Kearney puts it, narrative “is what gives us a shareable world,”
and this shareability is largely based on the way in which storytelling con-
tributes to shared memory (2002, p. 3). Both narrative and memory as
processes of “making absent things present” (p. 142) are already ethically
charged because they imply selecting something to be worth telling or
remembering, instead of something else. Telling someone’s story is a way
of giving it recognition and ascribing it value: “what we consider commu-
nicable and memorable is also what we consider valuable” (p. 154). Cultural
memory as an interplay of remembering and imagining takes part in con-
structing narrative identities in the present, and it is never just oriented
to the past, but always also to the future. Neither collective narrative
identities nor shared pasts are homogenous or unified: the narrative in-
between is constantly renegotiated, debated, and reconstituted in a dia-
logue between different voices and perspectives.31
It is widely acknowledged that the processes through which commu-
nities are built are inseparable from imaginative practices of storytell-
ing. Communities are “imagined,” as Benedict Anderson (2006) famously
argues in his analysis of how nationalist myth-making shapes communi-
ties. Storytelling is ontologically constitutive of communities; they would
not be what they are without the stories that bind them together. But
there is nothing in this narrative process that would make it inherently
ethically good.
It seems to me that Arendt’s followers have not always paid heed to the
fact that the Arendtian “common world,” like “every in-between, relates and
separates men at the same time” (Arendt, 1998, p. 52). Stories unite, but
they also disunite; they draw lines of division between “us” and “others.”32
The founding of communities is often rooted in violent “founding events”
(Ricoeur, 1999, p. 8), and collective identities are based on narratives of
“we” that exclude (potentially threatening) “others.” Acknowledging the
potential harmfulness of we-narratives, Richard Rorty argues that “the

force of ‘us’ is, typically, contrastive in the sense that it contrasts with a
‘they’ which is also made up of human beings—the wrong sort of human
beings” (1989, p. 190). For him, “moral progress” (p. 192) depends on our
ability to expand “our sense of ‘us’ as far as we can” (p. 196), toward “greater
human solidarity”—“the ability to think of people wildly different from
ourselves as included in the range of ‘us’ ” (p. 192). That our sense of sol-
idarity is historically constituted and malleable makes it no less real; it is
something we have to nourish and consciously enlarge. We need to make
a conscious effort to “create a more expansive sense of solidarity than we
presently have” (p. 196). Currently, Trump’s “America first” narrative, on
the one hand, and narratives in which inclusion and immigration feature
as central to the idea of America, on the other, struggle to define the limits
of the American “we.”
Rorty, however, conceives of solidarity in terms of an empathetic iden-
tification that seems to have a subsumptive tone to it. As Ritivoi puts it,
in confronting Rorty from a hermeneutic perspective, “it is important to
resist positing similarity between ourselves and others if we are to main-
tain the possibility of understanding them” (2016, 63). We need herme-
neutic attentiveness to the way in which ethical understanding begins with
acknowledging difference. This was recognized already by Bakhtin (1993,
p. 16) who observed that “losing myself in the other”—the collapse of
two subject positions so that “instead of two participants there would be
one”—impairs any true “answerability” and understanding of the other.
The condition of genuine solidarity is the ability to refrain from taking the
other as the same as oneself: it is to acknowledge commonality, while at the
same time being sensitive to the differences between the I and the non-I.
Storytelling creates a sense of community in both good and bad: while
it can transform communities by creating more inclusive spaces for new
forms of identity and solidarity, it can also reinforce nationalist extrem-
ism that fuels collective identities based on exclusion, racism, and misog-
yny. The negotiation of narrative identities takes place through different
discourses of narrating the past. Such negotiation becomes particularly
painful when communities need to struggle to overcome ruptured cultural
identities after violent events that challenge their self-understanding as a
community. Then storytelling can function as a way of working through col-
lective traumas. The notion of cultural trauma is contested, and one needs
to be cautious in drawing a parallel between individual, psychic trauma and
cultural, collective trauma.33 The reference to cultural trauma is warranted,
however, to signal that on a collective level, similar mechanisms of belat-
edness, disconnection, and disruption in communicability can take place
as in the case of individual trauma. Violent events that are not properly
21
addressed in public discourse can cause a wounding breach in the narrative

in-between that holds a community together.
Such cultural traumas can lead to a vicious transgenerational circle of
violence. A well-known example is the way in which the Germans who
fought in the Second World War were unable to talk about their traumas
and so re-enacted them in their homes, creating an atmosphere of violence
and silence from which the generation of ’68 was desperate to break free.34
Ruth Wajnryb, a child of Holocaust survivors, describes the experience of
growing up in a home “bathed in a silence wrought by trauma” and learning
to become “literate in the grammar of silence” (2001, p. xi). She suggests
that the discomfort knitted into the fabric of Holocaust narratives “derives
from the interweaving of two kinds of conflicted energy: on the part of
the survivor, it is the attempt to tell and the accompanying suppression
of telling; on the part of the descendant, it is the wanting to know, and
the accompanying fear of finding out” (p. 32). As Eviatar Zerubavel (2006,
p. 50) points out, Wajnryb’s testimony encapsulates the “double wall” of
silence, which Dan Bar-On (1999, pp. 168, 209, 218) has shown to structure
the dynamic between the Nazi perpetrators and their children, as well as
that of the Holocaust survivors and their children.
It is symptomatic of the cultural trauma of the Second World War that
the experiences of both Holocaust survivors and perpetrators have been
dealt with more extensively by their descendants than by the survivors and
perpetrators themselves. Public German discussion was initially unable to
confront the guilt and responsibility of ordinary Germans in Nazi Germany.
Eventually, the situation changed, and since the 1980s there has been a
proliferation of public discourse of remembrance and a boom of memory
fiction. In other countries, the belatedness has been even more prominent.
Finland, for example, for decades held on to a national narrative of a sep-
arate Finnish war with the Soviet Union, thereby mitigating its role as an
ally of Nazi Germany. Over the past decade, several young women novelists
have published important novels that re-evaluate the Finnish national nar-
ratives of the Second World War.35
In Germany, France, and many other European countries, the Second
World War was a major cultural trauma that marked a radical disruption
of the European narrative in-between. Writers and intellectuals felt that it
had become impossible to continue simply identifying with the project of
European humanism and with the basic tenets of Western rationalism. It
became urgent to ask what it was in European culture that made possible
the industrial mass murder of millions of people. One of the issues that
I will address in the subsequent chapters is how narrative fiction can deal
with this question in ethically complex ways that reflect on the processes

of constructing and transforming narrative in-betweens. Can it contribute
to building new forms of solidarity that redirect communities toward a less
violent future, through a process of learning from the past? In constructing
collective identities, such as that of Europeanness, it is key to reinterpret
the past, including its violent legacies, and to find ways to deal with grief,
guilt, loss, and responsibility that do not paralyze, but enhance agency.
That the ways in which communities narrate their past affects how they
orient themselves to the present and future is particularly salient at the
moment in the debates revolving around the future of the European project,
as the British have voted to leave the European Union and Europe is grap-
pling with the refugee crisis. To an important extent, the British EU refer-
endum was a struggle between different narratives of the past and future.
When the result was announced, it struck me that Angela Merkel, the chan-
cellor of Germany, responded by saying that due to history, Germany has
a special responsibility for the European project—for European peace and
solidarity.36 In the British discourse I have failed to find similar sentiments,
which leaves me wondering, is it really just the Germans who are respon-
sible for peace and solidarity in Europe and more globally? Do we not all
share that responsibility? I live in a relatively unknown country on the
margins of Europe, a country marked (due to its history) by deep suspicion
toward the superpowers and their ideologies, and I would like to think that
we cherish the European project as a project of learning from the past—a
coming together of countries in the hope that we cannot let history repeat
itself—but as far right extremism and populism are currently on the rise
across Europe and the United States, any such sense of joint responsibility
feels terrifyingly fragile everywhere, including the Nordic countries.
In addition to a shared past, communities need a projected future, a
vision of where they are heading, a story—or better: a dialogue of stories—
that guides them. In response to the British EU referendum, Jeanette
Winterson (2016) draws attention to “the power of the stories we tell”:
Everything starts as a story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Every political

movement begins as a counter-narrative to an existing narrative. The media is
mainly run by the rich and the right-wing. They are telling their stories their
way, and as Brexit shows, their narrative is working. It’s the immigrants, it’s
the EU, it’s the feckless unemployed. It’s welfare, it’s climate control, it’s (what’s
left) of the unions. If we’re living in a post-facts world—let’s have better stories.
Winterson writes that when she was “16 and living in a Mini in Accrington,”
she realized that she needed to read herself “as a fiction as well as a fact”: “I
thought that if I understood myself as a story I might do better, because
2
4
1
if I am the story I can change the story. To change the way we are tell-
ing the story of our country, the story of our world, does need more than
facts.” She suggests that Labour as a party, a word, and a story has become
outdated and there is a need for a “narrative that unites us, not one that
divides us.”
To reformulate Winterson’s point, the narrative in-between that held
together the socially progressive forces no longer does the work it should;
it has eroded and lost its potency. I agree that we need new stories to trans-
form the narrative in-between that used to bind together the forces that
fight for justice and solidarity across differences. The British “leave” cam-
paign and Trump’s presidential campaign (“America first”) were driven by
narratives that succeeded in attracting masses through their appeal to the
fear of otherness, blatant racism, and a strategy to discredit and denigrate
anything perceived as “foreign.” As the world changes and identifications
shift, different narratives struggle to shape the in-betweens that bind peo-
ple together. To a large extent, this is a struggle over how to define the
limits of the “we”: we British, Americans, Europeans, we humans, we world
citizens, we living beings.
The narrative in-between concerns all intersubjective spaces, ranging from

the global to the most intimate. Couples, lovers, siblings, and friends cre-
ate their own mythologies. Dialogic storytelling can build secret worlds
that exist only for the lovers, or create trans-subjective spaces that make it
possible for souls to touch and become what they could not become with-
out that space. All relationships involve their own narrative dynamic, and
while some of them largely follow conventional narrative scripts, others
develop rich, unique, highly unconventional narrative in-betweens.
Interactional approaches to narrative suggest that the interactive, con-
necting function of narrative practices is ultimately more fundamental to
our identities than their representational function. As Brockmeier puts it,
narratives can serve “less of an autobiographical function and more of an
immediate function of social interaction and communication, of connect-
ing” (2015, p. 203). In discussing narrative practices of couples where one
partner suffers from dementia, Brockmeier shows how they share stories
and repeatedly confirm important common memories, not in order to pro-
duce knowledge about past events, but rather to hold onto and keep alive
their connection and their shared world so that, in the face of illness, they
can conjure up and affirm in the present “the common ground of a shared
life” (p. 210), an “affective fabric of joint identity” (p. 216). But just as not
all community-building narrative in-betweens are ethically good, not all
co-authoring of identities in relationships and families is unproblematic.

Lindemann acknowledges this as she analyzes how these processes can go
wrong, for example when parents are unable to let go of their old stories in
situations when their stories no longer work and may keep their child from
growing (2014, p. 86).
In ethically evaluating and analyzing different narrative practices, it is
important to differentiate between practices that contribute to dialogic
and inclusive trans-subjective spaces of in-between that expand the pos-
sibilities of those affected, and those that reinforce ethically problematic
narrative in- betweens that perpetuate cultural stereotypes, restrictive
ways of categorizing people and their experiences, and violent, oppressive
mechanisms of exclusion and othering. This is, again, a differentiating con-
tinuum on which narrative practices can be placed. The challenge we face is
how to expand narrative in-betweens so as to make them more inclusive,
strengthening a sense of a shared humanity—and beyond that, a shared
sentiency—in order to bind us together across differences and to foster
a sense of mutual responsibility that makes possible a shared future for
humans and other sentient beings on this shared planet.37
PERSPECTIVE-TAKING AND PERSPECTIVE-A WARENESS
In the current age of terror and increasing polarization of world politics,

the need to perceive the world from a plurality of perspectives has become
as pressing as ever. Jürgen Habermas argues in an interview with Giovanna
Borradori after the 9/11 terrorist attacks that “attempts at understanding
have a chance only under symmetrical conditions of mutual perspective-
taking” (2003, p. 37). He reminds us that the ability to assume different
perspectives is already built into our basic linguistic competence: it is
something that we develop as we learn the use of personal pronouns and
acquire “competence in exchanging the perspectives between first and sec-
ond person” (p. 37). In the real world, however, we rarely have power-free
conditions of mutual perspective-taking, and our competence to adopt dif-
ferent perspectives is put to a difficult test when we encounter temporally
or culturally distant worlds. For a dialogue to take place, what is decisive is
the ability to imagine the world of the other as a world that, although dif-
ferent from one’s own, is nevertheless a human world of meaningful expe-
rience and action.
The ethical and political significance of such perspective-awareness is
indisputable. It is crucial for democracy, which depends on the recognition
of a plurality of perspectives, “the paradoxical plurality of unique beings”
who insert themselves into the human world through speech and action
261
(Arendt, 1998, p. 176). The capacity to take the perspective of others entails
an ability to see them as agents capable of action that initiates new pro-
cesses in the world. Perspective-taking is a condition for successful dia-
logue, which presupposes acknowledging that one could be wrong because
one’s views are not the absolute truth but relative to a limited perspective.
That narrative fiction cultivates our capacity for empathetic perspective-
taking is probably the most common argument presented, over the past
few decades, for its ethical significance—perhaps most influentially by
Nussbaum (1997, 2010). She argues that the power of narrative fiction to
foster our ability to imagine “what it might be like to be in the shoes of a
person different from oneself” is pivotal to its ethical value in promoting
democratic citizenship (2010, pp. 95–96). Empirical research in the psy-
chology of reading lends some support to the argument that fictional nar-
ratives are more efficient in helping us imagine the perspective of the other
than are nonfictional texts (Hakemulder, 2000; Djikic et al., 2009; Oatley,
2011) and that perspective-taking that is “experientially driven” results in
more marked changes in readers’ beliefs and self-concepts than one that is
“conceptually driven” (Kaufman & Libby, 2012).
In psychological literature on perspective-taking, it is customary to dif-
ferentiate between two modes: “imagine-other” perspective-taking and
“imagine-self” perspective-taking (e.g. Stotland, 1969; Barrett-Lennard,
1981). This distinction is pivotal in contemporary cognitive psychology:
First, you can imagine how another person sees his or her situation and feels as
a result (an imagine-other perspective). Second, you can imagine how you would
see the situation were you in the other person’s position and how you would feel
as a result (an imagine-self perspective). (Batson, 2009, p. 267)
Experiments have shown that participants who are asked to imagine how
another person feels in a certain situation have different feelings and phys-
iological symptoms, and different areas of their brain are activated than
in the case of those asked to “put themselves in the other’s shoes” in the
sense of imagining what they themselves would feel if they were in the
other person’s situation.38 In philosophy, these two modes are sometimes
called “self-oriented” and “other-oriented” perspective-taking, but, as Amy
Coplan (2011, p. 9) puts it, a failure to distinguish between these two vari-
eties is common in discussions on perspective-taking and empathy.
Across disciplines, the process of empathetic perspective-taking is com-
monly assumed to be characterized by an immediacy: it is described as a
process of overcoming distance, feeling with the other by emotionally par-
ticipating in his or her situation, and even more: feeling what the other

feels, mirroring his or her experience. “Equipped with mirror neurons, the
human brain appears to possess a system for automatically sharing feel-
ings,” as Keen puts it, and more complex “responses to others’ mental
states layer atop this initial spontaneous sharing of feelings” or “primitive
emotional contagion” (2007, pp. 4–5). Nussbaum’s (1997, 2010) approach
to putting oneself in the shoes of another also seems to assume such an
immediate, emotional participation.
Successful imagine-other perspective-taking, however, arguably involves
the capacity to differentiate between oneself and the other. Research using
neuroimaging suggests that imagining what someone else experiences is a
distinct cognitive and affective process, which does not involve a merging
of the self and the other.39 Research also indicates that without adequate
knowledge of the other’s situation, we tend to project ourselves into that
situation, rather than imagining it as being radically different from our own
(Batson, 2009). Peter Goldie makes a similar point from a philosophical per-
spective by arguing that empathizing with another person involves imagin-
ing “the thoughts, feelings and emotions (what I will call the narrative) of
another person” (1999, p. 409), which requires knowledge about the other
person’s character and the narrative events and experiences that the empa-
thizer enacts: “without the former, there is no possibility of centrally imag-
ining another; and without the latter, there is nothing to enact” (p. 411).
The binary between the imagine-self and imagine-other perspective-
taking, however, tends to dismiss that this conceptual dichotomy cannot
be absolute: we always imagine the other’s perspective from the horizon of
our own social, cultural, and historical world. In imagining the other’s situ-
ation, we draw (mainly unconsciously) on our own life history and embod-
ied memory. This is not to downplay the important difference between an
other-oriented process of imagining the other’s plight and merely trying
to imagine what one would feel in such a situation; rather it is to suggest
three important revisions to the current thinking on the imagine-self ver-
sus imagine-other perspective-taking.
First, the dichotomy is not as clear-cut and the imagine-other perspec-
tive not as “pure” as it is customarily taken to be, because the other’s per-
spective is imagined from the horizon of one’s own, through a process
that is historically, culturally, and socially mediated.40 Second, awareness
of this mediation and critical reflection on how one’s own situation may
affect the process of imagining are ethically relevant and likely to promote
successful imagine- other perspective- taking. And third, imagining the
other’s perspective is closely linked to understanding. Engagement with
the perspectives of others in social conditions markedly different from our
own is a process in which imagining and understanding are inextricably
2
8
1
intertwined and mutually dependent upon one another. We can under-

stand another historical mode of experience only by imagining, in as com-
plex terms as possible, how the subject of action and experience lives in
and is affected by a certain historical world, and we can engage in such
imagining only when we have sufficient knowledge about that world. We
need narrative imagination to acquire proper insight into historical worlds
as spaces of experience, and literature has the potential to boost our imagi-
native understanding of how historical and social conditions are linked to
different modes of experience.
Perspective-taking is mediated not only by our personal past, but also
through cultural systems of sense-making. It is easier to take the perspec-
tive of someone whose experiences are richly articulated in a language
that sets our imagination alight, and considerably more difficult to take
the perspective of someone whose experiences remain inexpressible.
The cultivation of our perspective-taking abilities is an important way in
which narrative fiction can contribute to what Fricker calls hermeneutic
justice by “generating new meanings” that reduce “the effects of herme-
neutical marginalization” of underprivileged people whose experiences are
ill understood (2007, p. 174).41 Literary narratives can enrich the herme-
neutic resources that attune us to the perspectives of people in different
social situations and positions, including socially marginalized ones (per-
spective-sensitivity), and allow us to articulate such experiences, or even
simply identify them as distinctive experiences defined by a perspective
that we may not fully understand but that merits recognition (perspec-
tive-awareness). The need for such recognition obviously goes beyond our
species; by developing our sensitivity to how various species perceive the
world, literature could make a difference to how we treat them.
In order to motivate ethical action, however, perspective-awareness
is not enough. Daniel Batson (2011, p. 45) suggests that what is needed
is that one values the welfare of the other in need. But how do we come
to value it? Narrative imagination crucially shapes what we value. Our
narratively mediated ethical identity—our sense of who we are as moral
agents—prompts us to action and inaction in particular situations. There
is no guaranteed recipe for a narrative to successfully move us to action—it
remains unpredictable because it is linked to our entire sense of who we
are and how we navigate ourselves in the narratively shaped moral space
that we co-inhabit. In any case, what is needed, undoubtedly, is the abil-
ity not only to take into consideration the perspectives of others, but also
to engage with these perspectives in an affectively responsive way. While
some narratives move us to simply feel with the other, others may move
us to the point of affecting our actions by changing our sense of who we

are, who we want to be, and what we need to do in order to be that per-
son. What happens in narrative encounters is unpredictable, but in any
case the ability of narratives to engage our imaginative powers in ways that
evoke our affective responses seems key to their power to transform our
ethically charged sense of who we are. Aleida Assmann makes a similar
point by arguing that receiving narratives about the Holocaust not just as
information about events but “as a memory means that it is received in the
modes of identification, ethics or empathy, fueling consequences for one’s
own life, value system and actions. Receiving in this sense means actively
responding to a representation of the Holocaust” (2018, p. 214). A major
ethical challenge for Holocaust narratives—and for literary narrative more
broadly—is to find ways to expand our “circle of concern” to include the
suffering of others different from ourselves.
I propose that the hermeneutic tradition is helpful in reflecting on the

mediation that pervades perspective-taking. While the task of overcoming
distance and empathetic merging into the other’s experience was essen-
tial to the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and Dilthey, the productive sig-
nificance of distance in understanding the other’s perspective has been a
central theme in philosophical hermeneutics since the early 1960s. In par-
ticular, it plays a key role in how Gadamer conceptualizes perspective-tak-
ing and its role in cultural education.42 He approaches this issue with the
concept of Bildung, which has been elemental to the German tradition of
understanding cultural education ever since the late eighteenth century.
For J. G. Herder and the Early German Romantics, Bildung referred to
the continuous process of self-formation and cultivation through culture
that results in the ability to distance oneself from what is nearest and in a
receptivity and openness to different perspectives. In Gadamer’s account,
the ability to “distance oneself from oneself” in Bildung is entwined with a
consciousness of the “viewpoints of possible others” (1997, p. 17). In the
approach of philosophical hermeneutics, engagement with the perspec-
tives of others does not imply the dissolution of one’s own, historically
constituted interpretative horizon; rather, it entails a dialogue with other
perspectives in such a way that one becomes aware of one’s preconceptions,
realizing that there are other ways of seeing the world that deserve to be
respected and taken seriously:
[A]‌person trying to understand a text is prepared for it to tell him something.

That is why a hermeneutically trained consciousness must be, from the start,
sensitive to the text’s alterity. But this kind of sensitivity involves neither “neu-
trality” with respect to content nor the extinction of one’s self. . . . The important
301
thing is to be aware of one’s own bias, so that the text can present itself in all
its otherness and thus assert its own truth against one’s own fore-meanings.
(p. 269)
Awareness of how it is always from within a certain historical situation

that we encounter another mode of experience facilitates engagement with
the alterity of other perspectives. That human existence is profoundly his-
torical, however, implies that “knowledge of oneself can never be complete”
(p. 302). But although we can never fully overcome the limits of our his-
torical world, we can become partly aware of them, and such awareness
allows us to partly transgress those limits. This is a two-way relation-
ship: awareness of one’s own historicity helps one to encounter otherness,
and encounters with others allow one to become aware of one’s historicity.
We always engage with other perspectives from within the horizon of our
own life history, our own values, beliefs, commitments, and attachments.
This mediation is often neglected in discussions on narrative immersion. In
narrative fiction, different perspectives are embedded in a fictional world
with which the narrative invites us to engage. The experience of being
transported to or immersed in the fictional world enables us to engage with
those perspectives with a different intensity—not only cognitively, but
also emotionally, as embodied beings—than when we read nonfiction or
encounter different perspectives in passing in real-life situations, “in which
both time pressure and unwillingness or laziness may effectually cancel
the process before it has even begun” (V. Nünning, 2015, p. 97). The moral
agency of the characters is inextricably linked to the temporal process of
change they go through. Following the development of characters in partic-
ular social and historical situations makes their actions, decisions, desires,
fears, and anxieties comprehensible in a way they would hardly be if we
did not go through that temporal process of change with them, thereby
acquiring an embodied sense of the historical world in which their lives are
embedded. Readers understand who the characters are, who they become,
and in what kinds of cultural power dynamics their lives are entangled only
after they have lived through the embodied process in which the characters
act in the world in concrete situations.
However, the kind of perspective-taking in which narrative fiction
invites readers to take part is not characterized by mere emotional partic-
ipation. Narrative fiction frequently gives rise to a readerly dynamic based
on the interplay between emotional participation and distanced reflection
fueled by an awareness of the literary constructedness of the text. Such
interplay is often dismissed in cognitively oriented literary studies, which

typically conceptualize engagement with fictional worlds in terms of an
experience of immersion or transportation and suggest that this experi-
ence is interrupted by the self-reflexive aspects of texts, that is, by moments
of becoming aware of their fictional, constructed character.43 For example,
Ryan argues that literary texts can be “either self-reflexive or immersive,
or they can alternate between these two stances,” but “they cannot offer
both experiences at the same time” (2003, p. 284). I agree with Merja
Polvinen that our engagement with literary worlds can be simultaneously
both “immersed and self-aware” (2012, p. 98), and I suggest that the her-
meneutic approach to perspective-taking provides a productive conceptual
framework for acknowledging this “both and.”
In the novels analyzed in this book, this “both and” is linked to their
self-reflexive dimension. Their protagonists are characters who refrain
from inviting straightforward identification; instead, these narratives
play with focalization in ways that encourage readers to adopt an engaged
yet critical perspective on the protagonists. For example, the process
of engaging with the perspectives of ordinary people who took part in
the events of the Holocaust can be a valuable experience in giving one a
sense of what historical processes made systematic, industrialized mass
murder possible. Perspective-taking and narrative imagination are not
only about feeling with or for the other, but also about imagining the
processes that lead certain individuals to act in certain ways. So long as
we cannot imagine the experience of the subjects who took part in the
events, we tend to regard atrocities like genocides as simply incompre-
hensible or monstrous. By imagining the experiences of the perpetrators
and bystanders, we are more likely to be able to engage in complex ethical
reflection on how such events concern us, implicate us, and place ethical
obligations on us, instead of thinking that what they did has nothing to
do with us.
Narratives differ greatly in terms of whether they actively foster
perspective-awareness, perspective-sensitivity, and perspective-taking—
for example, through polyphonic and self-reflexive narrative strategies—or
whether they mask their own perspectival organization through naturaliz-
ing narrative strategies. This is another continuum on which different nar-
ratives can be placed. In ethical terms, monological narratives that invite
immediate identification through naturalizing strategies tend to be more
dangerous than ones that encourage awareness of multiple perspectives
and of narrative construction. Terrorist recruitment magazines, for exam-
ple, employ narrative strategies that evoke straightforward identification
and techniques of naturalization.44 Narratives that create awareness of
different perspectives on the same phenomenon or situation are generally
321
ethically more productive than ones that present only one perspective as
worth considering.
This model allows us to understand the affective dimension of the ethical
potential of perspective-taking in wider terms than the Nussbaumian model.
Nussbaum believes that the ethically most valuable literature is one that cul-
tivates our “capacities for love and compassion” (2010, p. 112), and she privi-
leges literature that invites us to see the world from the perspective of those
who are socially marginalized or oppressed: “information about social stigma
and inequality will not convey the full understanding a democratic citizen
needs without a participatory experience of the stigmatized position, which
theater and literature both enable” (p. 107).45 Although Nussbaum undoubt-
edly draws attention to an important aspect of the ethical potential of nar-
rative fiction, her approach is arguably too narrow. Not just empathy, but
a whole range of affective responses—from shame and anger to a sense of
affection and solidarity—can make ethically valuable contributions to our
ethical imagination, and the capacity for perspective-taking is linked to the
capability to imagine and understand the horizons from which others orient
themselves to the world. Furthermore, perspective-taking in reading fiction
concerns not only taking the perspectives of characters; it also pertains to
engagement with the text’s overall vision. Engaging with the perspective on
the world opened up by a literary narrative can widen our horizons, enrich
our interpretative resources, and show new possibilities for us.
In sum, we should understand perspective-taking and the potential of
narrative fiction to cultivate our perspective-awareness and perspective-
sensitivity in a broader sense than is generally acknowledged. What I agree
on with Nussbaum, Batson, Goldie, Coplan, and many others who have made
important contributions to our understanding of the topic is that other-
oriented perspective-taking involves an act of imagination. As I have sug-
gested, however, we need a more nuanced understanding of this act. First,
it is not a process of leaving behind one’s own values and being transported
to the other’s perspective; instead, it involves putting one’s own values and
commitments at play and at stake, letting them be tested and questioned
but also allowing the encounter to clarify what it is in them that is worth
holding onto. Second, reflection on this mediation can help us move beyond
our own categories of understanding, let go of them, or modify them. Third,
ethically valuable outcomes of perspective-taking cannot be reduced to the
single outcome of empathetic concern for the other. The process of imag-
ining the world of the other as a space of possibilities that enables us to
understand the other’s actions without accepting them can also be ethically
valuable. The imaginative act of perspective-taking can help us understand
divergent kinds of otherness that require different ethical responses.

ETHICAL INQUIRY
Over the past few decades, it has become increasingly common for phi-
losophers to argue that narrative is central to moral agency, moral educa-
tion, and moral philosophy. This is a set of interconnected discussions from
which different threads of argumentation can be disentangled. Despite
their overlap, we can distinguish between discussions on the general sig-
nificance of narrative for moral agency and debates that focus specifically
on the ethical significance of narrative fiction.
Philosophers have emphasized that narrative is integral to moral agency
because in deciding to embark on one course of action instead of others,
we need to imagine the possible consequences of different actions. As
Noël Carroll observes, moral reasoning involves “entertaining alternative
courses of action” (2000, p. 362), and hence narrative imagination is a
central faculty for moral agency.46 The ability to imagine how our actions
would affect others in different alternative possible scenarios is linked to
perspective-taking—to imagining how our actions would be perceived and
experienced from the perspectives of others. As we make ethical decisions,
we project a story that involves understanding how the past motivates the
action and imagining a future to which it leads.47 Philosophers have not
always paid enough heed to how, as moral agents, we need to imagine not
just the immediate consequences of our actions, but also the kind of life
we want to live and the person we want to be: moral agency involves an
aspect of expressing, constructing, and reinterpreting one’s narrative eth-
ical identity.
As we saw earlier, theorists like Taylor, Ricoeur, and MacIntyre empha-
size the link between narrative and self- responsibility. Today’s media
environment, however, abounds with examples of the ways in which nar-
ratives can encourage ethically problematic actions. Terrorist recruitment
narratives, contemporary neo-Fascist narrative imaginary, and Trump’s
“America first” narrative are all efforts to provide people with a clear-cut
narrative identity and a concomitant action-guiding ethos and pathos.
Narratives shape our identity and agency often more effectively than
abstract moral theories because they do not affect us merely cognitively,
but also (and often primarily) affectively. When narratives do something
to us, ethically speaking, it is due to their power to move us, to elicit affec-
tive responses in us. The affective dimension of narrative is also key to its
power as a form of ethical inquiry: as narratives explore the ethical com-
plexities of a whole range of human emotional life, they are not plagued
with the abstract language of moral theories. But affectivity by itself does
not make narrative ethical. Precisely the power of narratives to move us
341
can also be harnessed for problematic political purposes. This is painfully

clear in the contemporary West, as highly emotionally charged xenophobic
narratives of far-right populists are attracting more and more supporters
across Europe and the United States.
The arguments on the ethical significance of narrative fiction mainly
emphasize either instruction or training. Booth, for example, sees fiction
as a form of “moral education” (1988, p. 211), and Nussbaum foregrounds
the capacity of narrative fiction to teach “certain truths about human
life” (1990, p. 5) that materialize in concrete situations. In her later work,
Nussbaum (2010) has particularly focused on the pedagogical value of the
right kind of narrative fiction to convey democratic moral values. Carroll’s
(2000) “cultivation approach,” in turn, links the ethical value of narrative
fiction to the way it cultivates our powers of moral deliberation by pro-
viding examples of moral actions in concrete situations. He argues that
such “exercise enhances our ability to reflect on further moral situations,
just as running through logic exercises prepares us to solve theorems we
have never seen before”; allegedly, we possess “abstract moral maxims” and
“abstract moral concepts, such as those pertaining to virtue and vice” and
by “providing concrete examples, art can advance our understanding of
how to apply them to particular cases” (2000, p. 368). Many thinkers who
draw on cognitive science understand such training in terms of simulation,
suggesting that reading a narrative means simulating in our minds what
it would be like to experience what the narrative describes.48 According to
the evolutionary cognitivists Brian Boyd (2009) and Jonathan Gottschall
(2013), for example, stories are the way our mind trains for situations that
demand moral action: “They simulate worlds so we can live better in this
one” (2013, p. 197). The reading process, Boyd asserts, resembles “scien-
tific advancing and testing of hypotheses” (2009, p. 387). A refined version
of the cultivation approach is Joshua Landy’s “formative approach,” which
argues that fiction trains and hones our mental capacities by providing
“spiritual exercises” that “help us become who we are” (2012, p. 10).
What troubles me in most approaches to the ethical potential of nar-
rative fiction is the way in which they, in perceiving this contribution in
terms of instruction (Booth, Nussbaum) or training (Carroll, Landy), seem
to assume that we already know beforehand what is right and wrong. They
argue that literature teaches us moral truths (Booth, Nussbaum), cultivates
our decision-making abilities by providing us with exercises in applying
abstract moral maxims in practice (Carroll), or trains our mental abili-
ties so that we learn ethically valuable skills, such as that of achieving “an
enduring peace of mind” (Landy, 2012, p. 11). I argue that instead of con-
veying moral truths or rehearsing our ability to detect them, literature can

function as a form of ethical inquiry in its own right. The ethical potential
of narrative fiction lies more in the questions it poses and in shaping or
refining our sense of the complexities of the moral space we inhabit than in
the answers it proposes.
To a certain extent, the discussions on the relevance of fiction for moral
philosophy have moved toward acknowledging that fiction can function
as ethical inquiry. In Anglo-American analytic philosophy, literature has
traditionally provided illuminating examples for moral philosophers, but
over the last few decades the situation has changed so that those who take
seriously the moral philosophical relevance of literature now increasingly
consider literary works, as Nora Hämäläinen puts it, as “self-standing vehi-
cles of philosophical or moral thought” (2016, p. 20). In her account, these
philosophers believe that “the writer pursues an ethical subject and lays
out an argument which is brought to life through the actions and thoughts
of characters,” whereby the work can be considered “an intervention in a
philosophical discussion” (p. 21).49 As the formulation indicates, however,
the primary interest of philosophers resides in arguments. Even when they
strive to treat literature in its own terms, philosophers tend to look for
arguments that make contributions to moral philosophy whereby literature
is subjected to philosophical categories, dichotomies, and terms of argu-
ment. This downplays the ethical insights conveyed by non-argumentative
aspects of literary works, including their narrative dynamic, affectivity,
and the interplay between their form and content.
In order to flesh out my disagreement with approaches implying that we

already know beforehand what is right and wrong, let me analyze more
closely Nussbaum’s influential thinking on the pedagogical value of liter-
ature. Her views on literature and moral agency draw and comment on
Plato’s and Aristotle’s ancient quarrel over whether literature is harmful
or beneficial given how it affects our emotional side. Nussbaum shows
convincingly that emotions are elemental to moral agency and rationality
and provides counter-arguments to two classical objections to emotions.
According to the first objection, emotions are irrational, “blind forces that
have nothing (or nothing much) to do with reasoning”; according to the
second, emotions are closely linked to judgments, but those judgments are
“false because they ascribe a very high value to external persons and events
that are not fully controlled by the person’s virtue or rational will” (1995,
p. 56):
In all of these cases, the emotions picture human life as something needy and
incomplete. . . . Ties to children, parents, loved ones, fellow citizens, country,
361
one’s own body and health—these are the material on which emotions work;
and these ties, given the power of chance to disrupt them, make human life a
vulnerable business, in which complete control is neither possible nor, given the
value of these attachments for the person who has them, even desirable. (p. 57)
Nussbaum shows that the anti-emotion position rests on the highly con-
troversial (Socratic) normative claim that “the good person is completely
self-sufficient” (p. 57). Regarding the quarrel between Plato and Aristotle,
Nussbaum is resolutely Aristotelian: “Aristotle insists that removing the
family, rather than ensuring impartial and equal concern for all citizens,
will ensure that nobody cares strongly about anything” (pp. 69–70). She
argues that emotions are essential for moral agency because they “ena-
ble the agent to perceive a certain sort of worth or value” (p. 64). Self-
sufficiency certainly makes one less vulnerable, but do we want to live that
kind of life?
For Nussbaum, play and literature are important for coming to terms
with our vulnerability: “Play teaches people to be capable of living with
others without control; it connects the experiences of vulnerability and
surprise to curiosity and wonder, rather than to crippling anxiety” (2010,
p. 101). With reference to Donald Winnicott, she emphasizes how art cre-
ates a “play space” that strengthens “the personality’s emotional and imag-
inative resources” (p. 101). Literature cultivates our capacity to assign value
to things and to care about the suffering and wishes of others, and what
Aristotle said of tragedy applies to the modern novel, too: “the very form
constructs compassion in readers, positioning them as people who care
intensely about the sufferings and bad luck of others, and who identify
with them in ways that show possibilities for themselves” (1995, p. 66).
I share Nussbaum’s view that essential to the ethical potential of narra-
tive fiction is how it invites us to engage with different ways of ascribing
worth to persons and things, but her way of conceptualizing literature’s
mode of “showing possibilities” for readers primarily as possibilities pro-
vided by heroes with whom we identify—admiringly or compassionately—
strikes me as too limited. It fails to acknowledge how fictional worlds
contribute to our possibilities by enlarging the space that sets the limits
for our capacities to experience, imagine, think, ascribe worth to others,
and invent new modes of co-inhabiting the world.
While agreeing with Nussbaum’s critique of the norm of detachment,
I have reservations about her own normativity: “in order to be stably linked
to democratic values,” she argues, the education of citizens for democratic
purposes needs to be linked to “a normative view about how human beings
ought to relate to one another (as equals, as dignified, as having inner

depth and worth),” and this requires “selectivity regarding the artworks
used” (2010, p. 108). It is of course welcome that she acknowledges that not
all literature makes us better persons:
[W]‌e cannot deny that antidemocratic movements have known how to use the
arts, music, and rhetoric in ways that contribute further to demeaning and stig-
matizing certain groups and people. The imaginative component of democratic
education requires careful selectivity. (p. 109)
What is disturbing in her normativity is that it seems more or less self-

evident to her what is right and wrong, which literary works should be
selected for the curriculum, and which are “defective forms of ‘literature’ ”
that fail to cultivate “a healthy moral relationship to others” (p. 109).
Nussbaum advocates a rather specific “normative sense of life” (1995, p. 2),
largely based on Aristotelian virtue ethics. Together with her view on the
empathetic identification with characters as the basis of the reading expe-
rience, it suggests that she essentially still expects literature to provide us
with models to imitate, following premodern, classicist poetics, where lit-
erature was expected to have a didactic function and to illustrate generally
known truths in an aesthetically pleasing form. Horace famously formu-
lated in Ars poetica that literature should be “dulce et utile”: sweet and use-
ful, pleasant and instructive. Classicist poetics, however, was based on a
worldview very different from the modern one. It was linked to an ontol-
ogy where a pregiven, divine, meaningful order can be found in the world,
independent of human beings, and an integral part of which were generally
known, universal truths about the good life. Crudely put, ontology and eth-
ics were part and parcel of the same meaningful order, a system of truths
that were taken to be shared by all rational beings, and it was the task of
literature to teach those truths in a pleasant form.
For the moderns, in contrast, there are no longer pregiven answers to
what human existence is about. Literature no longer preaches a pregiven
morality or vision of the good life; instead of setting examples, mod-
ern literature searches for meaning and values, exploring different ethi-
cal conceptions and modes of experience.50 As a process of exploration
it can engender new insights into the fundamental questions of human
existence—such as those concerning the good life or just society—as well
as radically new ways of posing these questions.
From this perspective, Nussbaum seems somewhat too eager to provide
us with ready answers to fundamental existential questions. If we define at
the outset what kind of people we should be, what kind of life we should
live, and what kind of literature is good for us, we risk overlooking the very
381
value that literature has in cultivating our narrative imagination as the

free, unrestrained exploration of human possibilities. Nussbaum neglects
how at the core of literary imagination is the capacity of fiction to explore
the limits of what can be said and thought and what Ricoeur calls “power-
to-be” (1991a, p. 66), that is, to unfold, in unexpected ways, new directions
for thought, action, and experience.
Like Nussbaum, Derrida stresses that literature is inextricably linked to
democracy. For him, however, this is because literature is an institution
that is based on the “right to say everything [tout dire],” on “the unlim-
ited right to ask any question, to suspect all dogmatism, to analyze every
presupposition, even those of the ethics or the politics of responsibility”
(1995a, p. 28).51 Nussbaum’s approach risks losing sight of the possibility
that literature may open up new modes of thinking, experiencing, and liv-
ing together that we may rule out if we only read literature that conforms
to our preexisting views of the good life.
Nussbaum’s approach to narrative imagination is also limited by a moral
psychology that overemphasizes individual psychology at the expense of
the social in making sense of ethical struggles. For her, “the real clash of
civilizations” (and the battle between the good and evil) is “a clash within
the individual soul, as greed and narcissism contend against respect and
love” (2010, p. 143). Her critique of the current state of democracies pays
curiously little attention to how narrative fiction can help us understand
more profoundly the social and historical developments that shape our
world, including insights into how narrative strategies of naturalization
are used to uphold structures of violence and the triumph of instrumental
reason—a mode of thought that focuses on the efficient achievement of a
given end, such as maximizing profit, at the expense of reflection on the
aims and values that steer our actions. From the perspective of the latter
type of reflection, which Max Weber called value rationality, essential to
the ethical contribution of narrative fiction is its exploration of different
visions of good life and just society, rather than teaching pregiven virtues.
As we will see, literature can also contribute to such value rationality by
inviting us to engage with worlds inhabited by unpleasant characters who
are nothing like role models.
Generally inadequate attention has been paid to the ethical relevance of

the temporality of the process in which the reader is emotionally engaged
with narratives, the worlds proposed by them, and characters’ perspectives
and modes of experience in those worlds. Temporality might be seen to
be implicit in Nussbaum’s emphasis on emotionally engaged “imaginative
participation” (2010, p. 104) and the significance of the particular for moral

agency (1990, pp. 35–49), but temporality does not profoundly affect her
conception of the ethical insights produced by narrative fiction. She seems
to think that while on some level we already possess knowledge of ethi-
cal truths beforehand, literature helps us better internalize these “truths
about human life” (1990, p. 5) on an emotional level by examining them in
connection to concrete, particular lives.
In developing the idea that temporality fundamentally shapes narra-
tive imagination as ethical imagination, it is worth going back to Aristotle,
whose ethics has been important for both Nussbaum and philosophical
hermeneutics. Gadamer draws on the Aristotelian notion of phronesis to
rethink ethics against the backdrop of the profound temporality of human
existence. Aristotle (1984, pp. 3726–3727) examines in Nicomachean Ethics
the role of reason in moral agency, where he rejects the Platonic idea of
the good as an empty abstraction and argues that it is necessary to explore
ethics in connection with the particular nature of the human mode of
being—in Gadamer’s words, “not detached from a being that is becom-
ing, but determined by it and determinative of it” (1997, p. 312). While
for Plato ethics is an inextricable part of his metaphysics that concerns all
being, Aristotle, by contrast, deals with nature and human existence as two
distinct realms of reality: the first, physis, is the sphere of necessity; the lat-
ter, ethos, the sphere where things are in a state of constant becoming and
could be otherwise than they are:
Ethical being, as a specifically human undertaking, is distinguished from natu-

ral being because it is not simply a collection of capacities or innervating forces.
Man, on the contrary, is a being who only becomes what he is and acquires
his bearing by what he does, by the “how” of his actions. It is in this sense
that Aristotle differentiates between the domain of ethos and that of physics.
(Gadamer, 1987, p. 116)
Aristotle argued that while the object of theoretical reason (episteme) is

unchangeable (eternal essences and laws), practical reason (phronesis) con-
cerns human temporal existence, that is, what could be otherwise. Ethical
action is not based on abstract knowledge of essences (of the idea of the
good), but on the temporal process in which human beings learn, through
their own experience, how to act in the world. Hence, instead of being
defined by an abstract essence, we become who we are by the “how” of our
actions (see Aristotle, 1984, pp. 3780–3781).
For Aristotle, practical reason concerns action, which always takes
place in particular situations and hence cannot be captured by universal
laws (pp. 3758–3759, 3855). From this starting point, Gadamer (1997,
4
0
1
pp. 313–317) characterizes practical, ethical knowledge as the ability to see

the right thing to do in a particular situation: “Only within ethical percep-
tion does the situation appear to us as a situation for our action and in the
light of what is just” (1987, p. 124). Unlike theoretical knowledge, practical,
phronetic knowledge cannot be taught in abstraction. It requires delibera-
tive abilities that only life experience can cultivate, which is why the young
lack “practical wisdom”:
[S]‌uch wisdom is concerned not only with universals but with particulars, which
become familiar from experience, but a young man has no experience, for it
is length of time that gives experience; . . . practical wisdom is . . . concerned
with the ultimate particular fact, since the thing to be done is of this nature.
(Aristotle, 1984, p. 3871)
Gadamer (1997, pp. 314–316) asserts that both techne and phronesis are
forms of knowledge that require prior knowledge and the ability to apply
it in practice, but while techne concerns the craftsperson’s knowledge of
general essences that she applies to manufacture an object according to a
model, as when she molds a piece of clay into a perfect pot, human beings
cannot mold themselves into “good persons” on the basis of general knowl-
edge about essences in this way. In ethical action, too, one requires prior
understanding of what is right, good, and just, but it is unlike a techni-
cal skill that could be first learned and then applied: ethical knowledge is
never pre-given in that way (p. 317).52 Instead, ethical understanding is
intertwined, from the beginning, with how we act in the world with others.
As “the subject of ethical reason, of phronesis, man always finds himself in
an ‘acting situation’ and he is always obliged to use ethical knowledge and
apply it according to the exigencies of his concrete situation” (1987, p. 120).
Ethical action takes place in concrete situations, which are all different, and
the ability to act in them is not something external to our being; it is an
inextricable part of our life experience and how we understand ourselves
in the world (p. 119). Ultimately, phronetic knowledge is always also a form
of self-knowledge (sich-Wissen) that manifests itself as a sense of one’s pos-
sibilities in the world (1997, p. 316).
Our general ethical views acquire content only through the way they are
expressed and actualized in concrete situations. This applies to all the con-
cepts we have at our disposal in our search for ethical bearings: “These con-
cepts are not fixed in the firmament like the stars; they are what they are
only in the concrete situations in which we find ourselves” (1987, p. 122).
The relationship between ethical preconceptions and the way they are
interpreted in concrete situations is dialogical and moves in a hermeneutic

circle. Hence, ethical insights cannot be disconnected from the process of
living (as moral agents entangled in narrative webs) because there can be
“no anterior certainty concerning what the good life is directed toward as a
whole” (Gadamer, 1997, p. 321). As the end (what makes life good) remains
permanently open, there can be no anterior, fixed knowledge of the right
means to achieve it either: “in moral actions there is no prior knowledge
of the right means which realize the end, and this is so because, above all
else, the ends themselves are at stake and not perfectly fixed beforehand”
(1987, p. 123). Thus, in ethical reasoning, we cannot strictly separate reflec-
tion concerning the right means from reflection concerning the right ends.
Ethical reasoning is simultaneously aimed both at one’s overall vision of
the good life and at assessing what is the right course of action in a par-
ticular situation and in what way the end appears in light of that particu-
lar action (p. 123). Narratives can contribute both to our overall visions of
good lives and just societies and to our sense of the ethical complexity of
particular situations.
Aristotle and Gadamer deal with ethical reasoning in connection to our
condition as moral agents in general, but the temporality of this process
is even more salient in the case of the moderns, who have generally no
unfaltering faith in a pregiven order of things and no universally shared
conception of the good life. The modern novel typically presents the tem-
poral process of becoming, in which moral agents embedded in a particular
historical world go through new experiences, make them their own, and are
transformed by these experiences as they search for a sense of who they
are and what makes their life meaningful.53 This search is fueled by narra-
tive imagination: by imagining where one comes from, how one’s life could
unfold, and who one could become. In the modern novel, the process of
ethical reflection is inextricably temporal for both characters and readers.
Not only do the characters become who they are only through the temporal
process of living their lives, but readers can engage in their ethical evalua-
tion only by considering the life process that led the person to act in a cer-
tain way, and the temporal process of engaging with this process requires
constant re-evaluation.
If ethical understanding is a phronetic art that cannot be taught in
abstraction and that is characterized by the temporal process of experienc-
ing and imagining concrete situations in their complexity, it is no wonder
that narrative fiction—which is emphatically about temporal processes of
ethical decision-making in complex fictional worlds—is the art of ethical
imagination. Musil saw literature as a “moral laboratory” (1983, p. 1173),
and Ricoeur further develops this view by arguing that narrative fiction is
“a vast laboratory in which we experiment with estimations, evaluations,
421
and judgments of approval and condemnation through which narrativity

serves as a propaedeutic to ethics” (1992, p. 115). In this “great laboratory
of the imaginary,” ethical questions are explored through imaginative var-
iations (p. 164). In this laboratory, however, we do not pass judgements
from secure, pre-established value positions; at its most powerful, the labo-
ratory transforms our narratively mediated ethical identities and the moral
space in which we navigate. In thinking of narrative fiction as a mode of
exploration that can function as a form of ethical inquiry in its own right,
we should consider the possibility that the ethical lies in the power of lit-
erary narratives to function as a form of ethical questioning that unsettles
us, rather than in the affirmative moral positions or arguments they may
present. The most important contribution of narrative fiction to ethical
imagination takes place when the application of knowledge that we already
possess is precisely not enough—when the subsumption model of narra-
tive understanding breaks down.
The ethical potential of narratives that function as a form of ethical
inquiry is linked to their capacity to expand our sense of the possible. Such
narratives can sensitize us to the multitude of ways of approaching a par-
ticular ethical issue and expand the space in which we can move, intellec-
tually and emotionally, as we deal with ethically complex issues. At the
opposite—ethically problematic—end of the continuum are narratives
that reinforce dogmatism: narratives that diminish our possibilities and
shut down discussion by declaring or implying that there is only one right
model of the good life, of being in relationships, or of organizing social life.
In contrast, narratives that function as a mode of ethical inquiry imagi-
natively and undogmatically explore different kinds of narrative identities
and in-betweens. At their most radical, such narratives can produce new
insights into some of our most fundamental ethical questions, concern-
ing how to live our lives in relation to those of others and what makes life
meaningful, new ways of asking these questions, and even new ways of
understanding the very meaning of the ethical.
INTERSECTING ASPECTS OF THE ETHICAL POTENTIAL

OF STORYTELLING
The six aspects of the ethical potential of narratives, discussed in this chap-
ter, are not separate from each other, and, as I have argued, an expansion
of the sense of the possible is integral to all of them. Multiple interlacing
threads link them to one another. To recapitulate from the perspective of
the sense of the possible, storytelling can enlarge our sense of what we

can do, think, feel, perceive, and experience, and how we can relate to oth-
ers. We understand our possibilities through being entangled in dialogical
relationships with others, and we understand others as agents who act and
suffer in response to possibilities open—or closed—to them. The narrative
in-between shapes our ways of understanding our own possibilities, those
of others, and possibilities that we have as “we”; the creation of new narra-
tive in-betweens entails novel intersubjective spaces in which unexpected
possibilities of being, feeling, thinking, doing, and sharing open up. Taking
the other’s perspective is linked to the ability to imagine the space of pos-
sibilities from which the other sees the world; by inviting us to imagine
different perspectives on the world, literary narratives can show us new
possibilities, including possibilities of more inclusive narratives of “us.”
When we take seriously narrative fiction as a form of ethical inquiry, we
can see how literary narratives can explore the limits of our ethical imag-
ination and provide us with fresh possibilities to imagine good lives and
just societies.
Throughout this chapter I have argued that narrative hermeneutics
should both articulate the various aspects of the ethical potential of sto-
rytelling and acknowledge that not all storytelling is beneficial for us. In
fact, most of the time, the ethical potential of narratives remains unre-
alized. The six aspects of the ethical potential and dangers of storytelling
analyzed in this chapter hopefully provide analytic and evaluative criteria
for a differentiated analysis of the ethics of particular narratives. Whether
the ethical potential of storytelling will or will not be realized in particular
cases can only be evaluated situationally, in context. In the next chapters
I will elucidate this situationality and social embeddedness of storytelling
practices in relation to fictional and autobiographical narratives. While the
discussion in this chapter has focused mainly on the different aspects of
the potential of storytelling, the following chapters discuss narratives that
alert us to the dangers of storytelling. At the same time, they demonstrate
how ethically complex, challenging narratives can expand our sense of the
possible by exploring the limits of our ethical imagination.
It seems to me that both the opponents and proponents of narrativ-
ity (particularly in psychology, philosophy, and literary theory) frequently
pay insufficient attention to the way in which narrative practices of sense-
making are always embedded in sociocultural, historical worlds and gain
meaning only when interpreted in concrete life situations. Shifting atten-
tion in this direction allows us to see that the question of the relationship
between narrative and life is always also a question of the subject’s relation
to social practices and dynamics of power. Above all, as the next chapters
hopefully show, the ethically crucial question is not whether narratives are
41
“good” or “bad,” but rather how individuals and communities use, perpetu-
ate, and transform cultural narrative practices to construct their identities,
interpret their experiences, and engage with those of others.
NOTES
1. “Hier ist dies oder das geschehen, wird geschehen, muß geschehen; sondern
er erfindet: Hier könnte, sollte oder müßte geschehn; und wenn man ihm von
irgend etwas erklärt, daß es so sei, wie es sei, dann denkt er: Nun, es könnte
wahrscheinlich auch anders sein” (Musil, 1974, p. 16).
2. “[L]‌’Histoire n’est pas, comme voudraient le faire croire les manuels scolaires,
une série discontinue de dates, de traités et de batailles spectaculaires et
cliquetantes . . . la terne existence d’une vieille dame, c’est l’Histoire elle-même,
la matière même de l’Histoire” (Simon, 1958, pp. 35–36).
3. On how the future anterior is linked to the way in which “memory has a form
that lends itself to anticipation as much as to recollection,” see Currie (2016,
p. 203). I have learned a lot about the future anterior from Jouni Teittinen.
4. Drawing on how remembrance “cuts across and binds together diverse spatial,
temporal, and cultural sites,” Rothberg delineates a “comparative imagination”
in which “comparisons, analogies, and other multidirectional invocations are an
inevitable part of the struggle for justice” (2009, pp. 11, 21, 29).
5. See Ricoeur (1984, pp. 74–76, 80; 1988, p. 249; 1992, p. 148).
6. Zetterberg Gjerlevsen (2016). See also Nielsen, Phelan, & Walsh (2015).
7. Ricoeur discusses, from a similar perspective, imagination as the “general
function of developing practical possibilities” (1991a, p. 178).
8. Both in Felski’s approach, inspired by Latour’s actor-network theory, and in
philosophical hermeneutics, the literary text is not seen as an object, but rather
as having a mode of being that resembles more that of a subject-like agent, with
whom we engage in a dialogue.
9. The idea that interpretation takes place “in front of the text” is one of Ricoeur’s
key metaphors: “to interpret is to explicate the type of being-in-the-world
unfolded in front of the text. . . . Through fiction and poetry, new possibilities of
being-in-the-world are opened up within everyday reality” (1991a, p. 86).
10. See also Taylor (1989, pp. 47, 52); MacIntyre (1984, pp. 204–225).
11. On how cultural sense-making practices that we fail to bring to the level of
critical self-reflection affect us “behind our backs,” see Gadamer (1993a, p. 247).
12. On the narrativization of identity in the Bildungsroman, see Saariluoma (2007).
13. On “small stories research,” see Georgakopoulou (2007); Bamberg &
Georgakopoulou (2008).
14. The Women’s March was the largest single-day demonstration in the US history.
In Washington alone, it drew at least 500,000 participants, and worldwide
participation was estimated to be around five million.
15. Felski in her talk “Identification: A Defense,” in Turku, April 2016.
16. See, for example, Heidegger (1996, p. 152); Ricoeur (1991a, p. 66). Ricoeur writes
about the “shock of the possible” (1984, p. 79).
17. For a fuller discussion of how narrative self-reflection can be linked to blindness
toward one’s ethical responsibility, see Meretoja (2014b, pp. 177–214).

18. “[E]‌s ist etwas Beleidigendes darin, verstanden zu werden. . . . Comprendre c’est
égaler.”
19. In addition to the first level of violence, there is institutionalized concealment
of the originary violence and violence as “what is commonly called evil, war,
indiscretion, rape” (Derrida, 1997, p. 112).
20. See, e.g., Lyotard (1991, p. 74); for a broader discussion, see Meretoja (2014b,
pp. 86–91).
21. From a certain perspective, the poststructuralist critique of understanding,
however, can be seen to assume, implicitly and performatively, the possibility of
non-subsumptive understanding: if nonviolent understanding were not possible,
what would be the point of the critique?
22. A starting point for the non-subsumptive model can be traced further back, to
Kant’s (2002, pp. 274–276) aesthetics, in which he acknowledges that not all
judgments follow the logic of subsuming the object under a known universal
(as suggested in Kritik der reinen Vernunft): in addition to such “determinative
judgments,” there are “reflective judgments” that involve seeking unknown
universals. Kant, however, failed to consider adequately how these “universals”
are constituted intersubjectively in time and how they vary across historical
and cultural worlds. Arendt drew on Kant’s theory of reflective judgment in
developing her own political philosophy, but failed to address the ahistorical
character of his thinking. Acknowledging this, Stone-Mediatore (2003, p. 68)
proceeds to consider how a critical engagement with Kant’s theory of reflective
judgment could be used in further developing an Arendtian theory of political
storytelling.
23. Such a utopia also characterizes Derrida’s ethics: encountering the other
nonviolently, he argues, would require that one “does not pass through the
neutral element of the universal” and, instead, encounters the other without the
violence of concepts, which, in turn, is impossible (1978, p. 96).
24. See, e.g., Ricoeur, 1984, p. 75; Cavarero (2000, 2005); Guaraldo (2013).
25. On my non-subsumptive model of narrative understanding, see also Meretoja
(2018).
26. Such criticism has been issued both within trauma theory (Brown, 1995;
Rothberg, 2009, 2014; Craps, 2013) and from positions that argue for moving
beyond it when “describing what happens to persons and populations as
an effect of catastrophic impacts”; unlike much of trauma theory suggests,
crisis is not exceptional “but a process embedded in the ordinary” (Berlant,
2011, pp. 9–10). Cognitive scientists, in turn, have questioned, on the basis of
empirical research, the view that trauma is inaccessible and unspeakable (see
Pederson, 2014).
27. Of course, one should acknowledge that the therapeutic situation involves power
structures and the danger of subsumptive appropriation (e.g., the therapist
forcing the patient’s story into certain explanatory categories), but awareness
of this danger is a step toward non-subsumptive understanding, which can
function as a regulative ideal for the therapeutic process.
28. See also White (2007, p. 40). Vassilieva contrasts narrative therapy with
McAdams’s approach, which risks “reducing the variety of personal stories
to one underlying myth” (2016, p. 174); his idea of the redemptive self as
underlying American identity seems to follow the logic of subsumptive
storytelling.
46
1
29. See, e.g., White & Epston (1990); White (1997, 2007); Payne (2006). Similarly,
Frie suggests that the aim of hermeneutic psychoanalytic practice is “to create
new possibilities for knowing and relating that are generated in the formation of
new narratives” (2016, pp. 129–131).
30. Felski (2016), in her talk “Identification: A Defense.” While Felski keeps the
notion of identification separate from that of identity, for me the conceptual
link between these two is important, and I see the dynamics of “identification-
with” as central to how identity as a sense of self is constituted, but instead of
understanding identity in terms of sameness, I see it as a temporal process of
becoming (see Chapter 2).
31. On how communities are built on shared memory, see Margalit (2002), and
Rothberg (2009, p. 15).
32. Gottschall asserts that storytelling continues to “fulfill its ancient function of
binding society by reinforcing a set of common values and strengthening the
ties of common culture,” thereby functioning as “the grease and glue of society”
(2013, pp. 137–138), but as Randall puts it, storytelling is not just “the glue
that binds us together” but, “just as often, the poison that pushes us apart”
(2015, p. 3).
33. On the concept of cultural trauma, see Alexander et al. (eds.) (2004); Korhonen
(2013); for criticism, see Kansteiner & Weilnböck, (2008).
34. On how the figure of the authoritarian father is seen to represent the legacy of
fascism in second-generation German literature, particularly in the so-called
Väterliteratur, see McGlothlin (2006).
35. These novels include Sofi Oksanen’s Puhdistus (2008, Purge), Katja Kettu’s
Kätilö (2011, The Midwife), and Jenni Linturi’s Isänmaan tähden (2011, For the
Fatherland). On the Finnish national narratives of the Second World War, see
Meinander (2011).
36. See, for example, http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/brexit/angela-merkel-
warnt-nach-brexit-vor-schnellen-schluessen-14306334.html.
37. On the need to extend hermeneutics beyond the human, see Herman (2016).
38. Batson (2009). On the ethical potential of literature in cultivating empathy, see
also Keen (2007); Locatelli (2015); V. Nünning (2015); A. Nünning (2015).
39. In his review, Batson (2009, p. 274) concludes that the finding according to
which “the imagine-other perspective activates the right inferior parietal lobule
(TPJ)—a region associated with distinguishing self from other and self-agency
from other agency—supports the idea that this perspective is not associated
with self-other merging but with self-other distinctiveness.” See also Coplan
(2011) on the need to distinguish emotional contagion from other-oriented
perspective-taking, which she sees as a necessary condition of genuine empathy.
40. This mediation is not something that one could switch off; hence, no
neuroimaging can compare “mediated” and “unmediated” imagining of others’
perspectives.
41. “Hermeneutic justice” only works as a relative, comparative notion: there can be
no such thing as absolute/perfect hermeneutic justice because it is not possible
for us to understand even ourselves perfectly, not to mention other people.
42. On the hermeneutic significance of distance, see also Ricoeur (1991a, pp. 75–
88); Freeman (2010). See Sklar (2013) on distance as a constitutive aspect of
sympathy.

43. See, e.g., Walton (1990); Gerrig (1998). For an insightful critical discussion
of such a dominant way of conceptualizing literary engagement, see Polvinen
(2012).
44. On terrorist recruitment narratives, see Falke (2018).
45. In making this argument, Nussbaum seems to be addressing readers who are
not themselves members of minority groups, i.e., white, middle-class (primarily
male) Westerners.
46. See also Nussbaum (1997, p. 90), and Johnson’s cognitively oriented view: “our
moral understanding and deliberation depends crucially on the cultivation of our
moral imagination” (1993, p. 1).
47. As Walker puts it, narratives situate moral problems in the context of socially
meaningful (inter)action that unfolds in time: “Because negotiation of our lives
in moral terms is a continuing process, new situations must be mapped onto
past understandings and projected into future possibilities. . . . [S]‌tories . . . show
how a situation comes to be the particular problem it is, and . . . explore
imaginatively the continuations that might resolve the problem and what they
mean for the parties involved” (2007, p. 72).
48. On simulation theories, see Bergen (2012, p. 13).
49. According to Hämäläinen, a “literary turn” has taken place in Anglo-American
moral philosophy since the 1980s as utilitarian and deontological theories have
been challenged by virtue ethics, feminist ethics, and various “particularisms”
(2016, p. 6).
50. On the modern conception of literature, underlying the Bildungsroman,
see Saariluoma (2004). As Locatelli (2015, p. 61) puts it, modern literature’s
“contribution to ethics comes largely from the polyphony of voices and points of
view it orchestrates and from the hermeneutic debate it provokes.”
51. Derrida seems to have in mind a kind of regulative idea of what is most essential
to the institution of literature; he is obviously not making a descriptive claim
about how the literary institution works; in totalitarian societies, for example,
literature is of course a very different kind of institution.
52. Gadamer acknowledges that the concept of application is problematic precisely
insofar as it connotes pregiven knowledge that we “already possess” and simply
apply to a particular case (1987, p. 120).
53. On the link between the modern novel and narrative identity, see Taylor (1989);
Saariluoma (2004); Meretoja (2014b, pp. 9–12).
4
8
1
CHAPTER 4
The Uses and Abuses of Narrative

for Life
Julia Franck’s Die Mittagsfrau
E choing Friedrich Nietzsche’s analysis of how history can be either ben-

eficial or harmful for life, the title of this chapter indicates my aim to
explore, in more concrete terms, both the ethically valuable and the vio-
lent effects of narratives on lives. I will test the framework of hermeneu-
tic narrative ethics, delineated in Chapter 3, by using it as a lens through
which to analyze the uses and abuses of narrative for life in Julia Franck’s
novel Die Mittagsfrau (2007), which has appeared in English as both The
Blind Side of the Heart (2009) and The Blindness of the Heart (2010),1 and
has received high critical acclaim, including the prestigious German Book
Prize. By exploring the ethical complexity of narrative practices in relation
to intersecting histories of violence, the novel provides a compelling study
of how narratives expand and diminish the space of possibilities in which
moral agents act and suffer.
In Germany, literature has played a major role in dealing with the trau-
matic legacy of the Second World War, and each new generation of writers
has brought new perspectives into the negotiation of the cultural memory
of the war.2 Franck is one of the most interesting of the younger genera-
tion of contemporary German novelists to question the dominance of a
male perspective and a stereotypical perpetrator–victim dichotomy in rep-
resentations of the war and the Holocaust. She asserts that women’s expe-
rience of the war is a realm that novelists have either largely neglected, or
dealt with through strategies of victimization or glorification, and that in
501
trying to understand the Holocaust through literary imagination, it is nec-

essary to think beyond the dichotomous categories of the “good victim”
(typically a Jew) and the “evil perpetrator” (typically a Nazi) (Meretoja
& Franck, 2010). To date, there are not many novels about the Second
World War that explore the mind of a (female) Jewish protagonist who is
not unambiguously a victim or a survivor. Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser
(1995, The Reader) was heralded as a groundbreaking novel because it
focuses on a female perpetrator and portrays her in human terms, but,
as Erin McGlothlin analyzes, the narrative gives no access to the perpe-
trator’s mind because her entire story is filtered through the male pro-
tagonist’s “narrow, egocentric, and often self-serving perspective” (2010,
pp. 216–217). Die Mittagsfrau, in contrast, is mostly focalized through the
female protagonist and narrates her life story in all its complexity and
ambiguity.
The central questions underlying Die Mittagsfrau include the following:
What do stories do to us, ethically speaking? What does the war do to our
narrative identities, and what experiential aspects of the Second World
War and the Holocaust have been underexamined in their literary repre-
sentations? The novel begins to unravel these issues in terms of a more
concrete question: How was it possible that after the Second World War
there were women who felt that they were no longer able to be mothers and
ended up abandoning their children?
Julia Franck’s own father experienced such an abandonment: her grand-
mother survived the war with her seven-year-old son (Franck’s father), but
when the war was over, she left him sitting on a bench at a railway station,
told him to wait, and never returned. Franck wanted to try to imagine how
this was possible.3 Her grandmother was by no means the only one to arrive
at such a desperate decision. Not only after the Second World War, but
also after other military conflicts, such as those in Bosnia and Rwanda, war
babies in particular have frequently been abandoned, including children
who were not born out of direct sexual violence.4 By writing an imaginary
family history, Franck explores narrative as a means of understanding both
a personal and a broader cultural past—in terms of human lives unfolding
in the space of possibilities of a particular historical world.
SHIFTING POSSIBILITIES
Franck’s novel begins with a prologue in which the protagonist, a young

woman called Alice— who later turns out to be half- Jewish Helene
Würsich—abandons her seven-year-old son Peter at a railway station,

along with the address of his relatives, as the reader later finds out. What
follows is the story of Helene’s life up to that point, a story through which
the novel asks whether it is possible to understand such a decision by fol-
lowing her preceding traumatic experiences in the given historical context.
The opening scene, after the prologue, depicts Helene and her older sister
Martha lying in bed fighting over a hot-water bottle. As Helene takes hold
of her sister’s thick, soft hair, it reminds her of their mother’s hair, which
Martha frequently combs. Their mother purrs contently when her hair is
brushed, but if she thinks that a strand of her hair is pulled out, she has an
aggressive outburst, cries out “with the fervour of some large animal,” and
begins to throw things at her daughters with “violent, aimless movements”
(Franck, 2009, p. 26):5
But while Mother shouted at her daughters, cursing them, complaining that
she’d given birth to a couple of useless brats, Helene kept on and on repeating
the same thing like a prayer: May I comb your hair? Her voice quivered: May
I comb your hair? As a pair of scissors flew through the air she raised her arms to
protect her head: May I comb your hair? . . . [Mother] whimpered, and finally she
kept on stammering the name Ernst Josef, Ernst Josef. . . . This is us, Mother.
Martha spoke sternly and calmly. We’re here. Ernst Josef is dead, like your other
sons, he was born dead, do you hear me, Mother? Dead, ten years ago. But we
are here. (pp. 27–28)6
This scene introduces the reader to a family history of trauma. Helene’s

way of seeking refuge in the chant-like repetition at the moment of abuse
betrays her traumatic relationship with her mother. As the reader learns,
the mother is a Jew whom the people of their small hometown, Bautzen,
treat as an inferior. She is also traumatized by the loss of four sons: most of
the time she is lost in a confused, desperate state, struggling with suicidal
thoughts, as each of the lost sons “seemed to her a demand for her life to
end” (p. 58).7 She remains unstable, locked in her dark room, and refuses
to talk to anyone. As she fails to be emotionally available to her two daugh-
ters, a nanny, Marie, takes care of them.
As contemporary trauma studies increasingly acknowledges, trauma is
not always caused by a single catastrophic event. Ongoing processes—such
as racist practices or other types of structural oppression—can also be
traumatizing (see Rothberg, 2009, pp. 89–92; Craps, 2013, p. 4; Buelens
et al. 2014). The feminist psychotherapist Laura S. Brown wrote as early
as 1995 about the way in which girls’ and women’s “secret, private, hid-
den experiences of everyday pain” tend to be left outside the definition of
trauma (1995, p. 110). In psychiatric diagnostics, trauma has been, until
Th e U s e s a n d A b u s e s of N a r r at i v e f or Li f e [ 151 ]
521
recently, defined in terms of “an event that is outside the range of human
experience” (p. 100):
War and genocide, which are the work of men and male-oriented culture, are
agreed-upon traumas. . . . Public events, visible to all, rarely themselves harbin-
gers of stigma for their victims, things that can and do happen to men—all of
these constitute trauma in the official lexicon. (pp. 101–102)
Brown argues for the necessity to admit that “everyday assaults on integrity
and personal safety are sources of psychic trauma” (p. 105), and that for the
majority of girls and women in the world, the constant threat of trauma
(linked to rape, silencing, violations of physical and psychic integrity) is “a
continuing background noise rather than an unusual event” (pp. 102–103).
Helene is traumatized (most obviously) by her mother, who only wanted
sons and emotionally abandons her daughters, refusing to give them recog-
nition as subjects of experience. The legitimacy of Helene’s experiences and
her need for affection are constantly questioned; she is the object of her
mother’s wrath and loathing. She is not only a victim of what Fricker (2007)
calls “epistemic injustice”; it is not just that her credibility as a knower is
called into question—what is undermined is her whole existence as a sin-
gular, unique being who deserves recognition and care. Cold mothers who
deny their children love and protection are recurring figures in Franck’s
novels, which explore how motherhood is socially conditioned. In Rücken
an Rücken (2011, Back to Back, 2013), for example, the mother, Käthe, mod-
eled after Franck’s maternal grandmother who lived in East Germany as a
devoted socialist, teaches her children that no one has “a right to love and
protection” (Franck, 2013, p. 99).8
What are the hermeneutic and affective resources available to a child as
she struggles to deal with such coldness? What are the narratives in terms
of which Helene seeks to make sense of her painful experiences? Marie, the
nanny, frequently tells Helene and Martha an old Slavic legend according to
which Lady Midday, or the Noonday Witch, “appears in the harvest fields at
noon and can confuse your mind or even kill you unless you hold her atten-
tion for an hour” by telling stories to her; Marie explains to the girls that
their mother simply refused to talk to the Noonday Witch:
[H]‌
er lady, as she called the girls’ mother, just wouldn’t speak to the
spirit. . . . There was nothing to be done about it . . . although all her lady had to
do was talk to the Noonday Witch. . . . Just passing on a little wisdom, she told
the girls. Martha and Helene had known the tale of the Noonday Witch as long
as they could remember; there was something comforting about it, because it

suggested that their mother’s confused state of mind was merely a curse that
could easily be lifted. (Franck, 2009, p. 136)9
This mythical narrative provides the girls with an interpretative model for
rendering their experiences intelligible. They also create their own mythi-
cal stories, such as that of the “blindness of the heart,” which is Martha’s
way of explaining to Helene why their mother neglects them: “her mother
could no longer recognize her younger daughter, her heart had gone blind,
as Martha said, so that she couldn’t see people any more” (p. 114). For the
girls, narrative sense-making is a process of sharing experiences in a way
that consoles and empowers them: it creates an intersubjective narrative
in-between that helps them bear and deal with a painful situation.
The ontological and ethical dimensions of storytelling are entwined in
the way stories shape the space of possibilities in which the characters’
lives unfold. The childhood and youth of the girls is structured by the sto-
ries that surround them, including not just the stories they hear, but also
the ones they read. Novels from their father’s library in particular provide
them with mirrors in which to reflect on their own being and to imagine
different courses of life. They secretly steal “treasures” from the library,
such as Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea: A Tragedy, which Helene tucks
under her apron; in her room “her familiar friends were waiting, Young
Werther and the Marquise of O.” (p. 120).10
Literary narratives play a crucial role in opening up new worlds for
Helene and in helping her imagine a future for herself in dialogue with
others. Especially at bedtime, Martha tells Helene stories about people she
knows, including young women who have studied to become teachers or
other professionals. These stories lead them to imagine a future in which
Helene, too, will study at university: “When Martha painted such a picture
of her future, Helene held her breath, hoping Martha wouldn’t stop telling
that story, would go on and on, and picture Helene studying human anat-
omy some day in a huge lecture room at Dresden University” (p. 49).11 Here
the emphasis is on the futurity of their developing narrative imagination.
Given the historical context, the gender system plays a decisive role
in defining and shrinking the space of possibilities in which Helene and
Martha have to fashion their lives. Their mother does nothing to encour-
age her daughters to cultivate their potential; on the contrary, her struggle
to control them ends up diminishing their possibilities. When the teacher
suggests to the mother that Helene would benefit from studying at uni-
versity, the mother actively robs her daughter of this dream, wanting her
instead to do something allegedly simple and useful. In fact, Helene’s
mother is more attached to the cultural stereotypes of what is appropriate
541
for women than Helene’s father, who is more open-minded and questions
conventional gender roles. Helene recalls how, when she was younger, her
father often asked her to stand guard at the doorway of the salesroom of
his printing works as he removed the money from the till, and to whistle if
anyone came:
Sometimes Helene said: Girls aren’t supposed to whistle. Then he would smile
and reply: Oh, are you a girl, then? And once, half hidden by the open cupboard
door, he chanted the lines he had written in her album: Sweet as the violet be, /
virtuous, modest and pure, /not like the rose whom we see /flaunting her full-blown
allure. Then he changed his tone of voice, adjuring her almost menacingly: But all
girls must know how to whistle, just you remember that. (p. 133)12
Helene’s father encourages her to become a strong and capable woman who
transgresses the norms and expectations of conventional identity catego-
ries. The loss of her father is one of the painful losses of her childhood. As
the First World War breaks out and he is drafted, Helene’s mother descends
into almost complete “darkness,” leaving the girls practically orphaned. He
is wounded in a random accident that is contrasted with the public dis-
course of heroism. In the novel, the war causes senseless misery and robs
Helene’s father of his dignity:
Cautiously, his thoughts circled around ideas like honour and conscience. Ernst
Ludwig Würsich felt ashamed of his own existence. What use was a one-legged,
wounded man, after all? He hadn’t so much as set eyes on a Russian, he hadn’t
looked an enemy in the face. Still less had he risked his life in some honorable
action in this war. The loss of his leg was a pitiful accident and could not be con-
sidered any kind of tribute to the enemy. (p. 68)13
After their father’s death, Helene and Martha feel that the other worlds
they had dreamed of slip beyond their reach. Helene’s “possible self” as
a student or as a doctor fades away as such a future becomes suddenly so
improbable that she cannot even hold on to that possible self as a “believa-
ble self” or as a “desired self.”14
Helene and Martha’s sense of the possible is radically altered, however,
when they receive a letter from their aunt inviting them to live with her
in Berlin. A new world of possibilities opens up for them, and their entire
horizon of expectation is transformed:
A whole world unfolded before their eyes. . . . Two years ago, when their father
died, they had thought that from now on their lives would consist of working

at the hospital and growing old here in Bautzen, at the side of their increasingly
confused mother—but here was this letter, the prelude to their future, and only
now could they really dream of it. (p. 147)15
The deictic “here” and “now” invite the reader to participate in the girls’ vis-
ceral experience of being at a turning point in their lives. The passage illu-
minates how the transformation of Helene’s space of possibilities is linked
to modifications in the relationship between her narrative unconscious
and narrative imagination. At her childhood home, her narrative uncon-
scious is shaped by the culturally dominant narrative models that dictate
what a woman can become: in these narratives, a woman’s main task is to
make herself useful in the roles of mother and wife, or by becoming a nurse
or a secretary. Helene cultivates her own, secret narrative imagination,
mainly in dialogue with Martha. This dialogue is a means of creating an
intersubjective relational space, a dialogic narrative in-between, even if it
remains a realm of fragile dreams and fantasies. In contrast to their life in
the conservative milieu of their hometown, the invitation to live with their
aunt in Berlin, known for its social diversity, signifies an immense expan-
sion of their horizon. For Martha, this diversity is particularly important
for her sexual self-expression. In Bautzen, it is not an option for a woman
to be in a relationship with another woman; in Berlin, Martha can openly
love and live with her partner Leontine. The contrast between these two
worlds as spaces of possibilities is crystallized in the moment when Helene
tries to explain, in vain, to the patriarchal professor of surgery for whom
she works why she and Martha want to leave home and move to Berlin to
live with their bohemian aunt: “Martha and I will have possibilities open
to us in Berlin, please understand, possibilities. We will work there, and
study—possibly” (p. 155).16
Later in Berlin, at one of her aunt’s parties, Helene meets a young phi-
losophy student, Carl Wertheimer. Helene has long discussions with him
about literature: “Her excitement was caused by something she had never
known before, an encounter with someone with whom she shared mutual
ideas, a mutual curiosity, and, indeed, as she confided to Martha, a mutual
passion for literature” (p. 211).17 She feels that with Carl, life and literature
impregnate one another, and ultimate happiness would be to share all read-
ing experiences with him: “If I could read every book with you I’d be happy,
do you believe that?” (p. 223).18
As Helene and Carl keep exchanging stories of their past and dreams of
their future, these stories create an intersubjective, shared space between
them, a sense of “us”: “Helene liked the way he said we as she lay there in
his arms” (p. 227).19 This is a “we” that not only allows for but celebrates
561
difference: “it was a sense of closeness that did not merely admit or allow
little secrets and differences; it unconditionally celebrated those secrets”
(p. 261).20 Alan Badiou (2012) suggests that love is about the reinvention
of the world from the perspective of two, of difference. Precisely such a
reinvention takes place as Carl and Helene engage in a dialogic process of
narrative world-making, constructing a narrative in-between that becomes
inseparable from who they are.
In Berlin, with Carl, Helene’s space of possibilities is radically trans-
formed as it becomes possible for her, for the first time, to cultivate her
talents and imagine different courses in life. Together, they develop what
can be characterized as a dialogic narrative imagination. This involves engag-
ing in an open-ended process of co-telling in which a variety of possible
shared futures emerge. Although narrative imagination is always dialogic
in the sense that it takes shape in a dialogic relationship to cultural nar-
rative models of sense-making, it can be dialogic in the stronger sense of
interpersonal dialogic reciprocity, characterized by the kind of openness
and receptivity to the other that leads to the dissolution of clear boundar-
ies between the I and the non-I. Helene’s and Carl’s relationship brings out
the fundamentally temporal dimension of the process of becoming oneself
together with the other in a process of dialogic storytelling. Storytelling is
presented in the novel as a way of telling where one comes from—making
the past intelligible to others in the present—but also as a way of orient-
ing oneself to the future and imagining possible futures with others. For
Helene and Carl, stories expand the present moment, both into the past
and into the future. They come to know each other by exchanging stories
about their past, imagining what they can become together, and reinvent-
ing their lives in relation to the stories they have read. Hence, storytelling
is presented as a way of understanding the other in his or her temporal
singularity, of constructing a shared narrative in-between, and of expand-
ing one’s sense of the possible through a dialogical cultivation of narrative
imagination.
Thus, Die Mittagsfrau agrees, to a certain extent, with the Arendtian-
hermeneutic view that narratives can make painful experiences shareable
and bearable, that they can be a means of understanding others in their
singularity, and that they can help us take the perspective of the other and
imagine different possibilities of being. What it also indicates, however,
is the limits of the ethical potential of storytelling: narratives do not nec-
essarily make a life ethical in the way suggested by Ricoeur when he iden-
tifies a narrated life with an examined and hence ethically superior life.
Helene narrates her life, drawing on her family mythology (particularly
the narratives of the Noonday Witch and the blindness of the heart), and

she engages in narrative self-reflection, but this does not save her. From
early on, she knows that there is something fundamentally wrong with
her mother, something irreparably broken, but the stories of the Noonday
Witch and of the blindness of the heart are also a way of avoiding proper
engagement with the unbearably painful experience of being emotionally
abandoned. Only at rare moments does she acknowledge “her old fear that
some day her heart might go as blind as her mother’s” (p. 116).21 This is
what eventually happens to Helene, and the stories of Lady Midday and the
blindness of the heart can do nothing to prevent it. On the contrary, they
may even unconsciously lead her to repeat a destructive emotional pattern
and to follow a path similar to that of her own mother when the situation
becomes desperate enough.
It could be argued, however, that this happens precisely because Helene
is unable to bring to the level of consciousness and to engage critically
with these narratives and the repressed painful affects they carry. To a cer-
tain extent, she naturalizes the narrative of the blindness of the heart and
applies it to her own life subsumptively; insofar as this happens, the narra-
tive limits and blinds her, leading her to believe that her life (or at least her
life as a mother) is somehow fated to fail. In any case, the novel suggests
that potentially most harmful for us are the stories—particularly natural-
ized stories—that remain part of our narrative unconscious due to a failure
to engage with them self-awarely as part of the narrative imagination that
we develop in dialogue with our significant others.
FROM DIALOGUE TO MUTENESS: STORYTELLING AS AN ART

OF SURVIVAL
Die Mittagsfrau presents human beings as irreducibly dialogically

constituted—as beings who become who they are only in a dialogic relation
to others. This makes their existence fragile and vulnerable. The novel sug-
gests that sharing experiences with others through storytelling is a neces-
sary condition for cultivating a narrative sense of self and for experiencing
life as meaningful. As a more or less orphaned child, Helene’s most impor-
tant significant other—the one with whom she shares her experiences—is
for a long time Martha, and then Carl, her fiancé. Helene’s dialogue with
Carl transforms her narrative imagination and sense of the possible, her
entire sense of who she is and what is possible for her. When Carl dies in
a car accident, Helene’s sense of the possible is radically diminished, and
her experience of time shrinks to the present: “Helene wasn’t waiting for
anything now. . . . Time contracted, rolled itself up, folded itself” (p. 275).22
581
Her wonderful idea of studying had now moved into the remote distance; it
seemed to Helene as if that wish had belonged to another, earlier life and was not
her own any more. Helene no longer wished for anything. The visions that they
had developed, discussed and conjured up together were all gone, had vanished
with Carl. The man who shared her memories no longer existed. (pp. 281–282)23
When life is reduced to a mere struggle to survive, the temporal horizon

shrinks to the present and, as Simone de Beauvoir argues, one cannot gen-
uinely commit oneself to a goal “insofar as it is the future of this present
moment and insofar as it is the surpassed past of days to come” (1976, p. 27).
Helene struggles with every “ordinary, unasked-for, unwanted, unimagina-
ble new day of her life” that is dominated by enormous, shattering ques-
tions to which she cannot even begin to imagine possible answers: “What
was her life really like? What was it going to be like, was it ever to be any-
thing, was she ever to be anything?” (Franck, 2009, p. 293).24 Helene recog-
nizes that living a human life is about searching for a connection with other
human beings that could release us “from our condemnation to isolation
and solitude”—that is why we think of, talk to, and embrace each other—
but she “found herself in a dilemma, torn both ways”:25
She didn’t want to think, she didn’t want to talk, she didn’t want to embrace
another human being ever again. But she wanted to live on for Carl, not in order
to survive him but to live for him. What else was left of him but her memories?
How was it possible to live on without thought or language or human embraces?
(p. 299)26
Helene loses her sense of identity even more dramatically when the
Nazis seize power. In order to survive as a half-Jew, she agrees to marry
Wilhelm, a member of the Nazi Party, who arranges a false identity for her.
She becomes Alice, an Aryan woman, who must remain silent about her
true past and identity. This leaves her feeling alienated, as if she were no
longer living her own life: “Something like me isn’t supposed to exist at all.
It burst out of her” (p. 312).27 The experience of not living one’s own life is
connected to a sense of not being in contact with one’s own emotions and
experiences, being unable to communicate them to anyone, and to a con-
comitant sense of being unable to imagine in what direction one’s life could
develop: “But she lacked any real idea of what life should and could be. She
would have to turn to someone else for that” (p. 315).28
Helene’s passionate discussions with Carl are contrasted with the lack
of connection she feels to Wilhelm. They never really talk to each other,
not even on their wedding cruise: “Two strangers sat side by side looking

in different directions” (p. 332).29 Later, Wilhelm’s supremacist racism
becomes increasingly abusive: “Perhaps jokes are a question of race,
child. Wilhelm turned to her now. We just don’t understand each other”
(p. 351).30 Helene retreats into silence in order to survive, and thinks of it
as her strength: “Helene was good at keeping silent, as he would soon find
out” (p. 341).31 But the muteness begins to destroy her from the inside,
and eventually she cannot talk even to her own son. Instead of helping
her survive, the muteness slowly annihilates her. She ends up speaking so
little that she wonders if her vocal cords are beginning to deteriorate—if
there might be a medical condition that causes “premature ageing of the
vocal cords” (p. 382).32 This “voice failure” (p. 382) functions as one of
the key metaphors of the novel, giving expression to Helene’s experience
of losing her own voice and her own sense of self as “terror and shame
were taking hold of her” (p. 343).33 In her “vocal ontology of uniqueness,”
Cavarero argues that voice “manifests the unique being of each human
being” (2005, p. 173); to lose one’s voice is to lose one’s capacity to express
one’s singular being.
As Arendt articulates, we enter the intersubjective, political sphere by
sharing “words and deeds” (1998, p. 198), through which we express our
singularity. Without such sharing and expressing, we do not fully exist as
moral agents: “Action . . . is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to
be deprived of the capacity to act” (p. 188). The idea of the Greek polis was
to constitute a public space that gives reality to action and speech—“the
reality that comes from being seen, being heard, and, generally, appearing
before an audience of fellow men” (p. 198)—but Arendt acknowledges that
in the history of humanity, most people have been denied reality in this
pregnant sense:
This space does not always exist, and although all men are capable of deed and
word, most of them—like the slave, the foreigner, and the barbarian in antiq-
uity, like the laborer or craftsman prior to the modern age, the jobholder or
businessman in our world—do not live in it. . . . To be deprived of it means to be
deprived of reality. . . . (p. 199)
Helene’s loss of identity is linked to the way in which she is denied the pos-
sibility to express and explore who she is through speech and action, and
not only in the public sphere, but even within her private life. Helene does
not suffer mere epistemic injustice; she loses much more than her credibil-
ity: her entire right to “exist at all” (Franck, 2009, p. 312).
Our experiences of being able or unable to speak in our own voice and
to tell our own stories take shape within social and historical worlds. Nazi
6
0
1
Germany is a historical world in which the range of culturally acceptable

narrative identities was exceptionally limited. The only “narrative identity”
that the society offers for Jews is that of the “parasite” that must be anni-
hilated (p. 353).34 The non-Jewish Germans, by contrast, develop a strong
collective narrative identity, a sense of “we-ness,” in the struggle against
the forces that supposedly threaten their Germanness. Helene is perplexed
by this “we”: “The word Germany was like a clarion call in his [Wilhelm’s]
mouth. We. Who were we?” (p. 315).35 “We’d all die out otherwise, you know.
. . . What did the woman mean by we? The Nordic race, humanity itself?” (p.
379).36 The counterpart of this German “we” is the Jewish “they,” in which
Helene cannot recognize herself either.
The novel foregrounds how certain people have the power to tell the
official, subsumptively functioning stories that define “us” and “others.”
Already as a child, Helene learns that because of her mother’s Jewish back-
ground people looked away and “hurried past in silence” (p. 30) instead of
greeting her on the street; similarly, Helene’s own son Peter learns that “his
father was a hero” and that there is “something suspect” in his mother’s
“background” (p. 21).37 The novel thereby shows how narrative practices
are intertwined with and embedded in power structures, how subsumptive
narratives can be used as vehicles of social ideologies and instrumental-
ized for violent political purposes, and how thoroughly the narratives in
which we are entangled shape the way we see ourselves and others, includ-
ing those closest to us. The narrative in-betweens bind people together, but
exclude others in ways that can become tantamount to annihilation.
From the perspective of the current book, perhaps most significant is
the way in which Franck’s novel shows how destructive it can be for indi-
viduals to be denied the right to tell their own stories—their own versions
of events from their own perspectives. As Peter grows older, Helene finds
herself in a situation in which she feels she cannot honestly tell her son
about herself, about who she is and where she comes from. She asks her-
self how she could be a mother to him without being able to tell him any-
thing: “What could she be to her Peter? And how could he be her Peter if
she couldn’t do anything for him, if she couldn’t speak or tell stories or say
anything to him?” (p. 390, emphasis added).38 Helene seems to feel that
sharing one’s life with the other—through generosity, compassion, and
storytelling—is so important to motherhood that when she is unable to
share stories of her own, and her life has become a series of losses leading
to the annihilation of her entire sense of self, then she can no longer be
a mother. Although she has repeatedly reflected on her mother’s “blind-
ness of the heart,” in this desperate situation she cannot stop herself from
repeating the family history of abandonment and muteness.

The idea that sharing and passing down stories is integral to motherhood
can also be found in other contemporary novels that deal with the effects
of war on women, mothers, and their sense of self. For example, it is pivotal
to the Finnish novelist Sofi Oksanen’s Puhdistus (2008, Purge), an interna-
tional bestseller that depicts the traumatic experiences of Estonian women
under Soviet occupation. Aliide Truu is one of the victims of Communist
terror, and she ends up marrying a Communist and living a false life, una-
ble to tell her daughter stories, despite her conviction that storytelling is
integral to motherhood:
She would be raised on stories with nothing true in them. Aliide could never tell
Talvi her own family’s stories, the stories she had learned from her granny, the
ones she heard as she fell asleep on Christmas Eve. She couldn’t tell her any of
the stories that she was raised on, she and her mother and grandmother and
great-grandmother. . . . What kind of person would a child become if she had
no stories in common with her mother, no yarns, no jokes? How could you be a
mother if there was no one to ask advice from, to ask what to do in a situation
like this? (Oksanen, 2010, 248)39
In Puhdistus, Communist terror leaves behind wounded, traumatized,

mute women whose whole bodily posture and way of looking at other peo-
ple is altered:
From every trembling hand, she could tell—there’s another one. From every
flinch at the sound of a Russian soldier’s shout and every lurch at the tramp
of boots. Her, too? . . . When she found herself in proximity with one of those
women, she tried to stay as far away from her as she could. So no one would
notice the similarities in their behaviour. . . . They wouldn’t be able to raise the
glass without spilling. They would be discovered. Someone would know. . . . And
all the blurring of memory she had managed by marrying Martin Truu would be
in vain. (pp. 168–169)40
Under Communist terror, people avoid looking one another in the eye, and
gradually honest communication disappears. Like Franck’s novel, Puhdistus
links terror to a culture of silence:
Meanwhile, the gold that had been carried to Siberia was turning into new teeth
for new mouths, golden smiles that nearly outshone the sun, casting a great
shadow, and in that shadow an immense number of averted eyes and shrinking
expressions bred and multiplied. You met them in the market squares, in the
roads and fields, an endless current, their pupils tarnished and gray, the whites
621
of their eyes red. When the last of the farms was roped into the kolkhozy, plain
talk vanished between the lines. . . . (pp. 208–209)41
Both Franck and Oksanen suggest that sexual violence plays a crucial role
in women’s muteness. In Die Mittagsfrau, Helene suffers from a history
of sexual exploitation: her aunt’s lover Erich repeatedly harasses her as a
teenager, and as a young woman she is routinely raped by her husband
Wilhelm and at least twice by soldiers.42 Her rape by Russian soldiers is
told from the perspective of Peter, who witnesses the rape without fully
comprehending its meaning: “Her skirt was torn, her eyes were wide open,
Peter didn’t know if she could see him or was looking straight through him.
Her mouth was wide open too, but no sound came out” (Franck, 2009,
p. 12).43 The rape and the fact that Peter witnesses it seem to be particu-
larly traumatic for Helene, a breaking point after which she feels unable to
continue being a mother. Afterward, she refuses to let Peter sleep in the
same bed as her anymore and treats him almost as if he were complicit
in the crime.44 Research on the gendered experience and memory of the
Holocaust suggests that women often felt that their survival required the
repression and forgetting of experiences like rape and assaults on mater-
nity, resulting in “a collaborative familial discourse of silence” (Reading,
2002, p. 61). Helene’s decision to abandon her son—who witnessed her
demolition as a woman and a mother—appears as a desperate attempt at
complete forgetting, an attempt to leave behind the traumatic past, which
then contributes to the transgenerational inheritance of the trauma, in an
even more aggravated form.
In Puhdistus, Aliide’s niece, Linda, experiences sexual assault as a child,
as part of the Communist “hearings,” and her traumatic experiences of
abuse leave her mute and numb, emotionally unavailable to her own daugh-
ter, Zara, the other protagonist of the novel. Zara’s grandmother tells her,
“Your mother’s a woman of few words.”

“Of no words, you mean.” . . .
Other people’s mothers had been in the bombing when they were children,
and they still talked, even though Grandmother said that a bomb can frighten a
child into silence. (Oksanen, 2010, p. 52)45
Both Puhdistus and Die Mittagsfrau link muteness to the failure to con-
front the devastating events of the past. When Helene and Martha leave
home for Berlin, Martha suggests that they should take a picture of their
mother with them, to preserve their memory of her: “We want a souvenir,
don’t we? A souvenir? Helene looked at Martha blankly. She thought of

saying: Not me, I don’t, but then decided not to” (Franck, 2009, p. 163).46
Later in Berlin, she actively practices forgetting: “Her old life had retreated
into the distance; she didn’t like to think about it. She practised not remem-
bering” (p. 184).47 This “not remembering” is similar to Aliide’s effort of
“blurring of memory” (Oksanen, 2010, p. 169). In both cases, remembering
is too painful, and becomes intertwined with an overwhelming sense of
shame: “There in the basement of the town hall, where Aliide had vanished,
where she just wanted to get out alive. But the only thing left alive was the
shame” (p. 254).48
In Die Mittagsfrau, Helene’s inability to engage with her past is inex-
tricably linked to the way in which her narrative imaginary is ridden with
shame, anxiety, and guilt, dominated by a narrative unconscious that con-
tains elements that cannot be confronted and that affect her in harmful
ways. Helene first feels ashamed of having a mother whom others avoid
because of her Jewish background. Then she feels ashamed of abandon-
ing her mother, later of her own lack of integrity in accepting a false iden-
tity, and, finally, of herself as an inadequate mother. She blames herself
for not being different, and her narrative imagination is directed more at
possible selves defined by dominant cultural norms—she imagines how
she should be—than at empowering counter-narratives that could open up
alternative futures for her. For example, when she visits her mother at a
mental institution, she blames herself for not visiting earlier and imagines
what “another daughter” would have done: “Another daughter would have
gone years ago, another daughter wouldn’t have left her mother in the first
place” (Franck, 2009, p. 317).49
To use Dominick LaCapra’s (1994) distinction, instead of “working
through” her issues with her mother, Helene keeps “acting out” their trou-
bled relationship by repeating harmful emotional patterns.50 Terrified of
turning into her mother, Helene tries to invert her mother’s attitudes and
habits without realizing that she thereby perpetuates them. Her mother
had wished for a boy, but lost each of her four sons; instead, she had two
girls whom she did not want and ended up neglecting. Helene wanted a girl,
and her son reminds her of his Nazi father. While Helene’s mother is com-
pletely self-absorbed and unable to do anything for anyone else, Helene
wants to devote all her time to being useful to others. She works day and
night at the hospital, but the work is largely an escape for her, allowing her
to avoid confronting painful issues in her personal life and having to enter
into a dialogue with anyone: “Her uniform protected her. . . . If you wore
white you could keep your mouth shut; if you wore white you weren’t asked
how you were . . . ; pity for the suffering of others was her inner prop and
stay” (Franck, 2009, p. 292).51
641
As a nurse, Helene is drawn into the machinery that implements the

Nazi ideology, and her self-loathing is reinforced by her complicity in Nazi
crimes. For example, she is involved in operations in which non-Aryan
women are sterilized. She knows that even though she is technically only
assisting, should she be given the orders, she would comply: “If the surgeon
had told her to make the incision, she would probably have cut the tubes
herself” (p. 380).52 Here the use of free indirect discourse conveys Helene’s
sense of how she would probably act; she is fully aware of her own complic-
ity and yet is unable to break free from it.
As a child, Helene is crushed by the self-loathing and misanthropy of
her mother, who sees people as “earthworms,” which Helene took “as an
expression of the hatred that Mother had always tried imparting to her,
and it bore fruit when Helene dreamed of slugs and fell into a void that
appeared to her like her mother’s womb” (p. 117).53 When Wilhelm com-
pares Jews to parasites, Helene identifies with this image: “Jews as worms.
I am a parasite, thought Helene” (p. 353).54 She begins to suspect that
Wilhelm is right in saying that she has a heart of stone, and eventually she
seems to genuinely believe that Peter would be “better off” with relatives
who would “talk to him about this, that and the other,” rather than with his
mute mother (p. 409).55
Narratives mediated by cultural contexts and family histories affect how
we experience things in the first place and our self-interpretations. These
self-interpretations shape the way we act in the world, our behavioral and
emotional patterns, and our relationships. There is always a multitude of
ways to interpret and narrate a particular experience. No matter how diffi-
cult her situation is, Helene could narrate it in a variety of ways. By drawing
on the culturally available narratives to which she feels closest and which
have been woven into her narrative imaginary, she interprets her situation
in terms of her inevitable descent into the “blindness of the heart,” and this
narrative self-interpretation plays a crucial role in leading her to the des-
perate decision to abandon her child.
Here we can see the logic of the triple hermeneutic at work. Experience
is always already interpretative. It is never merely the here and now: it
carries traces of earlier experiences, including our earliest experiences of
love, care, abandonment, and loss, and the narrative webs in which we
grow up color our experiences and our ways of rendering them intelligible
for ourselves and others. At the level of the double hermeneutic, cultural
narratives—such as the narratives of Lady Midday and the blindness of
the heart, central to Helene’s family mythology—give expression to and
provide interpretations of individuals’ interpretative experiences. The
triple hermeneutic is at work as Helene uses these cultural narratives to

reinterpret and renarrate her experiences in ways that have very tangible
real-world effects, both on her own life and on those of others.
THE CULTURE OF SILENCE
In the epilogue of Die Mittagsfrau, Helene comes to visit the relatives who
have taken in Peter, hoping to meet her teenage son. Peter, however, is
angry, hurt, and determined to punish his mother by never letting her see
him, so he hides in a barn—in a scene that echoes an earlier episode where
Helene hides in a forest from her little boy for so long that the hide-and-
seek game ends in tears.56 The ending suggests that the legacy of silence,
muteness, and non-communication is passed on from one generation to
the next, as in fact happened in Franck’s own family: her father, Peter,
traumatized by his early abandonment, later deserted his own family, and
led a lonely life in silence. Julia Franck got to know her father only as a
teenager, shortly before he died. Apparently the “double wall” of silence
(Bar-On, 1999) prevented them from discussing what had happened. The
story that was left untold was not one of straightforward perpetration or
victimization—it was a more complicated, messier one: the story of an
implicated subject untold to his equally implicated daughter. At the end of
the 1990s, Franck searched for her grandmother, only to find out that she
had died shortly before in Berlin, where she had lived a socially isolated life
in a one-room apartment with her sister (Geu & Franck, 2007). The novel
is an attempt to understand the family history of abandonment and mute-
ness. As an exploration of what Franck describes as a “culture of remaining
silent” (“die Kultur des Schweigens”),57 however, it also has wider relevance
and can be read as a contribution to the ethics of storytelling and implica-
tion in connection to the ongoing endeavor to work through the legacy of
the Second World War and the Holocaust.
When Die Mittagsfrau appeared, some critics questioned Franck’s right
to tell, as a non-Jew, such an ethically ambiguous story of a Jewish woman.
This discussion exemplifies how the telling of other people’s stories is linked
to debates over claims of entitlement—who has the right to tell whose
story and on what terms. In response to claims of a lack of entitlement,
Franck revealed her own Jewish background, which she had not considered
relevant prior to this incident, as she does not practice any religion and had
not thought of herself as a “Jewish novelist.” Ashley Barnwell discusses the
“complex social complicity in deciding which stories we as a society want
to hear and who we will allow to tell them” (2017, p. 113). Franck needed
to “come out” as a Jew in order to be allowed to tell the story of a Jewish
61
woman who does not quite fit the stereotype of the good victim. This came
as a surprise to her, because although in the novel she attempts to imagine
what could have happened to her own grandmother, she does not pretend
to tell her “true story.” Instead, Franck tells a story that, through its par-
ticularity, addresses more general questions of what war does to women,
the transgenerational effects of the culture of silence, and the necessity of
storytelling for our survival as unique individuals and moral agents.
As Amy Shuman (2005) observes, one of the reasons we tell other peo-
ple’s stories is that we feel compassion and empathy for them, and empathy
creates possibilities for understanding across differences, but critique of
empathy is equally important, because “easy empathy” is so often used as an
alibi for “the packaging of suffering as sentimentality” (p. 24): “Storytelling
needs a critique of empathy to remain a process of negotiating, rather
than defending, meaning” (p. 5). The narrative dynamic of Die Mittagsfrau
invites the reader to take part in such a negotiation of meaning and seeks
to interrupt the kind of easy, sentimental empathy that is always a risk
when we read about the suffering of others.58 One of the concerns of those
who criticize the narrative representation of the Holocaust has been that
readers, in identifying with the victims, appropriate and exploit the vic-
tims’ suffering for their own cathartic pleasure.59 The narration of Franck’s
novel is dominated by free indirect speech that conveys the thoughts and
experiences of the characters, but the narration is laconic, seemingly une-
motional, and the narrator refrains from laying claim to any ultimate
authority or truth.60 The narration neither condemns nor idealizes the pro-
tagonist; without defending her decision to abandon her son, it presents
Helene’s failure as a human one and as not entirely incomprehensible. The
novel neither asks the reader to accept Helene’s decision, nor provides an
exhaustive explanation for it. Instead of giving cathartic pleasure, it invites
the reader to engage with her story in its ethical complexity.
The novel tells the story of a unique individual, whose experiences and
life cannot be understood through simple identity categories. Helene is not
primarily a representative of a social group (Jews, women), but a singular
being, whose life course has an element of unpredictability and indeter-
minacy. By imagining what her grandmother’s life might have been like,
Franck gives dignity to that life without claiming that her imaginative
interpretation is the truth. Rather, the narrative suggests that before we
condemn other people’s actions, we should consider the possibility that
there is more to their stories—and other perspectives on them—than we
are able to know, understand, or imagine.
In the novel, this effect is created through shifts of perspective and
a narrative technique that disrupts the illusion of immediate access to

the other’s experience. It plays with focalization in ways that encour-
age readers to adopt an engaged yet critical perspective on the protag-
onist. Helene is first presented to the reader from Peter’s perspective,
as a mother who abandons her seven-year-old son on a railway bench,
before the narration rewinds to the time when Helene herself was a girl
of a similar age and recounts her life story with Helene as the center of
experience. In the end, we see her again from the son’s perspective and
realize how the traumatic culture of silence is passed on from one gener-
ation to the next. That we first see Helene through the eyes of the aban-
doned, hurt child, and then acquire a sense of her own perspective on
her story, creates an intense sense of perspectivism—of how every story
is different, depending on the perspective from which it is told. We are
encouraged to take the perspective of someone who may not fit into our
preconceived categories and to understand her actions and inactions in
the context of a historical world that questions her very right to exist,
while at the same time remaining acutely aware of other perspectives to
which she herself seems to be blind.
Franck’s novel has been criticized for substituting “big history” with a per-
sonal/family one. Elisabeth Krimmer asserts that “such a critique is not
without foundation: in Die Mittagsfrau historical and political events func-
tion as little more than a distant roar in the background” (2015, p. 44).
I would argue, however, that in fact the contrary is true: in the novel, his-
tory is precisely not a distant background, but pervades individual lives,
and the novel actually questions the narrow conception of history on which
the aforementioned criticism is based. It shows how the historical situa-
tion shapes the individual’s space of possibilities. History is not somewhere
out there, where “political” events take place, but right here where every-
day lives unfold. The culture of silence manifests itself not only in the pub-
lic, but also in the private sphere, where muteness erodes the narrative
in-betweens that bind people together.
Franck’s other novels, too, explore specific historical worlds as spaces
of possibilities that diminish the protagonists’ sense of the possible.
Lagerfeuer (2003, West, 2014), for example, depicts a camp where East
German refugees are detained when they flee to the West—Franck herself
spent part of her childhood in such a camp. The protagonist feels marked
by a history of fear and suggests that both Communism and Nazism were
symptoms of the “fear of what’s strange” (2014, p. 63).61 Instead of coming
across as a country of freedom, the camp “feels like a prison,” epitomized
by the camp’s canteen and the fact that the protagonist is deprived of the
possibility to cook for her own children:
6
8
1
When you eat only what’s put in front of you, and you’re just not in a position to
decide what you’ll cook and how, and your children aren’t eating the food you’ve
bought and prepared for them at your own table. It means you’re not giving
them a home anymore. . . . (p. 240)62
In the space of possibilities in which she finds herself, the protagonist feels
that she is unable to be and do what a mother should. At her most des-
perate moments, language fails her, and appears to be no longer able to
convey anything meaningful: “Even words seemed no more than useless
sounds” (p. 164).63 She is reduced from a moral agent, a subject of speech
and action, to someone who has no home, voice, or place in the world.
Franck’s characters often struggle with the feeling of being muted, but
the logic of her novels is emphatically dialogical. Die Mittagsfrau is dialogi-
cal on several levels. It engages in a dialogue with the narrative tradition by
functioning as a reinterpretation of the legend of Lady Midday, but it also
alludes to a longer literary tradition that deals with storytelling as a strat-
egy of survival, reaching back to One Thousand and One Nights.64 Against
the backdrop of this tradition, it unearths on a thematic level the complex
ethical significance of exchanging experiences through storytelling. While
for Scheherazade storytelling is a struggle to stay alive, Franck’s novel com-
plicates the notion of survival by showing how physical endurance does
not always guarantee the survival of one’s integrity as a unique individual
capable of moral agency. It suggests that even if, as Freeman puts it, “ ‘life
itself’ may not be quite as narrative-laden as some theorists (including me)
have suggested, life without narrative, without some sense of location and
rootedness in one’s history and story, can be quite horrifying” (2017, p.
25). He writes this in the context of what dementia does to our narrative
sense of self, but I would like to suggest that there is ethical signifance not
only in the question of whether we can or cannot tell stories, but also in the
continuum from being able to tell stories that we feel are our own to nar-
rative identities violently imposed on us in a way that diminishes or even
annihilates us.
In Dori Laub’s (1995) terms, it could be said that Helene cannot even
begin to properly process her traumatic experiences because she is denied
the possibility of sharing them with others by telling her own story, and
therefore she cannot bear witness to her own experiences. As a result, her
whole sense of self begins to collapse to such an extent that she starts to
doubt whether she is even capable of love and motherhood. As Laub puts
it, the “loss of the capacity to be a witness to oneself and thus to witness
from the inside is perhaps the true meaning of annihilation, for when one’s
history is abolished, one’s identity ceases to exist as well” (1995, p. 67).

The novel suggests that moral agency requires a minimum narrative sense
of self as a being capable of good—and explores (the annihilation of) the
conditions of possibility for such agency.
Those who have experienced trauma that they have not been able to share
with anyone frequently begin to doubt their own experiences and whether
the traumatic events even happened in the first place. Laub writes about the
way in which the experiences of the Holocaust were not “communicable” for
the survivors, “even to themselves, and therefore, perhaps never took place”
(p. 67). In Helene’s case, the way in which the people around her—from her
own mother to the Nazis who treat her as a parasite—see her as worthless
erodes her sense of self as a unique person worthy and capable of love. Being
robbed of the possibility of sharing her experiences, including the experi-
ences of rape and other forms of assault on her physical and psychic integ-
rity, becomes tantamount to Helene’s annihilation as a person.
When we share experiences by exchanging stories with others, we often
discover new ways of reorienting ourselves to these experiences, which can
help us come to terms with painful experiences and find ways to avoid the
kind of damaging silence that is depicted in Franck’s novel. It is from such
a perspective that narrative therapists emphasize “the importance of an
audience other than the therapist for the person’s telling and re-telling of
her developing story” (Payne, 2006, p. 16).65 It is precisely when Helene is
cut off from reciprocal dialogic relationships that she fails to stop herself
from repeating the family tradition of abandonment. Her relationship with
Carl suggests that it is only through an intersubjective process of exchang-
ing experiences that narrative imagination can sometimes develop into an
empowering process of dialogic reinterpretation.
The novel develops the view that we are constituted by storytelling, by
sharing our lives and experiences with others, and that this is so indis-
pensable for human existence that the inability to engage in storytelling—
closing up into silence and muteness—can lead to something worse than
death: the complete erosion of the self and the loss of loved ones. The novel
links this problematic to a specific historical context, thereby underlin-
ing that our capacity for storytelling and moral agency are conditioned
by our historical situation and its power relations, thus highlighting that
this is always also a broader cultural question. By unearthing a mentality
of silence and by depicting how being a mother is linked to the construc-
tion of a narrative identity with which one can live, the novel shows how
historical conditions in which individuals are violently forced into certain
narrative frames can seriously impair their ability to tell their own stories,
and thus lead to a damaging loss of identity and integrity—to a blindness
of the heart.
701
Die Mittagsfrau therefore suggests that storytelling is crucial for moral

agency and for sharing the world with others, but it also demonstrates how
narrative identities imposed on us may lead us to repeat harmful, poten-
tially violent emotional and behavioral patterns. The novel homes in on
why it is important to reflect on what kinds of social circumstances enhance
or impair our capacity for storytelling and moral agency. It explores the
devastating consequences of the breakdown of narrative identity and nar-
rative agency, and makes salient the real, world-constituting effects of nar-
rative practices.
THE SIX ETHICAL ASPECTS OF STORYTELLING
In On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (Vom Nutzen und Nachteil
der Historie für das Leben, 1874), Nietzsche asserts that “knowledge of the
past has at all times been desired only in the service of the future and the
present and not for the weakening of the present or for depriving a vigorous
future of its roots” (1999b, p. 77). In Nietzsche’s account, history is good for
us when it strengthens us and enhances our ability to express and develop
our potential. Similarly, narratives can be considered good for us when they
empower us—when they reinforce our moral agency and our sense of the
possible. From an ethical point of view, however, it is important to con-
sider these issues not only from the perspective of how narratives foster or
impede self-realization, but also in relation to how they influence our capac-
ity to be affected by others and to engage in ethical relationships with them.
As the discussion of Franck’s novel has made clear, there is nothing in
stories to guarantee that their possible ethical potential will be actualized.
Narrative form makes a narrative neither inherently harmful nor benefi-
cial; instead, its ethical value is contextual, that is, dependent on how the
narrative is interpreted and put to use in a particular social, historical, and
cultural world. Historical circumstances crucially affect the dialogic process
in which individuals interpret their experiences in relation to the narrative
models that are mediated by culture and family tradition. The novel depicts
this dialogic process in its temporality, without moralizing or categoriz-
ing: its narrative organization emphasizes that individuals always experi-
ence the world from their own unique perspectives, and it leaves the task of
interpretation and ethical reflection to the reader. Within the fictive world
of the novel, stories console, connect, empower, and invite reorientation to
the future, but they also mutilate, paralyze, and wound.
I will conclude by summarizing the analysis of the novel in terms of the
six aspects of the ethical potential of storytelling delineated in Chapter 3.

First, the novel explores how culturally mediated narratives expand and
diminish the spaces of possibilities in which individual lives unfold. These
spaces are inherently heterogeneous: one historical world constitutes a rad-
ically different space of possibilities for different individuals and groups.
For the Jews, for example, the Nazi narratives drastically diminished their
possibilities to the point of denying them the right to live. The novel shows
how the (im)possibility of sharing stories is linked to the characters’ narra-
tive identity, agency, and sense of the possible. It suggests that by address-
ing how the culture of silence is passed down from one generation to the
next, literary narratives have the power to disrupt such traumatic legacies
and help us confront aspects of family histories and broader cultural men-
talities that perpetuate these legacies. Literary narratives can cultivate our
sense of the possible by expanding the culturally available repertoire of
narrative models in relation to which we (re)interpret our experiences and
lives, the past and the future, as well as by helping us critically reflect on
the different ways in which narratives mediate our relation to ourselves
and others.
Second, the novel suggests that our narrative agency and identity take
shape in a dialogic relation to narratives that are culturally available to us,
but this dialogue is always conditioned by the specific historical and social
circumstances in which it takes place. In extreme conditions, when the
narrative web becomes a web of power relations that denies the subject of
experience and action any right to self-expression, agency, or even exist-
ence, then the dialogue no longer deserves that name. Then culturally avail-
able narratives no longer serve self-understanding or self-exploration, but
merely damage, distort, and diminish the sense of one’s possibilities. The
novel shows, through its depiction of the Nazi “we,” that the narrativity of
identity is no guarantee of its ethicality.
Third, Die Mittagsfrau displays both subsumptive and non-subsumptive
narrative practices. Within the novel, it is first and foremost in the context
of Helene and Carl’s relationship that storytelling functions in the non-
subsumptive explorative and dialogical mode, as a means of understand-
ing the other in his and her singularity. The Nazi mythology, in contrast,
exemplifies an extreme form of subsumptive narrative appropriation. The
novel as a whole, in turn, can be seen as a non-subsumptive attempt to
give dignity to a singular life. Without the complex temporal process of
narratively engaging with the unfolding of her life, Helene could be easily
assigned to simplified moral categories, such as those of a failed mother or
a Nazi collaborator. The novel narrates the life story of a unique individ-
ual in its singularity. By doing so, it questions “identity power” (Fricker,
2007, pp. 14–17) that directs us to interpret individual experiences and
721
lives in terms of generalizations. The narrative that tells the story of a

unique individual—inviting the reader to follow the temporal process of
how she experiences things and how her experiences gradually change
her—functions as a mode of non-subsumptive understanding. The nar-
rative does not set out to define her by subsuming her into a general
category, such as that of a good victim or an evil perpetrator; instead, it
narrates an ethically complex, temporal process of becoming in which the
reader acquires the task of interpreting Helene’s character, the ethically
demanding situations she faces, and her actions in them.
Fourth, narratives create a sense of connection and build intersubjec-
tively shared worlds, but these are not necessarily ethical worlds: the Nazis
had a strong narrative sense of a shared identity based on their narrative
in-between. In the novel, literary narratives provide empowering counter-
narratives that support the individuals’ struggle to construct narrative
identities and dialogic intersubjective spaces, but at the same time, col-
lectively shared narrative in-betweens are shown to have devastating con-
sequences for individuals who are excluded from the sphere of the “we.”
Sharing experiences by sharing stories is so essential to a sense of self
that losing this possibility can entail an erosion of one’s sense of “possible
selves” to the point of undermining one’s ability to see oneself as a moral
agent capable of intimate human relationships.
Fifth, the novel encourages us as readers to take the perspective of a
character who does not fit received identity categories and to see the ethical
complexity of her situation. It shows that perspective-taking does not auto-
matically mean accepting the other’s interpretations and actions; rather,
it signifies engaging with the other from one’s own experiential horizon.
Through its storyline, the novel links the ethical potential of storytelling
to the creation of narrative in-betweens that encourage perspective-taking
and celebrate difference. Within the fictive world of the novel, the element
of hope amid all the violence and muteness is the story of the lovers who
cultivate a dialogic narrative imagination—engaging with each other’s
perspectives through a dialogic exchange of stories. It suggests a regula-
tive idea for an ethics of storytelling: to strive toward dialogical practices
of telling, sharing, and reinterpreting stories in ways that help us look at
the world from the perspective of difference and to reinvent it—and our
lives—as both individuals and communities.
Sixth, and finally, the novel functions as a mode of ethical inquiry, as a
moral laboratory that unsettles our preconceived categories of right and
wrong. This inquiry takes the form of a narrative trajectory: the novel
engages the reader’s ethical imagination through the temporal process of
engaging with the story of a mother who abandons her child. While in the

beginning our judgment of Helene is likely to be straightforwardly neg-
ative, in the end we may still think that what she did was wrong, but we
are likely to have a more nuanced understanding of her actions and of the
complexity of her moral failure. The novel questions the adequacy of the
concepts of perpetrator and victim in the effort to understand lives entan-
gled in violent histories. In a sense, Helene is both a victim and a perpe-
trator: she is a victim of emotional child abuse and of the Nazi mythology
that portrays her as “vermin”; but she takes the side of the perpetrators
by marrying a Nazi and perpetrates her own act of extreme emotional
violence by abandoning her child. Yet she does not unproblematically
fall into either category, and the dichotomy fails to do justice to who she
is. Inhabitants of a historical world are implicated, in different ways, in
the dominant narrative webs that are also webs of violence. In relation
to these divergent modes of implication, the novel explores the sociohis-
torical conditions of possibility for moral and narrative agency and for
being capable of giving and receiving affection and care. As an inquiry into
the frailty of goodness, it invites us to consider the possibility that some
minimal sense of dialogic narrative agency—including the ability to share
stories with those who matter to us—may be a necessary (though not suf-
ficient) condition for being a subject capable of moral agency and human
intimacy.
NOTES
1. I have used the German original, Die Mittagsfrau, as my primary source, but
I provide the quotations from the English translation (The Blind Side of the Heart)
in order to make the book accessible for those who do not read German. The
original quotations can be found in the notes.
2. On the role of different generations in dealing with the German legacy of the
Second World War, see, e.g., McGlothlin (2006); Cohen-Pfister & Vees-Gulani
(eds.) (2010); Fuchs (2012); Assmann (2013).
3. See Meretoja & Franck (2010); Geu & Franck (2007).
4. See, e.g., Carpenter (2010).
5. “. . . mit der Inbrunst eines groβen Tieres”; “heftigen und ziellosen Bewegungen”
(2007, p. 32).
6. “Doch während die Mutter über ihre Töchter schimpfte, fluchte, sie habe eine
nichtsnutze Brut geboren, wiederholte Helene wie ein Gebet immer denselben
Satz: Darf ich dich kämmen? Ihre Stimme zitterte: Darf ich dich kämmen?
Als eine Schere durch die Luft flog, hob sie schützend die Arme über ihren
Kopf: Darf ich dich kämmen? . . . [Die Mutter] wimmerte, und schlieβlich
stammelte sie in einem fort den Namen Ernst Josef, Ernst Josef. . . . Wir sind es,
Mutter. Das sagte Martha streng und gefasst. Wir sind hier, Ernst Josef ist tot
wie deine anderen Söhne auch, tot geboren, hörst du, Mutter. Zehn Jahre, tot.
Aber wir sind da” (2007, pp. 33–34).
7
4
1
7. “Jedes Kind, das sie nach Marthas Geburt verloren hatte, war ihr als
Aufforderung erschienen, ihrem Leben ein Ende zu setzen” (2007, p. 63).
8. “Niemand habe ein Recht auf Liebe und Schutz” (2011, p. 120).
9. “[I]‌hre Dame, wie sie die Mutter nannte, weigere sich einfach, mit der
Mittagsfrau zu sprechen. . . . Nur ein wenig Wissen weitergeben. Martha
und Helene kannten die Geschichte von der Mittagsfrau, solange sie denken
konnten, es lag etwas Tröstliches in ihr, weil sie nahelegte, dass es sich bei der
mütterlichen Verwirrung um nichts anderes als einen leicht zu verscheuchenden
Fluch handelte” (2007, p. 142).
10. “. . . wo ihre Vertrauten warteten, der Werther und die Marquise” (2007, p. 126).
11. “Wenn Martha ihr so eine Zukunft ausmalte, hielt Helene den Atem an, sie
hoffte, dass Martha nicht aufhören würde, diese Geschichte zu erzählen, sie
sollte weitersprechen und davon erzählen, wie Helene eines Tages in einem
großen Lehrsaal an der Dresdner Universität die Anatomie des Menschen
studieren würde” (2007, 55).
12. “Manchmal sagte Helene: Mädchen sollen nicht pfeifen. Dann fragte er lächelnd
zurück: Ja, bist du denn ein Mädchen? Und einmal sang er hinter der geöffneten
Schranktür hervor jenen Vers, den er ihr schon ins Album geschrieben hatte:
Sei wie das Veilchen im Moose, sittsam, bescheiden und rein, nicht wie die
stolze Rose, die immer bewundert will sein. Dann veränderte er seinen Tonfall,
drohend, fast beschwörend flüsterte er: Aber jedes Mädchen muss pfeifen
können, merk dir das” (2007, p. 139).
13. “Vorsichtig umkreisten seine Gedanken Begriffe wie Ehre und Gewissen.
Ernst Ludwig Würsich fühlte Scham für sein Dasein. Was war schlieβlich ein
verwundeter Mann ohne Bein? Nicht einmal zu Gesicht bekommen hatte er
einen Russen, keinem Feind ins Antlitz geschaut. Geschweige denn hatte er in
diesem Krieg sein Leben irgendeinem ehrenvollen Einsatz entgegengebracht.
Sein Bein war ein kläglicher Unfall und konnte als keinerlei Tribut an den Feind
gelten” (2007, p. 74).
14. On these concepts by Anneke Sools (2016), see Chapter 2.
15. “Eine Welt lag da aufgefaltet vor ihnen. . . . Hatten sie noch vor zwei Jahren
beim Tode des Vaters geglaubt, ihr Leben werde von nun an darin bestehen,
im Krankenhaus zu arbeiten und an der Seite ihrer zunehmend verwirrten
Mutter in Bautzen alt zu werden, gab dieser Brief den Auftakt für eine erst zu
erträumende Zukunft” (2007, p. 153).
16. “In Berlin werden Martha und ich Möglichkeiten haben, bitte verstehen Sie,
Möglichkeiten. Wir werden dort arbeiten, studieren—vielleicht” (2007, p. 161).
17. “Ihre Aufregung galt einer Begegnung, wie sie noch nie eine erlebt hatte, ein
Zusammentreffen mit einem Menschen, mit dem es ein gemeinsames Denken,
eine gemeinsame Neugier, ja, wie sie Martha anvertraute, eine gemeinsame
Leidenschaft für die Literatur gab” (2007, p. 217).
18. “Wenn ich jedes Buch mit dir zusammen lesen könnte, wär ich glücklich, glaubst
du das?” (2007, p. 229). See also Franck (2009, p. 204; 2007, p. 210).
19. “Helene mochte es, wenn er wir sagte und sie in seinen Armen lag” (2007,
p. 232).
20. “[D]‌ie Zugehörigkeit, die sie zwischen ihm und sich spürte, war eine, die kleine
Geheimnisse und Verschiedenheiten nicht zugestand oder gestattete, sie feierte
die Geheimnisse, unbedingt” (2007, p. 266).
21. “[I]‌hre jüngere Tochter konnte die Mutter nicht mehr erkennen, eben blind am
Herzen, wie Martha sagte, dass sie niemanden mehr sehen konnte . . . Helene

spürte die alte Furcht in sich aufkommen, sie könne eines Tages erblinden wie
diese Mutter” (2007, pp. 120–122).
22. “Helene auf nichts mehr wartete, auf den Hunger nicht, nicht auf das
Essen. . . . Die Zeit zog sich zusammen, sie rollte sich ein und faltete sich” (2007,
p. 280).
23. “ . . . war ihre hehre Vorstellung zu studieren in weite Ferne gerückt, es schien
Helene, als gehörte dieser Wunsch zu einem anderen, früheren Leben, nicht
mehr zu ihr. Helene wünschte sich nichts mehr. Visionen, da sie gemeinsam
entwickelt, gemeinsam erwogen und gemeinsam erkoren worden waren, gab es
nicht mehr. Sie waren mit Carl verschwunden. Denjenigen, der ihr Gedächtnis
teilte, gab es nicht mehr” (2007, p. 286).
24. “Was war das, ihr Leben? Was sollte das sein, sollte es überhaupt etwas, es etwas,
sie etwas?” (2007, p. 298).
25. “. . . der Verdammnis in das einzelne, alleinige”; “Helene befand sich im
Zwiespalt und Widerspruch” (2007, p. 305).
26. “Sie wollte kein Denken, kein Sprechen, keine Umarmung mehr mit einem
anderen Menschen, mit niemandem mehr. Aber sie wollte Carl weiterleben,
nicht ihn überleben, ihn weiterleben; denn was anderes blieb von ihm als ihre
Erinnerung. Wie sollte ein Weiterleben möglich sein, ohne Denken und Sprechen
und Umarmen?” (2007, p. 305).
27. “So etwas wie mich dürfte es gar nicht geben, platzte sie heraus” (2007, p. 318).
28. “Allein, ihr fehlte eine Vorstellung vom Leben, von dem, was es sein sollte und
konnte. Sie würde sich für diesen Zweck einem Menschen zuwenden müssen”
(2007, p. 321).
29. “Zwei Fremde saβen nebeneinander und schauten jeder in seine Richtung”
(2007, p. 338).
30. “Vielleicht ist das doch ne Frage der Rasse, Kindchen, mit dem Scherzen.
Wilhelm drehte sich jetzt zu ihr um. Wir verstehen uns nicht” (2007, p. 357).
31. “Helene konnte gut schweigen, er würde schon sehen” (2007, p. 347).
32. “Ob es eine krankhaft frühzeitige Alterung der Stimmbänder gab, das Versiegen
der Stimme?” (2007, p. 388).
33. “. . . wie Entsetzen sie erfasste und Scham und nichts” (2007, p. 348).
34. “[D]‌er Parasit bin ich, Helene dachte” (2007, p. 359).
35. “Das Wort Deutschland klang aus seinem Mund wie eine Losung. Wir. Wer
waren wir? Wir waren wer. Nur wer?” (2007, p. 321).
36. “Wissen Sie, wir würden sonst aussterben. . . . Wen meinte die Frau mit wir? Die
nordische Rasse, die Menschheit?” (2007, p. 385).
37. “Sein Vater war ein Held. Und seine Mutter . . . hatte eine fragwürdige Herkunft”
(2007, p. 28).
38. “Was konnte sie ihrem Peter sein? Und wie konnte er ihr Peter sein, wenn sie
ihm nichts sein konnte, nicht sprechen, noch erzählen, einfach nichts sagen
konnte?” (2007, p. 397).
39. “Hänen tyttärensä kasvaisi tarinoihin, joissa mikään ei olisi totta. Aliide ei
voisi ikinä kertoa Talville oman perheensä tarinoita, niitä joita oli kuullut
mammaltaan, niitä joihin oli itse nukahtanut lapsena jouluyönä. Hän ei voisi
kertoa mitään siitä, mihin oli itse kasvanut, mihin hänen äitinsä, hänen
äidinäitinsä ja äidinäidin äiti. . . . Minkälainen ihminen kasvaisi lapsesta, jolla
ei olisi yhteisiä tarinoita äitinsä kanssa, ei yhteisiä juttuja, ei vitsejä? Miten olla
äiti, kun ei ollut ketään, keneltä kysyä neuvoa, miten tällaisessa tilanteessa voisi
toimia?” (Oksanen, 2008, pp. 243–244).
761
40. “Jokaisesta tärisevästä kädestä hän päätteli, että tuokin. Jokaisesta

hätkähdyksestä, jonka sai aikaa venäläisen sotilaan huuto tai jokaisesta
nytkähdyksestä, joka johtui saappaiden töminästä. Tuokin? . . . Jos hän joutui
samaan tilaan sellaisen naisen kanssa, hän yritti pysytellä mahdollisimman
kaukana. Jotta heidän käytöksensä samankaltaisuutta ei huomattaisi. . . . He
eivät pystyisi nostamaan samaan aikaan lasia läikyttämättä. He paljastuisivat.
Joku tajuaisi. . . . Ja kaikki se muistamisen hämärtyminen, jonka Aliide
oli saanut aikaan naimalla Martin Truun, olisi turhaa” (Oksanen, 2008,
pp. 165–166).
41. “Samaan aikaan Siperiaan viedyiltä viety kulta muuttui uusiksi hampaiksi uusissa
suissa, kultaiset hymyt kiilsivät kilpaa auringon kanssa ja niiden katveessa koko
maassa sikisi suunnaton välttelevien katseiden, väistyvien ilmeiden määrä. Niitä
tuli vastaan toreilla, teillä ja pelloilla loputtomana virtana, harmaiksi himmenneitä
mustuaisia ja punertavia valkuaisia. Kun viimeisetkin talot hirtettiin kolhooseihin,
suorat sanat katosivat rivien väleihin” (Oksanen, 2008, p. 203).
42. Despite the traumatic rape, Krimmer is probably right in arguing that the marital
sexual abuse is the “most drastic form of sexual exploitation” (2015, p. 40) in
the novel: “Because the terse and distanced description of the rape by Russian
soldiers is preceded by the lengthy passages that dwell on Helene’s sexual
victimization by Wilhelm, the rape by the Russians is almost an afterthought,
a final confirmation or master metaphor for the ‘night trap’ (Nachtfalle) that
Helene’s life has become, that is, for her multiple victimizations in a sexist and
racist society” (p. 42). In a way, Helene’s history of sexual harassment reaches
back to her childhood, when her lesbian sister asks her for sexual favors, but
this close, ambivalent relationship is not unequivocally abusive. It involves
physical intimacy and an exploration of their developing sexuality, but it is clearly
indicated that at times Helene is uncomfortable about Martha’s sexual advances
on her: when Martha guides Helene’s hand on her body and presses her tongue in
her mouth, Helene thinks of the time when Martha forced berries in her mouth
and nose and would not stop although she begged her to, and she considers biting
Martha’s tongue but in the end “she couldn’t” (“sie konnte nicht”), as there is
also something about it that she likes even as she feels “ashamed” (2009, p. 57;
“zugleich schämte sich Helene,” 2007, p. 63).
43. “Ihr Rock war zerrissen, ihre Augen weit geöffnet, Peter wusste nicht, ob sie ihn
sah oder durch ihn hindurch blickte. Aufgesperrt war ihr Mund—aber sie blieb
stumm” (2007, p. 18).
44. Helene’s reasons for treating Peter as if he were complicit in the rape remain
unclear. She had asked him to get a new lock to the door, which he forgot to take
care of; it may also play a role that he is male and the son of a Nazi, or she may
unconsciously blame him simply because he witnessed the rape and could not
do anything about it. Rejecting Peter seems like an irrational, visceral response
from Helene, as if she, unable to process her trauma, were simply trying to
refuse the reality of what Peter witnessed.
45. “–Äitisi on hieman harvasanainen.
– Mykkä se on.
. . . Muidenkin äidit olivat olleet lapsena pommituksissa ja silti puhuivat,
vaikka isoäiti sanoikin, että pommi voi säikäyttää lapsen hiljaiseksi”
(Oksanen, 2008, pp. 56–57).

46. “Wir brauchen doch eine Erinnerung, nicht? Eine Erinnerung? Helene sah
Martha ratlos an. Sie wollte sagen: Ich nicht, unterlieβ das aber” (2007, p. 169).
47. “Ihr altes Leben war in eine gute Ferne gerückt, sie erinnerte sich lieber nicht.
Was sie übte, war die Erinnerungslosigkeit” (2007, 190).
48. “Siinä kunnantalon kellarissa, jossa Aliide oli kadonnut ja josta hän halusi selvitä
hengissä, vaikka ainoa mitä oli jäänyt henkiin, oli häpeä” (Oksanen, 2008, p. 250).
49. “Eine andere Tochter wäre schon vor Jahren gefahren, eine andere Tochter hätte
ihre Mutter nicht erst im Stich gelassen” (2007, p. 322).
50. LaCapra (1994) adopts the notions of acting out and working through from
Freud, and they have now become part of the basic vocabulary of trauma
studies.
51. “Die Uniform schützte sie. . . . Wer Weiβ trug, durfte schweigen, wer Weiβ trug,
wurde nicht gefragt, wie es ihm ging . . . , die Anteilnahme am Leiden anderer
stützte sie von innen” (2007, p. 298). Helene’s desire to escape her personal life
is also evident in the scene in which she hides from Peter in the woods, a scene
that anticipates her later abandonment of her son.
52. “Hätte der Chirurg zu Helene gesagt, schneiden Sie, so hätte sie womöglich auch
den Eileiter durchtrennt” (2007, p. 386).
53. “. . . als Ausdruck des Hasses, den ihr die Mutter von jeher mitteilen wollte und
der Früchte zeigte, wenn Helene von den nackten Schnecken träumte, um in ein
Nichts zu fallen, das ihr wie der mütterliche Schoβ erschien” (2007, p. 123).
54. “Die Juden als Gewürm, der Parasit bin ich, Helene dachte” (2007, p. 359).
55. “[E]‌r es besser haben würde und jemand mit ihm sprechen würde, über dies und
jenes” (2007, p. 416).
56. That play is over becomes obvious when Peter begins to weep: “It was no joke”
(2009, p. 402; “Es war kein Spaβ,” 2007, p. 409).
57. In her interview, Franck used the phrase “die Kultur des Schweigens” several
times (Meretoja & Franck, 2010).
58. With narrative dynamics I refer to the interaction between “textual dynamics”
and “readerly dynamics” (see Phelan, 2007). I discuss narrative dynamics in
more detail in Chapter 6.
59. On this concern, voiced for example by Adorno and LaCapra, see McGlothlin
(2010, p. 211).
60. For a discussion of how Franck’s laconic style—which Franck describes as
“female sobriety”—is a response to the gendered reception of male and female
authors’ work, see Merley Hill (2008).
61. “Angst vor dem Fremden” (2005, p. 78).
62. “Wie ein Gefängnis fühlt sich das an. . . . Wenn du nur noch ißt, was dir einer
vorsetzt, und einfach nicht mehr in der Lage bist, selbst zu entscheiden, was du
wie kochst, und deine Kinder essen nicht mehr an deinem Tisch das Essen, das
du für sie besorgt und zubereitet hast. Dann schaffst du ihnen kein Zuhause
mehr, vielleicht noch ideell, praktisch nicht mehr” (2005, p. 271).
63. “Auch die Worte schienen nicht mehr zu sein als unnütze Geräusche” (2005,
p. 188).
64. On the significance of One Thousand and One Nights and the trope of storytelling
as an art of survival in Arabic literature, see Hiddleston (2017, pp. 47–56).
65. White (1997, pp. 94–95) uses the concept of “outsider-witness” with reference to
such audiences.
78
1
CHAPTER 5
Narrative Ethics of Implication

Günter Grass and Historical Imagination
F ictional and autobiographical narratives have their own ways of con-

tributing to historical imagination. While much scholarship empha-
sizes their differences, pointing to the alleged non-referentiality of fiction,
I believe that we should not only be attentive to their specificity, but also
acknowledge the ways in which they achieve similar effects through their
own specific means. In this chapter, I suggest that they both can have ethi-
cal potential to cultivate our sense of history as a sense of the possible.
I will test, in dialogue with the German novelist Günter Grass’s oeuvre,
the framework I sketched in Chapter 3 for unearthing different aspects of
historical imagination. After a brief overview of the debate on the relation-
ship between fiction and history, I will analyze (1) how Grass’s literary and
autobiographical narratives explore the historical world of Nazi Germany
as a space of possibilities; how they self-reflexively examine (against differ-
ent conceptions of time and history) (2) how history consists in concrete
actions and inactions and (3) the ways in which our narrative interpreta-
tions of the past shape our orientation to the present; and (4) how they
address the duty to remember through a future-oriented narrative ethics
of implication.
Grass is a particularly compelling case from the perspective of histor-
ical imagination. The controversy surrounding him demonstrates poign-
antly both how the ability to deal with traumatic historical legacies is
crucial to why literature matters to the reading public, and how the way
in which readers ascribe value to literary narratives is linked to their
8
01
evaluation of the ethos—and the ethical integrity—of the author.1 Ever

since the publication of the Danzig trilogy—Die Blechtrommel (1959, The
Tin Drum), Katz und Maus (1961, Cat and Mouse), and Hundejahre (1963,
Dog Years)—Grass has been considered the “moral consciousness” of the
postwar generation; he has played a seminal role in the German nation’s
memory work, that is, in its process of “coming to terms with the past”
(Vergangenheitsbewältigung). However, his autobiography Beim Häuten der
Zwiebel (2006, Peeling the Onion), in which he reveals that he not only was
a member of the Hitler Youth (which he has always been open about) but
also served in the Waffen-SS as a seventeen-year-old in the final stages of
the war, led to a reassessment of his stature.
Grass’s belated confession forms a minor part of his autobiographical
Bildungsroman that primarily focuses on his development into an artist
and deals with the conditions of possibility for becoming an artist in the
post-Holocaust world. 2 Yet the passage where he confesses his Waffen-SS
past gained the most publicity (by far) and triggered a media debate in
which the fact that he had withheld information about his precise role in
the war devalued the credibility of his novels for many critics. Some even
demanded that he should return his Nobel Prize in Literature (1999).3
Against the backdrop of this debate, how should we evaluate his work
from the perspective of an ethics of storytelling, and what insights does
his oeuvre bring into our understanding of such ethics? In what ways can
his fictional and autobiographical narratives be understood in terms of
a process of taking responsibility for one’s implication in the horrors of
history?
Ever since the Danzig trilogy, Grass’s work has depicted a society of
repression and forgetting that has a very complicated relationship with
the past. In Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, we get to know exactly how deeply
he was part of that society. Does his personal complicity and his belated
confession diminish the ethical value of his oeuvre’s exploration of Nazi
Germany as a space of possibilities and the postwar cultural amnesia?
I address these ethical issues by analyzing how his works deal, both the-
matically and through their narrative structure, with the narrative ethics
of being implicated in violent histories. Also ethically relevant is the way in
which his autobiography deals self-reflexively with the role of storytelling
in the construction of the past, which is shown to exist for us only through
narrative imagination. What insights can we draw from a comparison of
the strategies through which fictional and autobiographical narratives deal
with the traumatic past? What difference does the shift to the autobio-
graphical first-person make?

FICTION AND HISTORY, POSSIBLE AND ACTUAL
It seems evident that people read fiction in part to learn about past worlds
and that literature participates in negotiating cultural memory. In fact,
over the last couple of decades, narrative fiction all over the world has
engaged with history with unprecedented intensity. Yet there is no con-
sensus among literary theorists on whether fiction can contribute to our
understanding of history, or—if it can—how to conceptualize this con-
tribution. The Aristotelian tradition of drawing a dichotomy between the
actual and the possible in conceptualizing the relationship between fiction
and history still dominates current discussions. Nevertheless, it is far from
evident whether this conceptual dichotomy is the best starting point for
making sense of how literary narratives provide insights into history. One
of the central arguments of this book is that the way in which this dichot-
omy has been used to theorize the relationship between fiction and history
is linked to problematic ontological assumptions about the nature of his-
tory and reality, and that it risks dismissing how a sense of the possible
constitutes an important dimension of every actual world. Historical, auto-
biographical, and literary narratives have their own means of providing
interpretations of actual worlds, but they all can contribute to our sense
of a past world as a space of possibilities. Fiction is freer to imagine what
could have happened in a particular historical world than is historical non-
fiction, which is bound by the requirement of documentation; when specu-
lating, the historian is expected to clearly indicate this.4 Nevertheless, both
novelists and historians frequently imagine what might have been possible
and what was experienced as possible in a particular world.
When the relationship between literature and history is discussed, both
philosophers and literary theorists tend to place emphasis on the specific-
ity of fiction and to distinguish fiction from nonfiction on the grounds that
only the latter is “referential”; that is, it deals with the real, actual world
and can have truth value (see, e.g., Frege, 2008, orig. 1892; Cohn, 1999,
p. 15; Doležel, 2010, p. 41). This position, however, rests on problematic
assumptions about the ontology of history and literature.
Cohn’s influential “Signposts of Fictionality” (1990), for example, sug-
gests that what essentially distinguishes fiction from nonfiction is that
“a text-oriented poetics of fiction excludes, on principle, a realm at the
very center of the historiographer’s concern: the more or less reliably
documented evidence of past events out of which the historian fashions
his story”; it is a “bi-level” model that excludes the relationship between
“the story level and what we might call the referential level (or data
base)” (p. 778). Cohn argues that this exclusion makes the bi-level model
N a r r at i v e E t hi c s of I m p l i c at i o n [ 181 ]
821
inadequate for the analysis of history-writing but considers it fitting for

the analysis of fiction, which is structured by a “constitutional freedom”
from a referential dimension (p. 800). I would argue, however, that the
bi-level model (which still largely dominates narratology) is just as prob-
lematic for our understanding of literature and its role in our lives precisely
because it assumes that the referential level is not relevant to fiction. This
model is untenable if we acknowledge that literary narratives deal with our
worldly existence in ways that provide insights into the actual, real world
and often to specific historical worlds.5
Narratological approaches (such as Cohn’s and Doležel’s) tend to
ignore that although fictional narratives are not “literally true,” they can
have truth value at the level of the work as a whole, even when it makes
no sense to speak of truth value on a sentence level. As Thomas Pavel
puts it, against analytic philosophers who deny the truth value of fic-
tion, a literary work can be “true as a whole,” although it is “useless to
set up procedures for assessing the truth or falsity of isolated fictional
sentences” (1986, p. 17). As Ricoeur observes, “there is no discourse so
fictional that it does not connect up with reality,” but instead of referring
to reality at the level of “descriptive, constative, didactic discourse that
we call ordinary language,” fiction refers to reality at the level of “being-
in-the-world” (1991a, pp. 85–86). Through its thematic and structural
organization, a literary work communicates a certain interpretation of
the world. This is a central insight of hermeneutic aesthetics: works of art
disclose the world from a certain perspective, opening it up in such a way
that allows us to see and experience what we would not be otherwise able
to see and experience.6
The problematic assumptions underlying the prevalent way of drawing
a conceptual dichotomy between the actual and the possible in theorizing
the relationship between history and fiction are rarely articulated because
they are often simply taken for granted. Contemporary theories of fiction-
ality, for instance, tend to depend on a tacit theory of factuality that draws
a conceptual opposition between the actual and the possible, on the basis of
the ontological assumption that the actual and the real refer to objectively
verifiable actions, events, and facts. If we subscribe to a non-positivistic
conception of historical reality, in contrast, we should acknowledge that
reality also consists of phenomena that are less accessible to observation,
such as modes of experience, affect, and sense-making, and ways of orient-
ing oneself to the past, present, and future. Understanding these aspects
of reality requires the use of narrative imagination in the effort to chart a
historical world as a space of possibilities that sets certain limits on what is
perceivable, sayable, and thinkable.

If we conceptualize, from a hermeneutic perspective, the past world as a
space of possibilities in which it was possible to think, experience, feel, do,
and imagine certain things, and difficult or impossible to think, experience,
feel, do, and imagine other things, we can see how a sense of the possible is
an integral aspect of every actual world. Modes of relating to the past and
orienting oneself to the future are constitutive of each historical world as
a non-homogeneous, intersubjective space of possibilities. If we acknowl-
edge, against mainstream narratology, that the apparently uneventful eve-
ryday life of individuals and communities is also constitutive of history, we
can analyze how the historical world in which we live affects the very form
of our experience and how different modes of experience find expression
in divergent narrative forms.7 This conceptual framework enables us to
observe how fiction as the art of narrative imagination deepens our under-
standing of past worlds in terms of the possible.
The reading public tends to assess the truth value of historical and auto-
biographical narratives from the perspective of whether they depict accu-
rately what happened in a particular historical world or life. Interestingly,
however, it is mainly theorists of fictionality who emphasize the referen-
tial aspect of autobiographical and historical narratives in order to dis-
tinguish (allegedly non-referential) fiction from them, whereas theorists
of autobiography have increasingly come to stress the fictional aspects of
life-writing and its literary construction through various textual and nar-
rative strategies. Max Saunders voices a widespread sentiment in autobi-
ography studies: “however truthful or candid an autobiography might be
judged, it is nonetheless a narrative, and shares its narrative features with
fictional narratives” (2010, p. 7). The question of truth is often bracketed
in contemporary autobiography studies, but it nevertheless remains (even
if often tacitly) central to what Paul John Eakin (2004) calls the “eth-
ics of life-writing” and Phelan terms the “ethics of referentiality” (2007,
p. 219). The expectation of truth-telling regulates the reception of texts
that are generically framed as autobiographies, which explains why works
like James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003) or Binjamin Wilkomirski’s
Bruchstücke: Aus einer Kindheit 1939–1948 (1995, Fragments: Memories of a
Wartime Childhood), framed and marketed as “memoirs,” were considered
“frauds” when they turned out to be fictional.8
Grass’s autobiography appeals to the reader by aspiring to be truth-
ful and, through its truthfulness, ethical, and it also sets out to produce
important insights into the broader historical context beyond the indi-
vidual life. At the same time, however, it emphasizes its own element of
fabrication and fabulation, that is, the inevitable fictionalization that is
woven into the nonfictional. This self-reflexivity has the effect of making
8
4
1
the autobiographical narrator more reliable, rather than less, due to his
lucid awareness of his human limitations and of the inevitable selectivity
and inaccuracy of memory.
What I would like to suggest is that an important aspect of the truth
value and ethical value of both literary and autobiographical narratives
is how they succeed in conveying a sense of the past world as a space of
possibilities that encourages certain modes of experience and discourages
others. This argument will be elaborated next through an analysis of how
Grass’s fictional and autobiographical narratives produce insights into Nazi
Germany as a space of possibilities.
NAZI GERMANY AS A SPACE OF POSSIBILITIES
How do Grass’s Danzig trilogy and his autobiography Beim Häuten der
Zwiebel develop a narrative dynamic that contributes to the readers’ sense
of history as a sense of the possible? Both depict the petit bourgeois his-
torical world of 1930s Danzig, the milieu of Grass’s childhood and ado-
lescence, as a space of experience for a child to grow up. Grass’s was a
Catholic, National Socialist home: in the words of his lyrical self, he was
raised “between the Holy Spirit and the picture of Hitler” (1997a, p. 198).
In Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, Grass tells us that he was “a Young Nazi” who
believed in the legitimacy of the war and was an easy target for the hero-
ism and war propaganda promoted, for example, by the newsreels played
before feature films:
I was a pushover for the prettified black-

and-
white “truth” they served
up. . . . I would see Germany surrounded by enemies . . . : a bulwark against the
Red Tide. The German folk in a life-and-death struggle. Fortress Europe stand-
ing up to Anglo-American imperialism at great cost. (2007, pp. 69–70)9
Grass’s autobiography paints a detailed picture of how carefully crafted

ideological narratives (such as the master narrative of “American imperi-
alism”) were used to legitimize Nazi politics and were fed to the young.
Indoctrination shaped the narrative unconscious and narrative imagina-
tion of the boys and drew them into a “never-ending hero-worship” (p. 12).10
They hoped that the war would last long enough for them to enlist. As a 15-
year-old, Grass volunteered for submarine service, but due to his youth, his
application was declined. He was later drafted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst
and, at the end of 1944, he joined the Waffen-SS, without properly under-
standing what he was involved in:

True, during the tank gunner training . . . there was no mention of the war
crimes that later came to light, but the ignorance I claim could not blind me to
the fact that I had been incorporated into a system that had planned, organized,
and carried out the extermination of millions of people. Even if I could not be
accused of active complicity, there remains to this day a residue that is all too
commonly called joint responsibility. I will have to live with it for the rest of my
life. (p. 111)11
Ever since Die Blechtrommel (1959, Tin Drum), one of the earliest novels to
deal with the complicity of ordinary Germans in Nazi crimes, a key ques-
tion of Grass’s work has been how to understand this joint responsibility.
His fictional oeuvre has been an attempt to address this responsibility
through literary means. As his autobiography testifies, he eventually came
to the conclusion that the literary project had not been enough—that tak-
ing responsibility through storytelling needed to include an autobiograph-
ical account of his personal involvement and of what he had left untold.
Yet there are many similarities between the narrative strategies of his
fictional and autobiographical writings. In particular, they interlace the
perspective of the “experiencing I,” which reinforces the experientiality and
immersiveness of the narrative, with the distance-creating, self-reflexive,
retrospective interpretations of the “narrating I,” and they suggest (as in
the preceding quotation) that although the “experiencing I” is part of a his-
torical world (Nazi Germany) that he understands only in limited ways, he
is still responsible for his actions and inactions in that world (as the “nar-
rating I” acknowledges in hindsight).
Grass’s novels that depict Nazi Germany from the perspective of those
who collaborated with the Nazis are examples of perpetrator fiction or
complicity fiction, and in many respects they can be regarded as being
ahead of their times: the notion of perpetrator fiction was launched much
later, and the phenomenon has become a popular research topic only
within the past decade.12 Susan Suleiman (2009) praises Jonathan Littell’s
Les Bienveillantes (2006, The Kindly Ones), the topic of Chapter 6, for its
innovative narrative structure, as its first-person narrator and protago-
nist is both a perpetrator—a willing if somewhat passive participant in the
Holocaust—and a moral witness whose depiction of the action in the past
is intertwined with the kind of reflection that is “clearly retrospective, even
though it seems to be occurring at the moment”:13
Littell, in making his SS narrator into a reliable historical witness—that is, one
who functions as a witness informed by retrospective historical knowledge—
accomplishes something completely new. For here the historical truth—which
8
61
includes not only the facts but also an attempt to grapple with their ethical and
psychological implications—comes out of the mouth of one who was part of the
very system responsible for the horrors he is recounting. . . . (Suleiman, 2009,
pp. 8–9)
Such a narrative strategy, however, is not as completely new as Suleiman

suggests: a similar strategy had already been developed by Grass several
decades earlier. The narrators of the Danzig trilogy are character-narrators
who perceive their younger selves through the lens of their older selves.
They recount their past experiences (of growing up in Nazi Germany) in
such a way that a sense of immediacy (the perspective of the time when
the experiences took place) is intertwined with retrospective interpreta-
tions of these experiences. While narratologists frequently assume that
the “experiencing I” and the “narrating I” are separate, and that we cannot
experience and narrate at the same time (see, e.g., Cohn, 1999, p. 96), Grass
and Littell develop a form of narration that emphasizes, in a hermeneutic
spirit, the intertwinement of the two, particularly the way in which the
experiences of the “narrating I” affect how that I interprets narratively the
experiences of the past self.
Discussions on focalization usually focus on shifts between the
perspectives of different characters, but equally important are shifts
between the perspectives of the same characters at different points in
time. Although focalization is often linked to how a text invites the
reader to take the perspective of a certain character, shifts in focalization
have a wider range of functions. As Vera Nünning puts it, such shifts are
important in
highlighting differences of perception and feeling, as well as requiring readers to

position themselves in the face of such contradictions. Focalization is not only
about empathy and perspective taking, it is also about distancing and interpre-
tation. (2015, p. 107)
In the narrative strategies of Beim Häuten der Zwiebel and the Danzig tril-
ogy, shifts of focalization are integral to the narrative dynamic based on
the interplay between the perspective of the critical, self-reflexive “narrat-
ing I” in the present and that of the child and young man (the “experiencing
I”) who grows up and is immersed in the historical world of Nazi Germany.
Hundejahre, the third book of the Danzig trilogy, consists of three parts,
each of which has its own narrator. The novel focuses on the life stories of
two narrators, the childhood friends Eddi Amsel and Walter Matern, dur-
ing their adolescence in the outskirts of Danzig and during their postwar

years. In the first part, “The Morning Shifts,” Eddi Amsel, under the guise of
mine director Brauksel, tells in the third person about the childhood years
(1917–1927) of Eddi and Walter. The second part, “Love Letters,” comprises
Harry Liebenau’s letters to his cousin Tulla; in them he recalls the years
after 1927, focusing on the Nazi era. The third part, “Materniades,” is writ-
ten in the third person by the actor Walter Matern, who recounts his expe-
riences in postwar Germany until the year 1957. This narrative strategy
allows the novel to combine a depiction of petit bourgeois everyday life at
the time of the rise of Nazism, from the perspective of those who experi-
enced it, with a retrospective narrative interpretation of these experiences
and events.
In Hundejahre, National Socialism arrives at Langfuhr (an outlying dis-
trict of Danzig) little by little, taking hold of people’s daily lives: “gradually
more and more swastika flags” (1987, p. 661).14 The success of the Nazi doc-
trine is linked to its ability to appear normal and natural—representative
of the values of decent, upright, hard-working Germans. Much of the petit
bourgeoisie join the Nazi Party mainly because their neighbors are mem-
bers. A critical impetus for the community’s enthusiasm for Hitler is a let-
ter that the Führer sends them, furnished with his photo, in order to thank
them for giving him a dog, Prince: “Letter and picture of the Führer—both
were immediately placed under glass and framed in our shop—went on
long excursions in the neighborhood. As a result, first my father, then
August Pokriefke, and finally quite a few of the neighbors joined the Party”
(p. 682).15
The novel suggests that Nazism responded to a need for identity, pro-
vided by a sense of belonging to a collective—a yearning to be part of a
larger movement in order to feel accepted and important. Several scholars
have singled out the need for identity as one of the most crucial factors
behind the rise and success of Nazism: as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and
Jean-Luc Nancy (1990) suggest, the “Nazi myth,” the narrative of a supe-
rior race with a world-historical mission, provided ordinary Germans with
a seductive narrative identity. As we have seen, some narrative identities
perpetuate dominant power structures, while others provide individuals
with the means to resist them and to find alternative ways to construct
a sense of self. Hundejahre depicts the ways that the dominant ideologies
and the naturalizing narratives at the heart of their discourse of legitima-
tion shape the narrative identities of the average petit bourgeois citizens.
It also shows, however, how identity construction can draw on counter-
narratives, particularly through the story of Eddi Amsel, who seeks in
scarecrow-building an alternative identity, his own variation of an artist’s
self-reflexive, subversive identity.
81
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer have analyzed how the need
for an unambiguous identity is particularly powerful in “authoritarian
personalities” (1998, p. 212), who compensate for a weak self by identify-
ing with a powerful collective and complying with the prevalent ideology,
whatever it may be. In Hundejahre, such a personality is displayed particu-
larly by Matern, who is first a Catholic, then a Nazi, then a Communist, and
in the end searches for a new master, like a dog, symbolizing the desire to
give up one’s autonomy and to lead a life based on following authority and
ready-made narrative identities.
In Hundejahre, some residents of Danzig quickly become devoted adher-
ents to the Nazi movement, but more often they participate in passive
collaboration, blending into a conformist crowd. Liebenau, for example,
asserts self-ironically that “all he was good for was looking on and saying
what he’d heard other people say” (p. 803).16 With this modus operandi, he
follows the model of his parents. He lives in a community in which no one
wants to know or think about the broader implications of Nazi politics,
shockingly exemplified by the mountain of bones that accumulates from
the victims of Stutthof concentration camp: “No one talked about the pile
of bones. But everybody saw smelled tasted it” (1987, p. 809).17 As much
as people struggle to forget its existence, it penetrates their consciousness
with its stubborn presence as the sickeningly sweet odor of cremated ashes
wafts around the surrounding villages.
In Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, Grass depicts himself in similar terms:
I did my part unquestioningly . . . ; I was a schemer [Mitläufer] whose mind was
forever elsewhere. (2007, pp. 20–21)18
But I can take care of the labelling and branding myself. As a member of the
Hitler Youth I was, in fact, a Young Nazi. A believer till the end. Not what one
would call fanatical, not leading the pack, but with my eye, as if by reflex, fixed
on the flag that was to mean “more than death” to us, I kept pace in the rank and
file. No doubts clouded my faith. . . . (p. 35)19
The narrator here—as in Hundejahre—functions as a moral and historical

witness. For Avishai Margalit, “paradigmatic cases of what makes one into
a moral witness” involve “an encounter with external evil,” but there are no
conceptual reasons to disqualify confessions of encountering evil in one’s
“own soul” from moral testimony (2002, pp. 175–176). The forms of evil on
which Grass’s works focus are generally very mundane: evil ingrained in
indifference, laziness, lack of courage, and the failure to doubt. It is essen-
tially the same type of everyday evil that he depicts in his novels and that—
he suggests in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel—made him into a young Nazi.

In evaluating Nazi Germany as a space of possibilities, it is significant
that Grass, as the I-narrator of Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, sees himself not
only as importantly shaped by his sociohistorical milieu, but also as an
active moral agent who could have questioned prevailing forms of power.
Crucial, from this perspective, is the way in which both Hundejahre and
Beim Häuten der Zwiebel display the possibility of resistance. In the former,
one of the teachers (Dr. Brunies) refuses to collaborate with the Nazis; he
is deemed unpatriotic and ends up in a concentration camp. In the latter,
the narrator tells us that among the boys serving in the Reichsarbeitsdienst,
there is one whose performance is otherwise exemplary except that he
refuses to hold a gun. He drops it each time it is put into his hands and
asserts simply “Wedontdothat” (2007, p. 86; “Wirtunsowasnicht,” 2006,
p. 100). He is repeatedly and severely punished without success, until he
disappears—presumably to a concentration camp. This episode not only
underlines Grass’s personal culpability—he too had the option to resist—
but also shows how widespread conformism was and how fatal the conse-
quences of resistance often were.20
The sense of conformism that Grass’s narratives portray is integral to
the mode of existence of those inhabiting the depicted historical world.
While Fludernik believes that “novels and fiction films tend to foreground
the universally human in past experience” (2010, p. 48), what I am argu-
ing here, in contrast, is that Grass exemplifies the ambition of much of
contemporary fiction to create a sense of a certain world as a historically
specific space of experience. Both the Danzig trilogy and Beim Häuten der
Zwiebel convey a sense of how, in the Danzig of the 1930s, widespread con-
formism prevailed, and although it was possible to resist Nazism, doing so
required exceptional courage. The dominant narrative imaginary pushed
ordinary people to conform, luring them to follow blindly a movement that
offered them a seductive, heroic narrative identity.
In Hundejahre, Nazism builds on and radicalizes the everyday evil of
modern society, that is, what Hannah Arendt (1994) describes as the banal-
ity of evil: the novel shows that Nazism was not enabled by any inherent,
radical evilness of the Germans, but by quotidian indifference fueled by the
instrumental logic of modern Western society that divides responsibility
into such small pieces that nobody feels responsible for the ends and goals
of societal developments.21 In an essay, Grass writes about the “complex
‘modernity’ of genocide”: extreme evil disguises itself as the modern vir-
tues of decency and efficiency—as a mentality that encourages everyone
to unquestioningly take care of their own strictly defined responsibilities
(Grass, 1997f, p. 516). As Arendt shows, Eichmann and his ilk sat consci-
entiously at their desks and acted on orders. In depicting this banal evil,
9
01
Grass prompts the reader to ponder how much the logic of today’s Western
society differs from that of Nazi Germany and to recognize contemporary
mechanisms that are similar to those that enabled the rise of Nazism. In
our society, too, individuals become cogs in machines, in processes the
ends of which are not subject to critical discussion. We are taught to con-
sider efficiency (in terms of time and money) as an end in itself, although
the real issue should be the discussion of the ends and values toward which
we so efficiently strive. Grass’s ethics of remembering what he designates
metonymically as “Auschwitz” urges us to acknowledge that the Nazis and
bystanders—implicated subjects who were not directly involved but who
failed to resist the Nazis—were ordinary, conscientious men who did what
they were told and were driven by the need to conform and by the comforts
of a secure narrative identity.
While Arendt’s theory of the banality of evil remains easily abstract
as a philosophical theory, narratives like those by Grass embody similar
insights in a concrete form by showing us in experiential terms what it
is like to live in a world in which few people stop to reflect critically on
the ultimate values that steer their actions, or have courage to question
the goals imposed on them. Living through, with the characters, the social
developments through which the banality of evil takes shape and is har-
nessed to make the Holocaust possible gives us an understanding of those
developments that is different from the one we would get from abstract
accounts that lack the perspectives of subjects of experience and action
that are elemental to narrative logic. In the temporal process of engaging
with everyday banal evil, readers acquire a sense of how a specific histor-
ical world and its narrative imaginary conditioned the experiences and
actions of its inhabitants. It contributes to our sense of history by cultivat-
ing our sense of what was possible in that historical world: what different
modes of action—including bystanding, acting courageously, and showing
resistance—meant in that world, and how that space of possibilities is sim-
ilar or dissimilar to the one we inhabit today.
EXPERIENCE OF TIME AND HISTORY
Another way in which literary and autobiographical narratives contrib-

ute to historical imagination is by shaping our understanding of time
and history and of different modes of perceiving and experiencing them.
In a sense, Grass’s narratives are narratives about time and history. They
not only cultivate a sense of what a particular historical world (such as
Nazi Germany) was like, they also propose a more general philosophy of

history: a sense of how history, instead of being a linear progressive move-
ment governed by necessity or destiny, is made up of actions and inactions
of individuals in concrete situations. In Grass’s work, the mentality that
fosters the banal evil is linked to a particular dual experience of history
and time: they are experienced as both open and determined—coupling a
sense of the indeterminacy of the future with an assumption of history as
an inevitable process.
On the one hand, the characters are immersed in the events they are
experiencing, and their future is open in the sense that they do not know
where the present events are leading; they cannot (or are unwilling to)
imagine the consequences of their actions, or make sense of the larger
contexts to which they belong. In Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, the narration
particularly foregrounds the tension between the experience of those at
the scene of the action, immersed in the course of events, and the per-
spective of those looking back and retrospectively narrativizing the events.
For example, Grass the narrator tells us that no one talked about “war
crimes” at the time they were committed, or declared in Marienbad, when
the Germans surrendered to the Americans, that this is “Stunde Null” (a
“fresh start”): the events experienced primarily as confusing and chaotic by
those immersed in them came to be seen only much later as marking “the
end of one era and the beginning of the next” (2007, p. 164).22 The char-
acters originally experience the events from within an entirely different
narrative framework than the one in terms of which they are later narrativ-
ized. According to the narrative framework operational at the time of the
experience, the Germans were protecting Europe from the “Red Terror”;
according to the latter, the Americans came to rescue the Germans from
Nazi propaganda.
On the other hand, the dominant experience of time and history in Nazi
Germany is marked by a sense of inevitability. The characters do not per-
ceive themselves as agents making history but, rather, as being immersed
in an inevitable process that they are powerless to affect: “What is man?
A mere particle, partner, fellow traveller, cog in the cog-wheel of history.
A colourful ball being kicked around—I guess that was the way I pictured
myself” (p. 217).23 This experience of historical time as a determined proc-
ess is connected to an “idealistic” conception of history. Like Arendt, Grass
considers critical to the success of Nazism the belief that individuals must
submit to an inevitable historical process: for him, “faith in a coherent his-
torical process in a Hegelian sense” is an extremely dangerous “form of
superstition” that has been used to legitimate the most hideous crimes of
the twentieth century (Durzak & Grass, 1985, p. 14). As Arendt puts it, total-
itarian ideologies are based on an “ ‘idea’ by which the movement of history is
921
explained as one consistent process”: totalitarian rule claims to obey the

“laws of Nature or of History” (1976, pp. 461, 469).
In Grass’s oeuvre, the real consists in the everyday actions, inactions,
and sufferings of concrete individuals: this, indeed, is the stuff of history.
He worries that we lose sight of this reality if history is viewed only through
abstract ideas or portrayed as a teleological, rational, and meaningful proc-
ess with a given end, rather than as a process devoid of inherent meaning—
à la Döblin, for whom “no Hegelian Weltgeist rides over the battlefields”
(1997e, pp. 265, 272).24 Grass’s work foregrounds the concrete here and
now and the indeterminacy of the moment of action against teleological
historical narratives in which the singular is lost under abstract ideas. He
draws an opposition between the idea that history consists in the concrete
here and now, on the one hand, and, on the other, idealist conceptions of
history that subsume the concrete under abstract ideas.25 Grass puts for-
ward his narratives as an antidote to idealism that presents history as a
path toward a predetermined future.
For Grass, the basic evil (Grundübel) that functions as the condition of
possibility for the rise and triumph of Nazism is “idealism,” by which he
means sacrificing the particular and the individual in the name of universal
and abstract ideas (1997e, pp. 472–474). In Hundejahre, the fascist ideol-
ogy attempts to sublimate, sanctify, and conceal the concrete suffering of
individuals through abstract conceptual constructions. For example, hero
worship and a mythology knit together of nationalist narrative imaginary
and the misuse of pseudo-philosophical (here: pseudo-Heideggerian) jar-
gon enable Liebenau and Matern to dismiss the mass murder that is taking
place in the nearby concentration camp:
A boy, a young man, a uniformed high school student, who venerated the Führer,
Ulrich von Hutten, General Rommel, the historian Heinrich von Treitschke, for
brief moments Napoleon, the panting movie actor Emil Jannings, for a while
Savonarola, then again Luther, and of late the philosopher Martin Heidegger.
With the help of these models he succeeded in burying a real mound made
of human bones under medieval allegories. The pile of bones, which in reality
cried out to high heaven between Troyl and Kaiserhafen, was mentioned in
his diary as a place of sacrifice, erected in order that purity might come-to-
be in the luminous, which transluminates purity and so fosters light. (1987,
pp. 813–814)26
The parody stems here from Grass’s anti-idealism—from the conviction

that one should hold fast to that which is particular, to the concrete nature
of reality, instead of the general and abstract (1997e, pp. 472–474). He

thereby understands idealism in approximately the same way as Arendt,
who comments on Eichmann’s way of defining himself as an “idealist”:
An “idealist” was a man who lived for his idea—hence he could not be a
businessman—and who was prepared to sacrifice for his idea everything and,
especially, everybody. When he said in the police examination that he would
have sent his own father to his death if that had been required, he did not mean
merely to stress the extent to which he was under orders, and ready to obey
them; he also meant to show what an “idealist” he had always been. The perfect
“idealist,” like everybody else, had of course his personal feelings and emotions,
but he would never permit them to interfere with his actions if they came into
conflict with his “idea.” (Arendt, 1994, p. 42)
In Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, the narrator articulates a recurring theme of

Grass’s oeuvre by saying that the ability to doubt developed in him “much
too late,” but when it appeared, it came with overwhelming force: “I missed
the opportunity to learn to doubt, an activity that—much too late, but then
pursued all-out—enabled me to clear every altar and go beyond faith in
making decisions” (2007, p. 81).27 He asserts that only the ability to doubt
could have enabled him to resist Nazism, and on the basis of that ability
he developed—through the painful process that is the main topic of his
autobiography—into an artist. Grass suggests that it is precisely through
the ability to doubt that art can resist idealism and show that there are dif-
ferent possibilities of being and acting in every historical situation.
In the historical world depicted in Hundejahre, the narrative uncon-
scious of the petit bourgeois characters is dominated by the sense of the
inevitability of the course of events and of the concomitant powerlessness
of ordinary people to change it. At the same time, however, the reader is
shown how the unfolding of events is in fact shaped by the concrete actions
taken by particular individuals. The reader senses that things could have
happened differently. Hence, the reader’s sense of history is intertwined
with a sense of the “alternativeness of human possibility” (Bruner, 1986,
p. 53).
By using the narrative technique that Morson (1998) calls “sideshadow-
ing,” Hundejahre draws the reader’s attention to the possibilities of action
available for individuals in certain situations—possibilities that they often
leave unrealized, with fatal consequences. An illuminating example is the
pocket knife scene at the beginning of the novel. Walter plays with his
friend Eddi and the dog Senta on the Nickelswalde dam and wants to throw
a stone into the river Vistula, but he fails to find one and, instead, ends
up throwing in a pocket knife that he has received as a gift from Eddi. The
941
narrative makes clear that he could have asked Eddi to throw him a stone
or commanded the dog to fetch him one: “He could catch Amsel’s eye at
the foot of the dike with a hey and a ho, but his mouth is full of grinding
and not of hey and ho” (1987, p. 564).28 As he decides not to call Eddi but,
instead, throws away his gift, something is shattered between them—and
in Walter—and the narrative conveys a sense of how that would not have
been necessary. The novel suggests that history is made of such open situa-
tions in which individuals seize certain possibilities and ignore others.
While for those growing up and living in Nazi Germany the events
appeared largely inevitable, from a retrospective perspective the narrator
can show—against teleological narratives of history—that history con-
sists in concrete actions and inactions in particular spaces of possibilities
in which individuals practice their agency. The novel builds on the tension
between these notions of time—time as unfolding different possibilities,
defined and structured but not determined by the past, and time experi-
enced as an inevitable succession of predetermined events.
This tension can be clarified by Koselleck’s concepts of the space of
experience and the horizon of expectation, which he uses as metahistori-
cal, transcendental categories that allow us to disentangle different ways
of experiencing time, or “the inner relation between past and future or
yesterday, today, or tomorrow” (2004, p. 258). While the space of expe-
rience refers to the manner in which the past and its reception—the past
as remembered, reworked, and unconsciously present—constitutes a space
of possibilities within which it is possible to experience certain things,
the horizon of expectation refers to the diverse ways in which we orient
ourselves to the “not-yet.” With the rise of a new sense of historicity at
the turn of the nineteenth century—an awareness of the particularity of
each historical age—the space of experience and the horizon of expecta-
tion began to drift apart due to the novel vision of the present as a discon-
nected starting point for a new future. Since then, “there has existed and
does exist the consciousness of living in a transitional period” in which the
“historical experience descending from the past could no longer be directly
extended to the future” (pp. 259, 268–269). The moderns no longer expect
to be able to derive the future from how things are and have been; instead,
they perceive it as something that needs to be made.
In modern philosophies of history, however, the idea of an open future
is wedded to the belief that history follows a conceivable teleological
course.29 Hundejahre displays a dual sense of disruption and inevitability,
which is integral to the modern experience of time. The novel’s petit bour-
geois characters are waiting for a future that is, in principle, in the process
of becoming and of being shaped in the present, but that they nevertheless

experience as slipping beyond their reach and as ultimately dependent on
a “world-historical” plot in which certain nations and individuals—such
as the Nazi leaders—are destined to fulfill a special mission. Hence, their
experience of time is defined by the narrative imaginary constructed, dis-
seminated, and exploited by the Nazi regime.30 The novel shows how that
particular experience of time and history structures the narrative uncon-
scious that dominates the historical experience of petit bourgeois Germans
in the 1930s. It is an inquiry into the experience of time and history that
functioned as a condition of possibility for the Holocaust—and beyond
that, continues to function as a condition of possibility for many persist-
ent practices of structural violence.
The reader is invited to see the ethical problems in such an experience of
time and history—how it prevents ordinary people from taking responsi-
bility for their actions—and to reflect on how such a mentality still shapes
the contemporary world. The mode of narration, which both depicts the
experience of growing up in Nazi Germany and provides retrospective
reflection on that experience, encourages the reader to explore the signif-
icance of the narrated from the perspective of our own time—to ask, for
example: How do we make sure that history does not repeat itself? Are we
not also bystanders to genocides? How does the rhetoric of inevitability
structure contemporary politics and narrative unconscious?
VERGEGENKUNFT
Literary and autobiographical narratives can also contribute to our his-

torical imagination by heightening our awareness of the different ways in
which the three dimensions of time are intertwined in human experience
and of how particular ways of interpreting and relating to the past affect
who we are in the present. They can contribute to our understanding of
how the past is always constructed through interpretation that takes place
from the horizon of the present, and how storytelling plays a crucial role in
this process of interpretation, which is never ethically neutral.
Even if ours is an age of unprecedented interest in history and memory,
paradoxically it is also an age marked by the experience of an increasing
acceleration of life that is often linked to a narrow focus on the present. The
philosophical position known as “presentism” argues that only events and
entities that occur in the present truly exist.31 Commentators sometimes
refer to our age as one of presentism to problematize the mentality that
focuses on the present at the expense of how the past shapes it. In extreme
forms, such a mentality can be linked to an explicit attack against reflection
961
on the past, or against what Gadamer calls “wirkungsgeschichtliches

Bewuβtsein,” or “consciousness of being affected by history” (1997, p. 301).
An example would be Strawson’s provocative view (analyzed in Chapter 2)
according to which narrative self-reflection, involving reflection on the tra-
jectory through which we have become who we are, is inherently harmful.
Although Strawson acknowledges that the “way I am now is profoundly
shaped by my past” (2004, p. 438), he is committed to the normative idea
that we should refrain from reflecting on the past and, instead, focus on
living in the present moment. A major risk of such an attitude, of course,
is blindness to how the past shapes the present. A repressed past affects
us “behind our backs,” whereas conscious reflection on the complex ways
in which the past shapes the present can arguably help us gain emancipa-
tory distance from it, even when we acknowledge that self-transparence is
impossible.
Grass’s oeuvre suggests that the fight against harmful forms of for-
getting and silence is crucial to the ethics of storytelling. Some thinkers,
such as Elie Wiesel, have maintained that only silence can be an appropri-
ate response to the Holocaust, which is unrepresentable (like God): “The
unspeakable draws its force and its mystery from its own silence” (1990,
p. 165). Elsewhere, however, he acknowledges that silence “encourages
the tormentor, never the tormented” (p. 233). Grass’s work springs from
the latter insight. Remaining silent is also a mode of being implicated:
not speaking for the victims is often a way of implicitly taking the side of
the victimizers. While silence in Franck’s Die Mittagsfrau is primarily the
silence of the traumatized, Grass’s work foregrounds the silence of impli-
cated subjects who are mainly bystanders and witnesses, both at the time
of the events and afterward.
Both Beim Häuten der Zwiebel and the Danzig trilogy reflect on the his-
torical experience of not only those living in Nazi Germany, but also those
whom the traumatic past haunts in postwar Germany. The narrators of
Hundejahre provide an account of their wartime experiences by weaving
them into narratives that manifest and reflect on different ways of relating
to the past. The novel suggests that in postwar Germany, the most com-
mon survival strategy was the attempt to forget and simply leave behind
the troubling past:
Left behind: mounds of bones, mass graves, card files, flagpoles, Party books,
love letters, homes, church pews, and pianos difficult to transport.
Unpaid: taxes, mortgage payments, back rent, bills, debts, and guilt.

All are eager to start out fresh with living, saving, letter writing, in church pews,
at pianos, in card files and homes of their own.
All are eager to forget the mounds of bones and the mass graves, the flagpoles
and Party books, the debts and the guilt. (1987, pp. 848–849)32
The quotation represents petit bourgeois life and narrative imagination as

revolving around the accumulation of commodities. This life may be tem-
porarily interrupted by mounds of bones and mass graves, but will soon
resume its course. The passage creates a grotesque effect by drawing a par-
allel between economic matters (taxes, bills, debts) and ethical-existential
issues (the guilt linked to the Holocaust). It plays with the double mean-
ing of the German word “die Schuld,” which signifies both debt and guilt,
and with the conflation of these two meanings in the Germany of the “eco-
nomic miracle.” Economic productivity was offered as a solution to soci-
ety’s moral dilemma, as if guilt could be paid off like a debt. Hundejahre
suggests that forgetting and the idea of a new beginning formed the offi-
cial ideology because they guaranteed the smooth functioning of the eco-
nomic machinery: “Little by little this becomes the first principle of all
concerned: Forget! Maxims are embroidered on handkerchiefs, pillow slips,
and hat linings: Learn to forget. Forgetfulness is natural” (p. 938).33
Of the three narratives, it is Matern’s that most clearly represents an
obsessive attempt to forget the past. The narrative form gives expression to
his unwillingness to remember: unlike the other two parts of the book, the
“Materniades” are written in the third-person present tense, reflecting his
attempt to live in a present moment cut off from the past. He is unwilling
to tell about his life in the form of a story, which would require relating the
past to the present and reflecting on who he is on the basis of how he has
lived. The time experience that dominates the “Materniades” is similar to
the chronotope of “adventure time,” which Bakhtin has shown to be typical
of Robinsonades (modeled on Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe), that is, nar-
ratives about a series of exciting adventures that remain episodic and dis-
parate in relation to one another and that do not substantially change the
agent of the adventure.34 Matern sees his past in terms of such disparate
episodes. At the beginning of the novel, he betrays his friend by throwing
into the river a pocket knife that Amsel has given him. At the end of the
novel, he receives a second chance when Amsel gives him another pocket
knife, but he again throws it into the same river. This scene is emblem-
atic of his tendency to repeat the same aggressive behavioral and affec-
tive patterns, resulting from his inability to engage with the past, which he
attempts to compulsively erase from his mind and surroundings:
9
8
1
Matern buys a large eraser, stations himself on a kitchen chair, and begins to
erase the names, crossed off and not crossed off, from his heart, spleen, and
kidneys. As for Pluto, that four-legged hunk of past, feeble with age though still
running around, he’d be glad to sell him, send him to a rest home for dogs, erase
him. . . . (p. 938)35
The novel displays the return of the repressed, showing how the untold
past haunts the present and how those unable to confront the past are con-
demned to repeat it. Matern’s narrative unconscious, which he represses
with supreme effort, makes him repeat over and over again the same nar-
rative scenes of revenge and aggression toward the “evil other” onto whom
he projects and externalizes corruption and barbarity in order to avoid con-
fronting the evil within.
That our past experiences and narrative interpretations of them come
to constitute us is an ontological insight that is developed, in Beim Häuten
der Zwiebel, through the image of an onion. As a metaphor for the human
experience of time, it suggests that life is ultimately about memories piling
up on one another like layers of an onion. When “skin upon skin” is peeled
off, “life’s onion” proves devoid of any “meaningful core” (2007, p. 384).36
Instead of taking the form of a linear sequence, there are only interpen-
etrating layers of time that leak into one another.
This metaphor is linked to fierce criticism, throughout Grass’s oeu-
vre, of the assumption that the Nazi past could be appropriated or
“taken care of,” as the German word for dealing with the past sug-
gests: Vergangenheitsbewältigung includes the verb bewältigen, which
means “to master,” “take care of,” “resolve,” or “overcome.”37 Hundejahre,
for example, parodies attempts to find a technological solution to the
“problem of the past” by depicting the invention of “miracle glasses,” which
enable children to see the crimes committed by their parents (1987, p. 936;
1997b, pp. 601–602). The way in which the characters of Grass’s novels
remain haunted by the traumatic past, even when they believe they have
put it behind them, demonstrates that time is not a succession of point-like
moments but, rather, the past is a constitutive part of the present. Grass
depicts this conception of time that is at the core of his oeuvre through
the term Vergegenkunft, which combines the words referring to the past
(Vergangenheit), present (Gegenwart), and future (Zukunft) (1997d, p. 127).
Such a conception of time and history, stressing the coalescence of
the past, present, and future, is central to the hermeneutic tradition of
thought, including Koselleck’s analyses of temporality and historicity.
With the spatial metaphor of “the space of experience,” Koselleck indicates
how past experiences are “assembled into a totality, within which many

layers of earlier times are simultaneously present” (2004, p. 260), thereby
underscoring how experience is not constituted as simply an additive series
of events.38 Expanding on Koselleck’s ideas, Ricoeur (1988, pp. 215–235)
writes about the need to resist the shrinkage of the space of experience
that is linked to the tendency to see the past as separate from the pres-
ent, as a closed and unchangeable collection of past events. He suggests
that, through processes of reinterpreting and retelling, the past should be
kept open so that its presence in the present is acknowledged and atten-
tion is paid to the possibilities that the past opens up in the present. This
requires responsivity, for the cultivation of which we need imagination: we
are capable of being affected by the possibilities of the past “only to the
extent to which we are capable of broadening our capacity to be so affected.
Imagination is the secret of this competence” (Ricoeur, 1991a, 181).
Grass’s insistence on how the past is never totally past and experience
is always historically charged questions the assumption of the immediacy
of experience, prevalent in much of narrative studies. In Beim Häuten der
Zwiebel, for example, Grass brings elements of his past narrative uncon-
scious to the level of present consciousness by charting how his own
childhood and adolescent experiences were mediated by cultural imagery
prevalent at the time and through narrative models handed down to him
from novels, such as those by Erich Maria Remarque and Louis-Ferdinand
Céline:
But I had already read everything I write here. I had read it in Remarque or
Céline, who—like Grimmelshausen before them in his description of the Battle
of Wittstock, when the Swedes hacked the Kaiser’s troops to pieces—were
merely quoting the scenes of horror handed down to them. (2007, p. 125)39
The present “narrating I” has richer hermeneutic resources available to

interpret his past experiences than did his past “experiencing I.” The dis-
tance between the two selves draws attention to how understanding not
only is a matter of overcoming distance and empathizing with the other
(such as one’s past self) but also can have a sobering effect—making pos-
sible a new understanding that involves awareness of the limits of one’s
previous understanding. Here we can see the hermeneutic productivity of
distance, that is, “temporal distance as a positive and productive condition
enabling understanding” (Gadamer, 1997, p. 297).
In Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, the metaphor of an onion, not unlike the
notion of Vergegenkunft, points to the layered character of temporal experi-
ence. When the onion of memories is peeled back, layer by layer, “each skin
sweats words too long muffled, and curlicue signs, as if a mystery-monger
02
from an early age, while the onion was still germinating, had decided to
encode himself” (p. 3).40 What makes this process particularly challenging
is that many of the layers of our memories are only partly “ours”: we are
marked by a certain historical world and its narrative unconscious, which
we can acknowledge and understand only in a limited way. This limited-
ness, however, does not free us from the obligation to try to remember and
understand.
NARRATIVE ETHICS OF IMPLICATION: ART
The next issue that we should explore here is the potential of narratives
to cultivate our sense of what it might mean to learn from the past in ori-
enting ourselves to the future. In Grass’s oeuvre, the duty to remember is
the motor for writing, and it is repeatedly thematized in both his fictional
and autobiographical works. In this section, I examine how his oeuvre pres-
ents artistic practice as a process of taking responsibility; in the next one
I will address the idea of autobiographical storytelling as a means of taking
responsibility.
Grass has repeatedly argued that Auschwitz is not only a crime of past
generations, but something that places a permanent obligation on us (1997g,
p. 63). This conviction, which he shares with many other artists of his gen-
eration, has been the driving force behind his art from the beginning. He
thereby contributes to the discourse on collective responsibility that Thomas
Mann (1997, orig. 1945) and Karl Jaspers (1946) started in the immediate
postwar years by arguing that the Germans have joint responsibility for
the German catastrophe because they are complicit in the German culture
that made National Socialism possible—a discourse that members of the
Frankfurt School continued by showing how Auschwitz was enabled by the
logic of instrumental rationality integral to modern Western society. Grass’s
thinking also has a close affinity with that of Ricoeur’s ethics of memory that
discusses our debt to the people of the past and asserts that in the case of
extreme atrocities, “the relation of debt is transformed into the duty never to
forget” (1992, p. 164). Ricoeur places the emphasis on how the past is handed
down to us as a legacy that includes a collective responsibility to do justice to
the victims of history by telling their stories, and on the capacity of literature
to function as a form of alternative historiography that follows “the plot of
suffering” (1991b, p. 464).41 Grass’s work, however, suggests that in respond-
ing to this challenge, it is important that literature explores, on an experien-
tial level, not only the perspectives of the victims and the perpetrators, but
also those of various implicated subjects, such as bystanders, in order to help

us imagine how such atrocities were possible and wherein lies the possibility
to act otherwise.42 I call this his narrative ethics of implication.
Grass’s oeuvre presents art as the most powerful counterforce to the
mentality of conformism and cultural amnesia, and it ascribes art’s subver-
sive force to the ways in which it can ignite the capacity for doubt. It also
presents art as a process of taking responsibility by exploring the mecha-
nisms of modern, Western society that made the Holocaust possible and by
prompting us to recognize that they have not disappeared, but still struc-
ture our lives in certain respects, implicate us, and need to be resisted so as
to prevent history from repeating itself.
In Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, Grass depicts his own shock when he learned,
at the American re-education camp, about the concentration camps and
presents this experience as a key moment in his own development into
an artist. Disbelief changed into shock and then to the profound transfor-
mation of his whole outlook and sensibility. Like many other artists of his
generation, he adopted suspicion—“total doubt of all ideologies” (“totale
Ideologieverdacht,” Mayer, 1967, pp. 300–320)—as his most important
maxim; it was also more broadly the cornerstone of the aesthetic program
developed by the German postwar generation of novelists, most importantly
in Gruppe 47, the literary group of which Grass was a leading figure. This gen-
eration felt an urgent need to find new forms of expression in order address
Adorno’s famous dictum: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”
(1981, p. 34).43 Grass understood this not as a prohibition against writing
poetry, but as a requirement to write differently than before Auschwitz. As
Wolfdietrich Schnurre, his fellow writer in Gruppe 47, observed, the poet can
write about anything he wants, even about trees, but “his trees must be dif-
ferent from the ones that rustled in poems written before Auschwitz.”44 For
Grass, Adorno’s dictum meant that one must write in a way that addresses
what made twentieth-century totalitarianisms possible, such as the idealist,
determinist conception of history and the subjection of the singular and
concrete to abstract, general ideas and ideologies.
In Grass’s oeuvre, art plays a crucial role in making us aware of the pres-
ence of the past in the present. In Hundejahre, such reflection is conducted
by Eddi Amsel, who makes most salient the possibility of the individual
to resist—by developing one’s own subversive narrative imagination—the
pressures of the social environment and its prevailing narrative imaginary.
As a child, his resistance entails the creation of his own world of scare-
crows, which parody and critically comment on the surrounding social real-
ity. After the war, he constructs a “scarecrow hell” in a former mine: he
asserts that man has created the scarecrow in his own image, and his voca-
tion is to create an entire scarecrow world in the image of the contemporary
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2
world, the above-ground hell: “Here the turning points in history are scare-
crowified. Degraded yet dynamic, scarecrow history unfolds in its proper
order, reciting dates, defenestrations, and peace treaties” (1987, p. 1016).45
The end of the novel gestures toward the view that art can bring us to a
self-encounter, even if it cannot save us from ourselves. It suggests that
Matern’s visit to the scarecrow hell prompts him to realize just what kind
of a hell has been built on earth. Such a self-encounter finds expression, in
the final scene, as Matern finally relinquishes his third-person perspective
and assumes a first-person narrative voice:
And this man and that man—who now will call them Brauxel and Matern?—I
and he, we stride with doused lamps to the changehouse. . . . For me and him
bathtubs have been filled. I hear Eddi splashing next door. Now I too step into
my bath. The water soaks me clean. Eddi whistles something indeterminate.
I try to whistle something similar. But it’s difficult. We’re both naked. Each of us
bathes by himself. (p. 1023)46
Undressing suggests that the protagonists have given up the costumes they
have been wearing throughout the novel. Nudity, however, does not imply
here a self-enlightened state of knowing who one is and what one should
do. Matern’s way of lying in the bathtub, helpless and perplexed, trying to
imitate Eddi’s whistling behind the wall, indicates that, in the end, every-
one is alone with his or her past and guilt—they cannot be washed away
like dirt—but at least Matern now has the courage to acknowledge that it
is his own guilt. A similar gesture of changing into the first person—and
thereby taking personal responsibility—is the founding gesture of Beim
Häuten der Zwiebel.
The scarecrow hell, Amsel’s book project, and Grass’s autobiography are
all fueled by the dual need to address the past and to grapple with it in the
present. Already as a schoolboy, remembering is important for Eddi. The
motto of his diary is “Began at Easter because I shouldn’t forget anything”
(p. 595).47 Similarly, the key task of art for Grass is to struggle against for-
getting, particularly against cultural amnesia: “A writer, children, is some-
one who writes against the passage of time,” because its passage benefits
the perpetrators, not the victims (1997h, pp. 139–141).48
A central dimension of Beim Häuten der Zwiebel is its self-reflexive
rumination on the role of narrative fiction as a means of producing
counter-narratives that shape narrative imagination—of the young in
particular—and on how their narrative identities develop in a dialogical
relation to the culturally available stock of narrative models. These mod-
els provide the young with mirrors in which to reflect on their own sense

of life. The I-narrator depicts the young Grass as an avid reader, but the
books he reads are largely random—whatever happens to be available in
his uncle’s library. Even so, books provide him with mirrors and the oppor-
tunity to travel to imaginary worlds:
Books have always been his gap in the fence, his entry into other worlds.
(2007, p. 29)
Wilde’s copious roster of sins outdoing one another provided me with a suitable
mirror. . . . I would sit on an upside-down fire bucket and read more than I could
digest. I was especially drawn to heroes who took me out of myself and into
other spheres: Jürg Jenatsch, August Welumsegler, Der grüne Heinrich, David
Copperfield, or the Three Musketeers—all three at once. (pp. 95–96)49
The narratives that reinforce culturally dominant ideologies and the ones
that provide counter-narratives lie side by side on the book shelves; it is
often largely by chance that the young boy picks up one book instead of
another, even if authority figures like teachers and parents obviously play
an important role in those choices. One of the books Grass tells us he read
as a youth was an officially forbidden book, which, however, neither he nor
his uncle knew to be forbidden. It was Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues
(1929, All Quiet on the Western Front), the influential antiwar novel that
affected an entire generation:
I can’t say for sure when I plucked All Quiet on the Western Front from my uncle’s
bookshelf. Was it not until I was waiting to be called up or was it at the same
time I read Jünger’s Storm of Steel, a war diary that my German teacher at Saint
Peter’s had prescribed as good preparation for the front? (2007, p. 96)50
The reading experience was so powerful that it left a lasting impression

on him: “To this day the delayed effect of that early reading experience is
with me” (2007, pp. 96–97).51 Yet, even this experience was not powerful
enough to develop his ability to doubt to the extent of enabling him to
resist Nazi propaganda. Hence, the book came to symbolize for him the
limits of the transformative, empowering, and emancipatory force of lit-
erature: “Over and over, author and book remind me of how little I under-
stood as a youth and how limited an effect literature may have. A sobering
thought” (p. 97).52 Hence, Grass’s oeuvre suggests that individuals are con-
stituted dialogically in relation to cultural webs of narrative, which con-
dition (without determining) their life courses and narrative identities,
but while artistic counter-narratives open up the possibility for resistance
4
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based on imagining other worlds and modes of experience, ultimately they

rarely empower individuals enough for them to stand up against dominant
ideologies.
NARRATIVE ETHICS OF IMPLICATION: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL

STORYTELLING
Grass’s way of dealing with storytelling as a process of taking responsi-

bility and his narrative ethics of implication gain an entirely new dimen-
sion in his autobiography, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel. By entering into the
“autobiographical pact” (Lejeune, 1988, p. 12), Grass drops the protective
shield of art and sets out to tell the “full” truth about his adolescent years
in Nazi Germany. We learn that the cultural amnesia that he has depicted
throughout his work has a pressing personal dimension to him: he now
pleads guilty of this same amnesia, which manifested itself in his inability
to confess his personal involvement in the Waffen-SS. In interviews follow-
ing the book’s publication, Grass explained that it was only in Beim Häuten
der Zwiebel that he found a narrative form in which he was able to deal with
these issues: the form of an autobiographical narrative of becoming an art-
ist, which links his personal failure to the broader failure of his generation
to “ask questions” (Wickert & Grass, 2006). Integral to the autobiography
is confronting not just his own implication in a web of violence, but also his
concealment of this implication.
Grass begins by addressing the “temptation to camouflage oneself in the
third person” (2007, p. 1):53 “But because so many kept silent, the temp-
tation is great to discount one’s own silence, or to compensate for it by
invoking the general guilt, or to speak about oneself . . . in the third per-
son: he was, saw, had, said, he kept silent” (p. 28).54 The driving force of the
narrative is the sense that while in a way he has already dealt with all of
these themes before—in his novels in which he has trapped his “dual self”
(p. 9)55—he still needs to write about them in his own first-person voice. At
the same time, he engages in intense reflection on the nature, possibilities,
and limits of autobiographical writing.
In his autobiography, Grass emphasizes a theme that has been a
recurring undercurrent of all his books: the intimate relationship
between memory and storytelling. He explores how we deal with our
experiences and remember them by weaving them into narratives, and
he presents storytelling as ethically ambivalent in that it often dis-
torts experience: “once experiences of this sort blossom into stories,
they take on a life of their own and flaunt one detail or another” (2007,

p. 172).56 On the other hand, memory has a tendency to link events and
experiences together into stories precisely because we can remember
stories better than disparate events: “Clearer in my mind, because it
can be told as a story, is an incident that took place outside the hazing
routine” (p. 115).57 We need stories in order to remember, but we also
need to be aware of their interpretative, selective nature and how this
shapes our memory.
One of the central themes of Beim Häuten der Zwiebel is the way in
which remembering is always an act of interpreting, bound up with acts
of narrativization not only in literary, but also in autobiographical mem-
ory. Grass openly displays the paradox of all autobiographical narratives:
they are evaluated in terms of their “truthfulness,” and yet autobiograph-
ical memory is necessarily selective and interpretative. Autobiographical
narratives can never be an exhaustive account of what “truly” happened.
Instead of being the sole version, it is inherent to narrative logic that every
narrative can be contested and told from a different perspective: there are
always other versions of the story. I propose that the truth aspect of auto-
biographical narratives should not be understood in narrowly referential
terms. Both fictional and autobiographical narratives can have truth value
on a non-propositional level, for example when they are able to disclose the
space of possibilities in which the narrated life is embedded. An important
aspect of the autobiographical endeavor to give a truthful account of one’s
past actions and experiences is precisely the mapping of the narratively
shaped space of possibilities in which the events of one’s life unfold.
In Grass’s narratives, such mapping takes place in conjunction with con-
tinuous reflection on the fictional and imaginative aspects of life-storying.
They emphasize how every account of the past is a narrative interpretation
that is necessarily selective and partial. In Hundejahre, the alternation of
three “constrained” narrative perspectives, with no overriding authorial
intervention or normative commentary, displays the way in which there is
no single “correct” or ethically neutral perspective. While authors of histo-
riography interpret and explain the narrated historical events, in histori-
ographical novels with homodiegetic narration (a narrator who is also the
protagonist or other character in the novel), most of this interpretative and
evaluative work is left to the reader. In Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, an autho-
rial voice occasionally takes part in this reflection, observing his past self
as if from an outsider’s perspective: “[M]‌y now lenient, now stringent eyes
remain focused on a boy still in shorts, snooping into hidden affairs, yet
failing to ask ‘Why?’ ” (p. 10).58 However, the point of such reflection is less
to give the “right” answer and more to make the reflective work visible, so
as to encourage similar reflection in the reader.
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Grass’s narratives are emphatically self-reflexive: they are aware of their

own narrative— selective, interpretative, ethically charged— nature. In
many novels written in response to the trauma of the Second World War,
the dissolution and fragmentation of narrative forms manifest the experi-
ence of disorientation itself.59 Grass, in contrast, embraces storytelling as
something that belongs inextricably to the human mode of making sense
of experience in time, but his narratives never pretend to simply reflect
order found in reality; rather, they self-reflexively present themselves as
modes of (re)interpretation, construction, and selection, inevitably involv-
ing both remembering and forgetting.60 While Hundejahre draws attention
to the material textuality of the narrative through the distinctly literary
styles of its three parts, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel foregrounds the voice of
the storyteller who—no matter how sincerely he is striving to be truthful—
cannot avoid fabulation.
A central insight in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel is that in autobiographical
narration, too, we have access to the past only via narrative imagination.
One has to imagine who one was and what it was like to be an earlier ver-
sion of oneself. That past self is now an other, a partly imaginative varia-
tion of oneself, living in a different space of possibilities than one’s present
world. The autobiographical narrator of Beim Häuten der Zwiebel makes vis-
ible the process of imagining his past self. He struggles to recognize him-
self in “the boy I apparently was” (p. 4)61 and asks in what sense he is that
child and therefore responsible for his past actions and inactions. He calls
himself a “Young Nazi” and interrogates himself, but elsewhere feels sym-
pathy for the 12-year-old tortured by these questions and accusations, and
suggests that he may be demanding too much of that boy (p. 10; 2006,
p. 17). The hesitation and oscillation between the accusatory and the rec-
onciliatory mode invite the reader to take part in this process—pondering,
for example, what one can expect from a child of that age.
Beim Häuten der Zwiebel tells the story of how a Nazi-minded teenager grew
into a young man who felt that it was only possible to become an artist by
devoting all one’s creative powers to the attempt to deal with the legacy
of “Auschwitz,” but who has to admit, in the end, that it is not enough
to address this ethical challenge through art—that even if all memory is
necessarily incomplete, he can only make peace with his past by integrat-
ing into his life narrative what he had earlier edited out as too painful and
shameful.
In making sense of how we relate to our past selves, Marya Schechtman’s
distinction between persons and selves is useful. While a “person is a moral

agent who can be held responsible for her actions” (2007, p. 169), selves are
constituted by the experiences and actions they identify with:
Temporally remote actions and experiences that are appropriated into one’s self
narrative must impact the present in a more fundamental sense than just con-
straining options or having caused one’s current situation and outlook. These
events must condition the quality of present experience in the strongest sense,
unifying consciousness over time through affective connections and identifica-
tion. (p. 171)
A person constituted narratively needs only “to recognize one’s human his-
tory as one’s own and accept certain implications of that fact” (p. 172); a
self, in contrast, is constituted narratively in the sense of making certain
parts of one’s past one’s own through affective identification. In order to
experience that we are the same self as our past selves, it is not enough to
have a cognitive sense of being the same person. Instead, we must have a
phenomenological connection to our past, implying an affective relation to
it: we must feel it was our own past (p. 167). Phenomenological selves, how-
ever, are “fluid and amorphous,” and it is not clear where the self begins
and ends (pp. 177–178). Hence, the distinction between persons and selves
is not a binary opposition, but includes degrees of attribution:
[A person] will relate to different elements of her narrative in different ways.

She will identify more strongly with some than with others, and feel more of
an affective connection to them. Those narrative elements that a person more
strongly appropriates . . . are more fully or completely her own than those from
which she is more distanced. (p. 175)
In Grass’s case, he clearly feels that his former self—the young Nazi—is
phenomenologically so different from his present self that it is necessary
to ask in what sense he is still the same person. But at the same time, he is
autobiographically the same person, if not the same self, and he recognizes
the responsibility he has to bear for the deeds of that person, no matter
how long ago they took place. Schechtman explains: “What one considers
one’s own actions and experiences in this weaker sense will have to corre-
spond for the most part to what is in one’s human history” (p. 170). What
Grass did as a child and a youth is part of his life history and in that sense
part of his narrative, but he had excluded aspects of it, up until his auto-
biographical effort to integrate the untold, shameful fragments of his past
into the story of his youth.
8
0
2
Schechtman acknowledges that although the distinction between person

and self is analytically useful, there are important connections between the
two. While in her earlier narrative self-constitution theory she “strongly
implied that it is desirable for a person to be as strongly identified as pos-
sible with the whole of her narrative, a tightly woven self-narrative making
for a stronger person than a weaker one,” in its revised version she suggests
more cautiously that “there are advantages to making one’s self-narrative
coincide as far as possible with one’s person-narrative,” and she no longer
insists that “it is always desirable to have an extended self-narrative. There
may be circumstances in which it is better for a life to include radical affec-
tive breaks within it” (p. 176). She remains committed, however, “to the
view that there is value in seeking to maintain affective connection to as
much of our (person) lives as we can” (p. 176).
Schechtman’s examples of the tension between a sense of self and a
sense of person are examples of “alienation or indifference with respect to
part of one’s human past” (p. 175), which breaks the sense of “a phenome-
nological experience of unity of self,” a unity based on “the subject’s strong
identification with past and future phases of his life” (p. 175). But in Grass’s
case it is a matter of something more than just alienation or indifference.
It is a question of how to deal with a repressed aspect of his past, a pain-
ful element that he has been too ashamed to acknowledge as part of his
history. The task that Grass takes up in his autobiography is to integrate
the previously excluded parts of his life history into his self-narrative in a
process of taking responsibility for his past and his silence. It is clear that
he cannot simply identify with what he experienced and did as a young
Nazi, but he is not indifferent toward it either: it is marked by an affective
investment—colored by shame, guilt, compassion, and anxiety.
It seems to me that Schechtman does not adequately acknowledge how
important change, development, and transformation often are to self-
narratives. Her “phenomenological self” appears relatively coherent and
unified, rather than radically temporal and changing. It is not so simple
that we either identify with our pasts or have an affective break with them.
As selves we are constantly changing, and integral to these transforma-
tions and to our sense of self can be what we have learned from the past.
In Grass’s case, the process of learning is pivotal. His narrative ethics of
implication is an ethics of learning—learning courage to fight silence, to
doubt, and to acknowledge that one is often wrong. His development into
an artist is based on the will to devote his life to struggling against the
forces that made him into a young Nazi so that others may avoid repeating
his mistakes and succeed in the art of doubting. There is a sense in which
his past obligates him to deal with who he was and how it was possible that

he became that person. Even if the sense of self largely concerns the past
we identify with, our life narratives should also address the past we must
take responsibility for—including the past we no longer identify with.
As for the debate around Grass’s belated confession, does his Waffen-SS
past and its concealment undermine the way in which he deals with issues
of guilt, forgetting, and the obligation to remember in his literary oeu-
vre? Fictionalization was for Grass a strategy of dealing with both per-
sonal and collective guilt, and now his complicity is used, by many, as a
strategy for dismissing the ethical demand his work places on us. Such a
response ignores the narrative ethics of implication that forms the driv-
ing force of his work, an ethics which suggests that we are all implicated
differently in histories of violence. It also eschews the ways in which Grass
has dealt with his Nazi past (with the exception of the Waffen-SS episode)
in his writings from early on: as Stuart Taberner puts it, “at least since the
early 1960s, Grass had transformed reflection on his own ‘biographical
failure’ into a staple of his essays, speeches and literary texts” (2009, p. 2).
It is ethically important that even insofar as Grass the novelist was able
to address his complicity only “in the third person,” as he says, the third-
person narrative perspective in his novels has never been one of a moral
high ground that would present evil as something that does not concern
“us” (the author and the readers). His novels undermine the perspective
of an external, morally superior narrator in possession of unconditional
truth: their narrators are themselves entangled in the events they narrate,
and although they sometimes try to adopt an impartial third-person nar-
rative mode, this gesture is thematized, and guilt is revealed as the motor
for their narration.62
The ethical challenge Grass presents to us is intertwined with the view
pervading his work that “Auschwitz” is not only a German or a Jewish
trauma. It is an “incurable rupture of civilization history,” which “will never
stop being present in the present”: it is not only a crime of past genera-
tions, but something that implies a permanent moral debt, an obligation to
remember, for all of humanity, even if it is particularly urgent for European
self-understanding to address this debt (1997g, pp. 63, 236, 239). Grass’s
literary work has consistently argued that the Holocaust implicates all of
us and can never stop implicating us. The reaction to the disclosure of his
Waffen-SS past is symptomatic of a sensationalist hunger for revelations
that would allow us to allocate responsibility to the “evil other,” as if estab-
lishing Grass as “guilty” would mitigate the burden on the rest of us who
are posited as “not guilty”—as if Grass’s act of confession would relieve us
of the duty to reflect on the conditions of possibility for genocide.
0
21
Grass’s work not only provides us with a sense of the space of experience
of those living in Nazi Germany; it also reflects on how the legacy of that
historical world continues to shape our space of experience in the contem-
porary world and how we could learn from it. It encourages us to ask how
we should live and how we do live with the weight of the past: “After is
always before. What we call the present, this fleeting nownownow, is con-
stantly overshadowed by a past now in such a way that the escape route
known as the future can be marched to only in lead-soled shoes” (2007, p.
144).63 For Grass, the “ethics of memory” has a broader meaning than, for
example, for Margalit, who reserves this term only for “thick relationships”
within “communities of memory” (2002, pp. 6–9) or between individuals,
based on feelings of intimacy and belonging. For Grass, it pertains to the
obligation of the whole of humankind to remember “Auschwitz.” His work,
however, suggests that it is not just a matter of remembering what hap-
pened; it also involves the obligation to try to imagine and understand how it
was possible that what happened could actually happen, what processes of
implication were involved and continue to be involved, and how we could,
through such understanding, try to prevent history from repeating itself.
It is hence a future-oriented obligation to try to understand something
that cannot be accepted. In this chapter, I have suggested that essential to
this task is the obligation to narratively imagine the space of experience in
which these actions were rooted and to reflect on how processes of story-
telling—that always involve both remembering and forgetting—mediate
the interpenetration of the past, present, and future in our lives.
CONTRIBUTIONS TO HISTORICAL IMAGINATION
I have argued here that opposing the factual, actual, and real to the fictional,
possible, and unreal makes it difficult to conceptualize how a fictive world
can—precisely by creating a world of its own—function as an interpreta-
tion of the world (past, present, or future). In Grass’s case, such an approach
has trouble explaining why and how both his novels and his autobiography
succeed in producing insights into the historical world of Nazi Germany.
I have explored here several dimensions of the ways in which literary and
autobiographical narratives contribute to our historical imagination and
cultivate our sense of history as a sense of the possible. I will conclude by
emphasizing the intimate interconnections between these aspects.
First, I analyzed how narratives can develop our awareness of how a his-
torical world and its narrative webs condition the experiences and actions
of its inhabitants. Grass’s first-person narrators, both in his novels and in

his autobiography, are moral and historical witnesses who convey a sense
of Nazi Germany as a space of possibilities in which conformism, bystand-
ing, and resistance had specific consequences. The historical world as a
space of possibilities also shapes the experience of time and history, the
understanding of which I examined as the second dimension of how nar-
ratives contribute to our historical imagination. Due to their self-reflexive
distance, narratives can not only convey a certain experience of time and
history, but also cultivate our sense of how history, instead of being gov-
erned by necessity or destiny, consists of everyday actions and inactions of
individuals in concrete situations. They can thereby help us perceive each
historical present as an open space in which the future is in the process of
being made. Grass’s work makes tangible the tension between the ways in
which Nazism was linked to the belief in the inevitability of the historical
process and how history is made of concrete actions and inactions. It shows
the power of literature to function as an antidote against an idealist con-
ception of history, and how such a conception functioned as a condition of
possibility for the Holocaust.
Third, I suggested that literary and autobiographical narratives can
contribute to our awareness of how the past, present, and future always
interpenetrate one another, and how our relation to the past is narratively
mediated. Grass warns us against cultural amnesia that represses the trace
of the past in the present. Our sense of how narrative interpretations of
the past shape our space of possibilities in the present and our orientation
to the future is intertwined with our experience of time and history, as well
as with our understanding of how the past implicates us. Finally, I analyzed
Grass’s autobiographical exploration of how we need narrative imagination
to understand both our personal and cultural past. This is also a form of
the interconnectedness of different dimensions of time and is linked to our
sense of the possible: not only does our understanding of the past affect
how we experience our possibilities in the present, but also our present
sense of the possible affects how we interpret, remember, and narrate the
past. For Grass, it became possible to narrate untold, shameful parts of his
past only in twenty-first-century Germany.
In this chapter, literary and autobiographical storytelling have provided
complementary perspectives on the ways in which narratives can cultivate
our sense of how the past implicates us: their analyses have suggested that
the duty to remember entails a duty to try to understand and imagine how
the horrors of the past were possible, and how we might learn from the
past as we orient ourselves to the future. Acknowledging this results in
an ethics of implication that draws attention to the ways in which violent
history implicates not only those involved in direct acts of perpetration,
21
but also all those indirectly involved, including those whose actions and
inactions made the events possible and who witnessed them, even if from a
temporal or spatial distance, such as ourselves. Awareness of the historical
conditions of possibility for past atrocities can make us more attentive to
the historicity of our own world and to how it perpetuates violent practices
and mentalities—for example, in an effort to analyze the continuities and
discontinuities of the racist politics of the current US administration with
the intersecting histories of nationalism, colonialism, and fascism.
Discussions on the ethics of autobiography are often centered on the
individual and could pay more attention to ethical issues arising from the
ways in which lives are implicated in processes that go beyond individual
agency. Autobiographical storytelling often functions as a mode of explor-
ing how individual lives are entangled in violent historical processes and
can alert us to how witnessing at a distance implicates us. It is also impor-
tant to acknowledge how narratives of different genres can shed light on
the fictional and imaginative aspects of life-storying and on the historically
conditioned but non-determined nature of our narrative agency. While the
postwar suspicion of all ideologies often took the form of rejecting narra-
tive per se because it was taken to speak the language of destiny, Grass’s
narratives exemplify how storytelling can function against discourses of
destiny and idealism—which sacrifice the individual to an “idea” or a his-
torical movement—by providing counter-narratives that cultivate our nar-
rative imagination and our powers of doubt.
NOTES
1. On ethos attribution, see Booth (1988); Korthals Altes (2014). As Korthals Altes
puts it, an author’s “discourse through its whole form is likely to be understood
as expressing its enunciator’s character” (p. 5). Grass’s fictional and nonfictional
discourse made him into the moral conscience of the nation; the way he covered
up a part of his political past incited, for some, the need to revise this ethos
attribution, or even to see his previous ethos (underlying his work and his
“identity as a person”) as a “fraud” (p. 10).
2. On the question of the genre of Grass’s book, see Taberner (2008, p. 145), and
Schade (2007, p. 292).
3. For documentation of the debate, see Köbel (ed.) (2007).
4. Historians indicate speculation in various ways, such as through the conditional
tense or speculative words such as “perhaps” or “maybe” (see Salmi, 2011, p. 177).
5. Equally problematic is Cohn’s assumption that there is an immediately given
“database” available to the historian. As several philosophers of history—from
Gadamer (1997) to White (1981) and Gardner (2010)—have argued, historians
do not encounter past events as immediately given, but as perceived from a
certain historically constituted horizon of interpretation.

6. On the hermeneutic conception of truth in connection to art, see Heidegger
(1977a); Gadamer (1997); Bowie (1997); Eaglestone (2004a); on truth as
“fidelity” or “respectful beholding” in narrative hermeneutics, see Freeman
(2016).
7. Such a wider notion of the historicity of experience has been developed in
the hermeneutic and other continental traditions: Foucault, for example,
insisted that everything has a history, including sexuality, emotions, and
concepts.
8. See Phelan (2007, p. 219); Korthals Altes (2014, pp. 89, 110–111).
9. “Ein Bollwerk gegen die rote Flut. Ein Volk im Schicksalskampf. Die Festung
Europa, wie sie der Macht des angloamerikanischen Imperialismus standhielt”
(2006, p. 82).
10. “. . . immerwährenden Heldenanbetung” (2006, p. 19).
11. “Zwar war während der Ausbildung zum Panzerschützen . . . nichts von jenen
Kriegsverbrechen zu hören, die später ans Licht kamen, aber behauptete
Unwissenheit konnte meine Einsicht, einem System eingefügt gewesen
zu sein, das die Vernichtung von Millionen Menschen geplant, organisiert
und vollzogen hatte, nicht verschleiern. Selbst wenn mir tätige Mitschuld
auszureden war, blieb ein bis heute nicht abgetragener Rest, der allzu geläufig
Mitverantwortung genannt wird. Damit zu leben ist für die restlichen Jahre
gewiß” (2006, p. 127).
12. The earliest uses of the term “perpetrator fiction” that I am aware of are
Eaglestone (2011), and Meretoja (2011) (independently of each other). For
research on perpetrator fiction, see Suleiman (2009); McGlothlin (2010, 2016);
Sanyal (2015); Pettitt (2016).
13. In 2009, Suleiman wrote that perpetrators’ testimonies have been so far
“virtually nonexistent” (2009, p. 1), but, in fact, these testimonies had been
discussed by literary critics for more than a decade (see e.g., Wood, 1999).
14. “Mehr und mehr Hakenkreuzfahnen” (1997b, p. 164).
15. “Brief und Führerfoto—beides wurde sogleich unter Glas gelegt und in
eigener Tischlerei gerahmt—machten lange Wege durch die Nachbarschaft
und bewirkten, daß zuerst mein Vater, dann August Pokriefke, danach etliche
Nachbarn in die Partei eintraten” (1997b, p. 197).
16. “Harry Liebenau . . . eignete sich nur zum Zugucken und Nachplappern” (1997b,
p. 392).
17. “Niemand sprach von dem Knochenberg. Aber alle sahen rochen schmeckten
ihn” (1997b, p. 402).
18. Heim has translated “Mitläufer” sometime as “fellow traveller” and sometimes as
“schemer.” “[M]‌itgemacht habe ich fraglos . . . ; ein Mitläufer, dessen Gedanken
immer woanders streunten” (2006, pp. 27–28).
19. “[D]‌as Belasten, Einstufen und Abstempeln kann ich selber besorgen. Ich war
ja als Hitlerjunge ein Jungnazi. Gläubig bis zum Schluß. Nicht gerade fanatisch
vorneweg, aber mit reflexhaft unverrücktem Blick auf die Fahne, von der es hieß,
sie sei ‘mehr als der Tod,’ blieb ich in Reih und Glied, geübt im Gleichschritt.
Kein Zweifel kränkte den Glauben” (2006, p. 43).
20. See Fuchs (2007, p. 269); Schade (2007, p. 287).
21. A similar approach to the Holocaust has been developed by a range of thinkers
who include the theorists of the Frankfurt school and Foucault, who insists that
fascism and Stalinism “used, to a large extent, the ideas and the devices of our
political rationality” (2000, p. 328).
4
21
22. “Eine ‘Stunde Null’ jedoch, die später als Zeitenwende . . . im Handel war,
wurde mir nicht geläutet. . . . Vielleicht wirkte der Ort des Geschehens . . . zu
einschläfernd, um den historischen Tag als ein Ende und Anfang bezifferndes
Datum wahrzunehmen” (2006, pp. 185–186). Heim’s translation does not seem
to convey the ironic and critical distance the narrator maintains to what was
announced as “a new beginning”: “a fresh start [Stunde Null] of the sort I felt
later as a whole new era . . . I did not yet feel. . . . [I]‌t was too soporific a setting
for marking the monumental day as the end of one era and the beginning of the
next” (2007, p. 164, emphasis added).
23. I re-translated the end of the quotation, which Heim translates somewhat too
definitively as “that is how I saw myself.” “Was ist der Mensch? Nichts anderes
als ein Partikel, Teilhaber, Mitläufer, ein Stück im Stückwerk der Geschichte. So
etwa, als jeweils anders bunter Spielball, den andere querfeldein stießen, werde
ich mich eingeschätzt haben” (2006, p. 245).
24. Cf. Saariluoma’s (1995, p. 66) discussion of Grass’s relation to Döblin.
25. As Arendt explains, “ideological thinking becomes emancipated from the reality
that we perceive with our five senses, and insists on a ‘truer’ reality concealed
behind all perceptible things” (1976, p. 470).
26. “Ein Knabe, ein Jüngling, ein uniformierter Gymnasiast, der den Führer,
Ulrich von Hutten, den General Rommel, den Historiker Heinrich von
Treitschke, Augenblicke lang Napoleon, den schnaufenden Schauspieler
Heinrich George, mal Savonarola, dann wieder Luther und seit einiger Zeit
den Philosophen Martin Heidegger verehrte. Mit Hilfe dieser Vorbilder gelang
es ihm, einen tatsächlichen, aus menschlichen Knochen erstellten Berg mit
mittelalterlichen Allegorien zuzuschütten. Er erwähnte den Knochenberg, der
in Wirklichkeit zwischen dem Troyl und dem Kaiserhafen gen Himmel schrie,
in seinem Tagebuch als Opferstätte, errichtet, damit das Reine sich im Lichten
ereigne, indem es das Reine umlichte und so das Licht stifte” (1997b, 409).
Although Grass’s critique is not aimed at Heidegger’s philosophy as such, but
at the way it was imitated and made use of during the Nazi era (and in his
autobiography Grass recounts how he himself took part in such imitation),
part of the critical edge of this parody is also directed at the way Heidegger was
lured by Nazism.
27. “Ich verpaßte die Gelegenheit, in erster Lektion das Zweifeln zu lernen, eine
Tätigkeit, die mich viel zu spät, dann aber gründlich befähigte, jedweden Altar
abzuräumen und mich jenseits vom Glauben zu entscheiden” (2006, p. 94).
28. “Könnte Amsels Blick mit Häh! und Häh! von der Deichsohle auf sich ziehen, hat
aber den Mund voller Knirschen und nicht voller Häh! und Häh!” (1997b, p. 12).
29. Cf. Ricoeur (1988, pp. 208–211, 214–215); Lyotard (1991, pp. 67–68).
30. See, e.g., Koselleck (2004, p. 266); Ricoeur (1988, pp. 209–210).
31. For an overview of versions of presentism as a philosophical position, see
Bourne (2006); in the theoretical debates on history and historiography,
“presentism” is often used in a different sense, to refer to ways of interpreting
the past from the perspective of present-day interests and concerns (see Tamm,
2013). On the acceleration of life in digital capitalism, see Wajcman (2015).
32. “Zurück bleiben Knochenberge, Massengräber, Karteikästen, Fahnenhalter,
Parteibücher, Liebesbriefe, Eigenheime, Kirchenstühle und schwer
transportierende Klaviere. Nicht bezahlt werden: fällige Steuern, Raten für
Bausparkassen, Mietrückstände, Rechnungen, Schulden und Schuld. Neu
beginnen wollen alle mit dem Leben, mit dem Sparen, mit dem Briefeschreiben,

auf Kirschenstühlen, vor Klavieren, in Karteikästen und Eigenheimen. Vergessen
wollen alle die Knochenberge und Massengräber, die Fahnenhalter und
Parteibücher, die Schulden und die Schuld” (1997b, pp. 465–466).
33. “Diese Verhaltensweise wird mehr und mehr zur Hauptlebensregel aller
Beteiligten: Vergessen! Sprüche werden in Taschentücher, Handtücher,
Kopfkissenbezüge und Hutfutter gestickt: Jeder Mensch muß vergessen
können. Die Vergeßlichkeit ist etwas Natürliches” (1997b, pp. 605–606).
34. On the episodic nature of adventure time, see Bakhtin (1981, pp. 87–88, 125,
244, 391); Mäkikalli (2007, pp. 70, 80–93).
35. “Matern kauft sich einen großen Radiergummi, setzt sich auf einen Küchenstuhl
und beginnt alle abgezinkten und nicht abgezinkten Namen von Herz, Milz und
Nieren wegzuradieren. Auch den Hund Pluto, ein altersschwaches und dennoch
herumlaufendes Stück Vergangenheit auf vier Beinen, möchte er verkaufen, in
ein Tierheim geben, ausradieren” (1997b, p. 606).
36. “. . . keinen sinnstiftenden Kern” (2006, p. 433).
37. See, e.g., Grass (1997g, p. 236); Adorno (1998) presented a similar critique of the
idea of mastering or coming to terms with the past.
38. On the importance of this idea for Ricoeur, see his (1991b, p. 467).
39. “Aber das, was hier im einzelnen geschrieben steht, habe ich ähnlich bereits
woanders, bei Remarque oder Céline gelesen” (2006, p. 142).
40. “Und jede weitere schwitzt zu lang gemiedene Wörter aus, auch schnörkelige
Zeichen, als habe sich ein Geheimniskrämer von jung an, als die Zwiebel noch
keimte, verschlüsseln wollen” (2006, p. 9).
41. See also Ricoeur (1988, pp. 215–235; 1991a, p. 221; 1998; 2000).
42. Ricoeur (2000, pp. 507–511) presents similar ideas on the relationship between
history and cultural memory, for example by suggesting that the “culture of
memory” provides history with important “imaginative variations.”
43. Adorno later expressed regret at this formulation: “Perennial suffering has as
much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have
been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems” (1973,
p. 362).
44. “[S]‌eine Bäume müssen andere sein als die, die in den Gedichten rauschten, die
vor Auschwitz enstanden” (Schnurre, 1987, p. 58).
45. “Hier finden sich die historischen Wendepunkte scheuchifiziert. Verunglimpft
und dennoch dynamisch ereignet sich der Reihe nach und Jahreszahlen,
Fensterstürze und Friedensschlüsse herbetend die Geschichte in
Scheuchengestalt” (1997b, p. 732).
46. “Und Dieser und Jener—wer mag sich noch Brauxel und Matern nennen? –ich
und er, wir schreiten mit abgelöschtem Geleucht zur Steigerkaue . . . Für mich
und ihn wurden die Badewannen gefüllt. Drüben höre ich Eddi plätschern.
Jetzt steige auch ich ins Bad. Das Wasser laugt uns ab. Eddi pfeift etwas
Unbestimmtes. Ich versuche ähnliches zu pfeifen. Doch das ist schwer. Beide
sind wir nackt. Jeder badet für sich” (1997b, p. 744).
47. “Fing an auf Ostern weil man nichts vergessen soll” (1997b, 61).
48. “Ein Schriftsteller, Kinder, ist jemand, der gegen die verstreichende Zeit
schreibt” (1997c, pp. 147–148).
49. “Bücher waren ihm von früh an die fehlenden Latte im Zaun, seinem
Schlupflöcher in andere Welten” (2006, p. 37). “Oscar Wildes üppiges
Angebot an Lastern, die sündhaft einander überboten, eignete sich zur
Selbstbespiegelung. . . . Auf einem umgestülpten Feuerlöscheimer saβ ich
621
und las mehr, als ich halten konnte. So ging ich in Büchern auf, die dazu
einluden, jeweils in anderer Gegend ein anderer zu sein: Jürg Jenatsch, August
Weltumsegler, der grüne Heinrich, David Copperfield oder die drei Musketiere
zugleich” (p. 110).
50. “Fraglich bleibt, wann ich mir aus dem Bücherschrank eines Onkels Im Westen
nichts Neues gezogen habe. Ist mir dieses Buch erst während meiner Wartezeit
als Kriegsfreiwilliger zwischen die Finger geraten oder habe ich es zeitgleich
mit Jüngers In Stahlgewittern gelesen? Ein Kriegstagebuch, das uns mein
Deutschlehrer auf der Petrischule am Hansaplatz als vorbereitende Lektüre für
künftige Fronterlebnisse verordnet hatte” (2006, pp. 110–111.).
51. “Bis heute läβt die verzögerte Wirkung früher Leseerfahrung nicht von mir ab”
(2006, p. 111).
52. “Immer wieder erinnern mich Autor und Buch an meinen jugendlichen
Unverstand und zugleich an die ernüchternd begrenzte Wirkung der Literatur”
(2006, p. 112).
53. “[D]‌ie Versuchung, sich in dritter Person zu verkappen” (2006, p. 7).
54. “Weil aber so viele geschwiegen haben, bleibt die Versuchung groß, ganz und
gar vom eigenen Versagen abzusehen, ersatzweise die allgemeine Schuld
einzuklagen oder nur uneigentlich in dritter Person von sich zu sprechen: Er war,
sah, hat, sagte, er schwieg” (2006, p. 36).
55. “[S]‌ein doppeltes Ich” (2006, p. 15).
56. “[W]‌eil Erlebnisse dieser Art, sobald sie sich zu Geschichten mausern, nun mal
auf Eigenleben bestehen und gern mit Einzelheiten prahlen” (2006, p. 194).
57. “Deutlicher, weil erzählbar, ist mir ein Ereignis” (2006, p. 131). Variations of this
idea recur in the book (see, e.g., 2007, p. 199; 2006, p. 225).
58. “[M]‌ein mal nachsichtiger, dann wieder strenger Blick auf einen Jungen
gerichtet bleibt, der kniefreie Hosen trägt, allem was sich verborgen hält,
hinterdreinschnüffelt und dennoch versäumt hat, ‘warum’ zu sagen” (2006,
p. 17).
59. I have analyzed elsewhere the problematization of narrativism in the Robbe-
Grilletean nouveau roman as a response to the experience of the Second World
War (see Meretoja, 2014b).
60. In Suleiman’s (2009, p. 9) terms, we can say that there is a degree of
“derealization” in his narratives, as they make us aware of the literary choices
the author is making and thereby add a metanarrative dimension to his novels.
Hence, they are closely related to what is commonly called, after Hutcheon
(1988), “historiographic metafiction.”
61. “Junge, der anscheinend ich war” (2006, p. 10).
62. Grass asserts that guilt functions as the motor of narration for all of the
narrators of the Danzig trilogy (Arnold, 1971, pp. 10–11).
63. “Danach ist immer davor. Was wir Gegenwart nennen, dieses flüchtige
Jetztjetztjetzt, wird stets von einem vergangenen Jetzt beschattet, so daß auch
der Fluchtweg nach vorn, Zukunft genannt, nur auf Bleisohlen zu erlaufen ist”
(2006, p. 165).

CHAPTER 6
Narrative Dynamics,
Perspective-Taking, and Engagement
Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes
O ne of the persistent taboos in post-Holocaust narrative imagination

has been, for a long time, engagement with the perpetrator’s perspec-
tive. For Ricoeur, it was self-evident that while historians count the cadav-
ers, the task of fiction is to tell the victims’ stories: “Fiction gives eyes to the
horrified narrator. . . . Either one counts the cadavers or one tells the story
of the victims” (1988, p. 188). Telling the perpetrators’ stories was not an
option. For Lanzmann, all attempts to understand perpetrators represent
“the obscenity of the very project of understanding” (1995, p. 205). While
early French postwar thinkers saw Nazism in connection to other histories
of racialized violence, and the commemoration of the Second World War
focused on celebrating those who fought against the Nazis, the focus then
shifted, as Debarati Sanyal puts it, “from heroic to tragic registers”: “from
the droit au souvenir (right to remembrance) demanded by the figure of the
Resistance fighter to a devoir de mémoire (duty of remembrance),” charac-
terized by “an orientation toward the innocent victim’s memory along with
the Shoah’s singularity” (2015, pp. 183–184). Even though philosophers
and historians like Hannah Arendt (1994, orig. 1963) and Christopher
Browning (1992) have persistently argued for the need to understand how
ordinary men became Nazi perpetrators, it is only in the recent years that
a turn to the perpetrator has come to mark literary Holocaust studies, at
the same time as fiction has increasingly come to feature perpetrators as
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protagonists, first-person narrators, and focalizers (whose experiences a

third-person narrator narrates), rather than representing them through
an external, distanced perspective.1 Even so, as Jenni Adams writes, “the
sense of literary and cultural unease which surrounds attempts to concep-
tualise or depict the Holocaust perpetrator continues” (2013, p. 1).
As novelists have increasingly taken up the task of engaging with the
minds of Holocaust perpetrators, this has created heated discussions on
narrative empathy and ethics, revolving around this question: Do narra-
tives that are narrated from the perpetrator’s perspective, particularly
when they are in the first person, give rise to ethically problematic empa-
thy? In this chapter, I address this question in connection to broader issues
of narrative dynamics and of the ethical relevance of the temporal process
of readerly engagement. These issues will be discussed in relation to a novel
that has created perhaps the most heated controversy around the contribu-
tion of perpetrator fiction to the understanding of the Holocaust: Jonathan
Littell’s Les Bienveillantes (2006, The Kindly Ones). The novel, which consists
exclusively of the first-person narration of former SS officer Maximilien
Aue, has been criticized for a lack of realism and an ethically questiona-
ble attempt to lure the reader into identifying with a Nazi. At the same
time, it has been repeatedly praised as the most important novel of the
twenty-first century thus far. Among the admirers of the novel, the novel-
ist Jorge Semprún asserts that in 50 years’ time, our memory of the Second
World War and the Holocaust will be defined less by the works of histori-
ans than by Littell’s Les Bienveillantes: “Historians will continue to write
on the Second World War. But only novelists can renew memory” (2008,
p. 35). Like the historian Antony Beevor (2009) and many others, Semprún
believes that the novel succeeds in producing insights into history that are
possible only through fiction.
The different ways in which the novel has been read provide fertile
ground for discussing the assumptions underlying divergent understand-
ings of the relationship between history and fiction. The novel has mostly
been read either “mimetically,” as a representation of the Second World
War that lends itself to a comparison with what we know about it from his-
torical research, or “anti-mimetically,” stressing its nature as an imagina-
tive discourse and an aesthetic artifact. Here, I shall explore how narrative
hermeneutics problematizes the mimetic–anti-mimetic dichotomy—and
allows us to advance beyond it—in connection to undermining the stand-
ard way of drawing a dichotomy between literature as the realm of the
possible and history as the realm of the actual. As I have suggested, the
current discussion on the relationship between fiction and history does not
adequately take into account how the actual and the possible constantly

interpenetrate each other in both fiction and nonfiction, and how actual
worlds can be productively understood as spaces of possibilities. I aim to
show how the conceptual framework developed in this book enables us to
analyze how ethically challenging narratives, such as Les Bienveillantes, can
deepen our understanding of historical worlds (in this case, that of Nazi
Germany) in terms of the possible and, by the same token, make an ethi-
cally valuable contribution to our narrative imagination.
Although I will touch upon all six aspects of the ethical potential of
storytelling, enumerated in Chapter 3, I will mainly focus on the possi-
bilities of narrative fiction in contributing to our comprehension of the
limits of narrative understanding of the horrors of history and on the ethi-
cal issues involved in perspective-taking, particularly in engaging with the
perpetrator’s perspective. After discussing how Les Bienveillantes unearths
the historical world of Nazi Germany as a space of possibilities, I will ana-
lyze the narrative dynamic of the novel and how it functions simultane-
ously immersively, inviting emotional engagement, and self-reflexively,
producing critical distance. I suggest that this interplay gives rise to a read-
erly dynamic that is crucial for the potential of fiction to contribute to our
understanding of history in specifically literary ways, which involve reflec-
tion on the conditions and limits of narrating, representing, and under-
standing the traumatic past.
THE DIMENSION OF THE POSSIBLE
The question of the possible pervades Les Bienveillantes on several levels.

The novel not only tells us what happened, it explores the conditions of
possibility of those events. It imagines what the agents of the past experi-
enced to be possible in the historical world of Nazi-occupied Europe, and
what might have been possible for them from a retrospective perspective,
marked by hindsight and temporal distance. The novel also asks what is
possible for us to know about that world, and what possibilities this might
open for us in the current world.
Les Bienveillantes shows in a multidimensional way how the actual and
the possible constantly interpenetrate each other. In the fictive world of
the novel, this applies to both past and present reality. On the level of the
narrated events, Aue, the protagonist-narrator, is present and sees what
happens, but there is no certainty of what is happening beneath the sur-
face, inside people’s heads, or what invisible forces make people act in a
certain way. Aue looks at the Ukrainian soldiers forced by the Nazis to mas-
sacre Jews, and he tries to imagine who they are, where they have come
N a r r at i v e D y n a m i c s , P e r s p e c t i v e - Ta k i n g , a n d E n g ag e m e n t [ 219 ]
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from, and what they would think, in the future, of their actions at this
moment:
I thought about these Ukrainians: How had they got to this point? Most of
them had fought against the Poles, and then against the Soviets, they must have
dreamed of a better future, for themselves and for their children, and now they
found themselves in a forest, wearing a strange uniform and killing people who
had done nothing to them, without any reason they could understand. What
could they be thinking about all this? Still, when they were given the order, they
shot, they pushed the bodies into the ditch and brought other ones, they didn’t
protest. What would they think of all this later on? (Littell, 2010, pp. 85–86)2
The way in which the narrator reflects on these issues from the perspec-
tive of an eyewitness highlights how the answer to the question of what
kind of intersubjective reality made the Holocaust possible is by no means
something that can be simply seen, even at the moment the events unfold.
The question was as acute then as it is now. Responding to this question
requires narrative imagination: one needs to imagine the sense of the pos-
sible that structures the mode of experience of those involved. A sense of
different possibilities, of alternative courses of life, and of the intercon-
nections between the past, present, and future regulates how things are
experienced in the first place:
I thought about my life, about what relationship there could be between this
life that I had lived—an entirely ordinary life, the life of anyone, but also in
some respects an extraordinary, an unusual life, although the unusual is
also very ordinary—and what was happening here. There must have been a
relationship. . . . (p. 95)3
The protagonist and the other characters orient themselves to the present
and future on the basis of their horizon of expectation, shaped by their
past experiences. Their narrative unconscious affects whether they con-
sider certain courses of events possible, likely, unlikely, or impossible. The
unfolding of the political events transforms their horizon of expectation
and puts them under pressure to modify their behavior in order to sur-
vive. For example, the protagonist is acutely aware of the impossibility of
expressing his homosexuality under the Nazi regime. In the Nazi narrative
imaginary, homosexuality is forbidden—taboo—and those who are guilty
of it are considered weak, effeminate, and degenerate.
Through its detailed depiction of the rise of National Socialism, Les
Bienveillantes gives us a sense of how the space of possibilities in which

the characters live slowly changes. When the officers first hear about the
plan to kill all the Jews, women and children included, their first reaction is
sheer disbelief—they simply cannot believe that it is possible:
“But look, that’s impossible,” Callsen said. He seemed to be begging. . . . Oh Lord,

I was saying to myself, now that too must be done, it has been spoken, and we’ll
have to go through that too. I felt invaded by a boundless horror but I remained
calm, nothing showed through, my breathing remained even. Callsen continued
his objections: “But Standartenführer, most of us are married, we have children.
They can’t ask us to do that.” (p. 100)4
After the initial shock, they eventually grow accustomed to the atrocities,
their horizon of expectation is transformed, and they learn to dissociate
themselves from what they consider to be their unfortunate but necessary
job. The novel depicts the gradual process through which a sensitive young
man who is shocked by such orders develops into a cog in the machinery of
industrial mass murder, into someone who can no longer walk in the for-
est without thinking of mass graves: “A sudden burst of bitterness invaded
me: so this is what they’ve turned me into, I said to myself, a man who can’t
see a forest without thinking about a mass grave” (p. 702).5
Like Grass’s work, Les Bienveillantes explores, in a literary form, the
Arendtian idea of the banality of evil, but this time from the perspective
of a Nazi perpetrator. It shows how officers work in chains of command in
which no one feels responsible for the actions committed by the chain, and
how they have trouble understanding the overall rationale of the machin-
eries in which they function as small, obedient cogs. By giving the reader
a sense of what the banality of evil meant in terms of everyday decision-
making, and by asking the reader to live through the temporal process in
which that evil transforms the protagonist, the novel engages the reader
in a different way than abstract academic studies. The way in which the
novel deals with this problematic in a narrative form, from the perspective
of lived time, is ethically relevant: the reader goes through, imagines, and
experiences, in an embodied, affectively charged way, the temporal process
that turns ordinary men into brutal, cold-blooded killing machines. The
sheer length of the book and the astonishingly detailed depiction of “the
production of the day-to-day of the genocide” (Eaglestone, 2011, p. 24) is
ethically crucial. The readers’ emotional investment intensifies as the story
unfolds and the effects of war on human integrity become apparent. As the
narrator asserts in the beginning, in wartime man loses “his right to life,”
but he also “loses another right, one just as basic and perhaps even more
vital for his conception of himself as a civilized human being: the right not
2
to kill. . . . In most cases the man standing above the mass grave no more
asked to be there than the one lying, dead or dying, at the bottom of the
pit” (Littell, 2010, p. 17).6 The reader’s emotional engagement is also likely
to involve sharing Aue’s feeling of growing numbness—as the initial shock
of terror turns into gradual habituation—and his experience of dizziness
and disorientation after extended immersion in the world of atrocity.
National Socialism is depicted in the novel as a power that penetrates
people’s everyday lives in such a way that they lack a sense of alternatives.
For example, a certain type of bureaucratic language guides people to act as
if the orders were inevitable:
This tendency spread to all our bureaucratic language, our bürokratisches

Amtsdeutsch, as my colleague Eichmann would say; in correspondence, in
speeches too, passive constructions dominated: “it has been decided that . . . ,”
“the Jews have been conveyed to the special treatment,” “this difficult task has
been carried out,” and so things were done all by themselves, no one ever did
anything, no one acted, they were actions without actors, which is always reas-
suring, and in a way they weren’t even actions, . . . there were only facts, brute
realities, either already present or waiting for their inevitable accomplishment,
like the Einsatz, or the Einbruch (the breakthrough). . . . (p. 631)7
The narrator reflects critically on the tendency of the Nazis to reify the
social reality they have constructed, but at the same time he himself is
deeply complicit with the Nazi regime. Aue’s first-person narration func-
tions against reification both through such critical commentary and by
drawing attention to how history consists of concrete actions and inac-
tions, conditioned by a historical world as a space of possibilities.
The narration is shot through with sideshadowing, as Aue repeatedly
asks himself whether he could have done things differently, questioning
his options and alternative possibilities. He acknowledges the difficulty of
obtaining any definite certainty on these issues:
Could there have been another realm of activity that might have agreed with
me better, where I would have felt more at home? There might have been, but
it’s hard to say, for it didn’t happen, and in the end, the only thing that counts
is what was, and not what could have been. From the very beginning, things
weren’t as I would have liked them: I had resigned myself to that a long time
ago (yet at the same time, it seems to me, I never accepted things as they are,
so wrong and so bad . . .). It is also true that I have changed. When I was young,
I felt transparent with lucidity, I had precise ideas about the world, about what

it should be and what it actually was, . . . but I . . . did not yet know the force of
time, of time and fatigue. And even more than my indecision, my ideological
confusion, my inability to take a clear position on the questions I was dealing
with, and to hold to it, it was this that was wearing me down, taking the ground
away from under my feet. (pp. 761–762)8
The narration here foregrounds the process of retrospective sense-making.

A feeling of powerlessness, fatigue, and the “force of time” are factors that
Aue sees in hindsight as reasons for not embarking on different courses of
action. He refrains from emplotting the past into a narrative that would
provide exhaustive causal explanations. This is part and parcel of accepting
responsibility for what he did. Aue does not deny the fact that his actions
were not inevitable: he made choices that were not predetermined; things
could have gone differently. It is ethically important that his actions are
presented as conditioned by the historical circumstances, but not deter-
mined by them.
It is integral to the dynamic of the novel that throughout its textual
progression the narrative in-between within the depicted world is in the
process of being constructed and transformed. The emergent narrative
imagination, shaped by the Nazi ideology, clearly affects Aue’s worldview
and beliefs, but he is also able to maintain, to a certain extent, critical
distance from it. In particular, the racist Aryan mythology that plays an
important role in legitimating the Holocaust remains alien to Aue, and he
develops, with his colleagues, theories to explain the German obsession
with the Jews. They suggest that it is first and foremost the repressed
desire to be like the Jews that underlies the anti-Semitic fantasy of destroy-
ing them. This view has a close affinity with René Girard’s (1976) theory
of mimetic desire, according to which the driving force underlying many
forms of violence is an identificatory mechanism based on the desire to
be like the rival, to have what he or she has, and to annihilate the rival in
order to take his or her place. Colin Davis sums up the Girardian triangular
desire as follows:
So there are three figures involved in the Girardian drama of desire: the desir-
ing subject, the desired object, and the prestigious mediator who makes the
object desirable to the subject by desiring or possessing it first. . . . Triangular
or mimetic desire can easily turn to violence. By desiring what the other desires,
I desire also to be like, even to be, that person. But I also establish the other as
my rival. The deadlock of desire is that the mediator both makes the object of
desire desirable and stands in the way of my obtaining it. (2003, pp. 243–244)
4
2
Aue suggests that a similar ambivalent triangular desire underlies the

Holocaust. To demonstrate this, he cites several Nazi ideologists who argue
that the Jews are the mirror image and the only true rivals of the Germans:
The Jews were the first genuine National Socialists, for almost three thou-
sand five hundred years they’ve been so. . . . All our great ideas come from the
Jews, and we must have the lucidity to recognize it: the Land as promise and as
accomplishment, the notion of the Chosen People, the concept of the purity of
blood. . . . They are our only real competitors, in fact. Our only serious rivals.
(Littell, 2010, pp. 454–455)9
On the other hand, Aue’s way of explaining the logic of destroying the
other also echoes Levinas’s thinking on the face of the other and on how
our irrevocable responsibility for the other cannot be annihilated, even
through murder. Levinas maintains that the face of the other presents an
ethical appeal that calls to responsibility, and we are human only insofar as
we assume responsibility for the other.10 Aue suggests that the sadism of
the soldiers and officers is ultimately linked to the unbearable task of hav-
ing to kill fellow human beings, whose humanness can not be denied, and
to the realization that in fact the murderer is less human than the murder
victim:
I came to the conclusion that the SS guard doesn’t become violent or sadistic
because he thinks the inmate is not a human being; on the contrary, his rage
increases and turns into sadism when he sees that the inmate, far from being
a subhuman as he was taught, is actually at bottom a man, like him, after all,
and it’s this resistance, you see, that the guard finds unbearable, this silent per-
sistence of the other, and so the guard beats him to try to make their shared
humanity disappear. Of course, that doesn’t work: the more the guard strikes,
the more he’s forced to see that the inmate refuses to recognize himself as a non-
human. In the end, no other solution remains for him than to kill him, which is
an acknowledgment of complete failure. (2010, p. 624)11
Lirian Razinsky suggests that Aue’s response to a female partisan whose

“look stuck into [him], split open [his] stomach” so that he wanted with all
his heart to tell her that “everything would be fine, but instead . . . compul-
sively shot a bullet into her head” (2010, p. 130)12 sounds “like a parodic
response to Levinas’s ethics of encounter with the face of the other”
(2008, p. 79).13 Levinas, however, never claimed that the face of the other
would prevent one from killing; rather, he emphasized that killing is no
real solution—it does not abolish the ethical claim made by the face—and

precisely this is Aue’s point.14 Being forced to kill the woman fills him with
“immense, boundless rage” (2010, p. 130),15 and he keeps shooting compul-
sively until he begins to cry. He suggests that such an affective response,
marking most men, testifies to the indestructability of the other: “Their
reactions, their violence, their alcoholism, the nervous depressions, the
suicides, my own sadness, all that demonstrated that the other exists, exists
as an other, as a human, and that no will, no ideology, no amount of stupid-
ity or alcohol can break this bond, tenuous but indestructible” (p. 147).16
Aue also acknowledges that there were very human, mundane reasons
for individuals to act in ways that benefited the Nazi regime, reasons linked
to personal ambition, vanity, laziness, and indifference:
even if, objectively, there was no doubt about the final aim, it wasn’t with this
aim in mind that most of the participants were working, it wasn’t that which
motivated them and drove them to work so energetically and single-mindedly, it
was a whole gamut of motivations, and even Eichmann . . . at bottom it was the
same to him whether or not the Jews were killed, the only thing that counted,
for him, was to show what he could do, to prove his worth, . . . the only thing he
did give a fuck about was that no one fucked with him, . . . and for the others it’s
the same, everyone had his reasons. . . (pp. 781–782)17
In the novel, such personal, mundane motivations are presented as the

driving force behind people’s actions, but they are also linked to rationali-
zation mechanisms fueled by the willingness to believe in the inevitability
of the events. Like Grass’s work, Littell’s novel suggests that the discourse
of inevitability is intimately connected to the logic of modern society, gov-
erned by instrumental rationality; the concentration camp, “with all the
rigidity of its organization, its absurd violence, its meticulous hierarchy,” is
presented as “a reductio ad absurdum of everyday life” (p. 622).18
It is important that the novel does not merely illustrate Arendtian theo-
ries of the Holocaust, but contributes in its own right, through its own
literary means, to the understanding of the banality of evil. As a fictional
narrative, it invites and requires different interpretative strategies and
modes of engagement than historical studies, for example. Fiction com-
municates its interpretation of history not just through the referential lan-
guage of statements about what happened and why; it requires from the
reader a complex interpretation of the work as a whole, including its struc-
ture and narrative organization. Its overall narrative dynamic involves
both textual and readerly dynamics.
Brian Richardson argues that narrative dynamics refers to an approach
that “views narrative as a progressively unfolding, interconnected system
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of elements rather than as a succession of discrete elements” (2005, p. 353),

but I would like to stress that, in addition to the “system,” the analysis of
narrative dynamics should acknowledge the encounter between the text’s
world and the reader’s world. I have a similar reservation about Phelan’s
(2017, p. 62) otherwise helpful definition of textual dynamics as “the inter-
nal mechanisms governing the movement of events and their telling” and
of readerly dynamics as “the trajectory of the audience’s multi-layered
responses to those textual dynamics.”19 Namely, I want to emphasize that
readerly dynamics is not limited to the reader’s responses to text-internal
mechanisms, as Phelan implies; engagement always takes place within
worldly contexts and involves everything that the reader brings into play in
the dialogic encounter with the narrative (his or her values, commitments,
understanding of the world, and so on). Let us now take a closer look at the
readerly dynamics of Les Bienveillantes. What kind of engagement does it
invite from the reader?
MULTILAYERED READERLY CONTRACT
Les Bienveillantes has been read mainly as a historical novel. This is hardly
surprising, given that the novel deals with the Second World War and the
Holocaust from the perspective of a character who takes part in its plan-
ning and execution. Littell has studied the Holocaust extensively, and his-
torians agree that the novel’s historical details are generally accurate. Right
from the opening sentence, Aue endeavors to convince readers that they
are embarking on an eyewitness testimony of what happened—and “how
it happened” (2010, p. 3; “comment ça s’est passé,” 2006, p. 11)—in Nazi-
occupied Europe between 1941 and 1945. Razinsky observes that Aue’s
function is first and foremost “that of an eye”: “He is more often a con-
duit of information than active participant. . . . Aue’s narrative expresses a
strong, almost obsessive, need to tell, and to provide a faithful account of
historical events themselves” (2008, pp. 71–72). Yet Aue recognizes that
“watching involves my responsibility as much as doing” (2010, p. 482).20
Moreover, he positions himself as an expert who not only worked dur-
ing the war as an intelligence officer, compiling reports about the events
and their underlying forces, but also as someone who holds a doctorate
in law and has studied “quite a few books” on the Holocaust (2010, p. 6;
2006, p. 13). In addition to depicting historical events, the book abounds
in reflections on the philosophy of history and sociology. Aue is not merely
an eyewitness, but also someone who perpetually reflects on the meaning
of what he sees and remembers, in relation to what he has read.

Littell himself has said that he did not search, in the novel, for “verisi-
militude” (vraisemblance) but for “truth” (verité): the novel had to be written
precisely because perpetrator testimonies and historical and sociological
studies of perpetrators did not get us far enough under their skin (Littell
& Blumenfeld, 2006). Many commentators, however, have focused on
whether the novel is historically or psychologically convincing.21 For exam-
ple, the historian Jeremy D. Popkin writes that the novel impressed him “as
historically accurate” in certain respects, but it struck him as “unrealistic” in
others: “I found it hard to believe that anyone could survive a bullet through
the head, like the one Aue receives at Stalingrad, and be back on the job in
a matter of weeks, with his memory sufficiently unaffected to allow him
to reconstruct, years later, every detail of his wartime experiences” (2012,
p. 189). What is most disturbing for Popkin and many other critics, however,
is the way in which the novel combines historical and imaginative aspects:
One cannot have it both ways: if The Kindly Ones is meant to tell us something
about what actually happened in Nazi-occupied Europe between 1941 and 1945,
then Littell can legitimately be taken to task for ignoring the historical knowl-
edge we now have about the perpetrators; if it is to be understood as a non-
referential exercise of the imagination, then it is risky to regard it as a source of
factual insight into their psychology. (p. 198)
What he means by historical research on perpetrator psychology are stud-

ies that “demonstrate that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were, in most
respects, rather ordinary individuals, whose extraordinary behavior can be
explained in terms of mundane psychological processes of rationalization,
conformity to group norms, and obedience to authority” (p. 197). Popkin
acknowledges that such research informs Littell’s novel, but for him, Littell
ultimately undermines this insight when he portrays the perpetrator as
a sexually deviant, monstrous character who kills his mother and has sex
with his sister.22
It is, of course, the mythical frame of the novel, the Orestes myth to
which the title already refers, that motivates the matricidal story of the
protagonist.23 Given the ways in which the novel underlines its own status
as imaginative discourse—particularly through its abundant intertextu-
ality and mythical framing—it clearly invites readings that diverge from
straightforwardly realist ones.24 These elements introduce a self-reflexive
level to the novel, one that works against its realist, immersive level. In my
view, the mimetic/historical versus anti-mimetic/imaginative dichotomy
is unhelpful in understanding this complex “both–and” quality that lies at
the heart of the novel’s narrative dynamic.
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2
The way in which the novel activates simultaneously different interpre-

tative frames underlines the nature of the novel as an artistic, synthetic
composition that is much more than merely the memoir of a fictional Nazi
officer. Let us take a closer look at the novel’s opening paragraph:
Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened. I am not your brother,
you’ll retort, and I don’t want to know. And it certainly is true that this is a bleak
story, but an edifying one too, a real morality play, I assure you. You might find
it a bit long—a lot of things happened, after all—but perhaps you’re not in too
much of a hurry; with a little luck you’ll have some time to spare. And also, this
concerns you: you’ll see that this concerns you. (2010, p. 3)25
What kind of readerly contract does this opening propose to the reader?
By directly addressing the reader, the novel thematizes the question of the
readerly dynamics from the beginning. It raises the question of why one
should spend so much time reading a narrative of hundreds of pages that is
dominated by the voice and perspective of a perpetrator, a Nazi officer, who
can be considered “dispositionally unreliable” (Shen, 2013). The narrator
appeals to us, the readers, asking us to “admit him into the circle of human
communication” and to listen to his story (McGlothlin, 2016, p. 252). The
appeal largely takes place through the insistence that the narrated events
involve the readers, too, perhaps more directly than they would like to
admit. At the same time, however, the narrator presents his story rhetor-
ically as a narrative that does not want to be read: “And if you’re not con-
vinced of this, don’t bother to read any further. You’ll understand nothing
and you’ll get angry, with little profit for you or for me” (2010, pp. 21–22).26
By simultaneously inviting readers to immerse themselves in the fictive
world and pushing them away from it, the opening asks for active read-
ing: readers have to choose whether to read or not, and the narrator later
reminds them of their power to cease or continue reading: “you have an
irrevocable power, that of closing this book and throwing it in the rubbish,
a final recourse against which I am powerless, so I don’t see why I should
wear kid gloves” (p. 783).27
The opening sentence also breaks the mimetic illusion by being emphat-
ically literary and dense with intertextual allusions. It alludes to François
Villon’s line “Frères humains qui après nous vivez” (Villon, 2005, p. 159)
and to Charles Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal (1857): “Hypocrite lecteur—
mon semblable—mon frère!”28 Villon addresses the reader to ask for his or
her sympathy; Baudelaire asks the reader to admit his or her complicity. In
Littell’s novel, the narrator seems to address readers primarily to stress the
way the narrative implicates them, but as an undercurrent, the sentence

also echoes the thought of a shared humanity. Intertextual allusions func-
tion in the novel as a counterforce to its dark confessionality and build a
self-ironic, self-reflexive, almost playful dimension to the memoir.29
It is therefore evident that the opening passage does not merely sketch a
historical frame for the novel’s events. It proposes a readerly contract that
asks the reader to do several things at once. First, on a superficial level, it
persuades readers to read in the mode of the “as if,” to imagine that they
are reading the confessional memoir of an SS officer. Yet, second, the self-
reflexive, metafictive level undermines simple realist or naïvely identifica-
tory readings. It is a thoroughly literary work, dense with literary allusions,
which repeatedly remind the readers that they are reading imaginative
discourse, a narrative that is conceived not by a real SS officer, but by an
author who does not share the views of his narrator. The novel’s intertex-
tual, mythical frame transcends the narrator’s consciousness, and through
it the (implied) author draws the reader’s attention to the nature of the
text as a literary composition.30
Third, the opening raises the issue of unreliability. As the narrator is
a self-confessed former SS officer, a perpetrator of the worst kind, why
should we trust him? It is generally true that while third-person narration
with internal focalization (where an external narrator provides informa-
tion about the protagonist’s inner, mental life) is conventionally perceived
as authoritative, first-person character-narrators are typically perceived as
less reliable (Lissa et al., 2016, p. 44). An empirical study by Caspar van
Lissa, Marco Caracciolo, Thom van Duuren, and Bram Leuveren suggests
that “the narrative situation has an effect on readers’ trust for the protag-
onist of a literary text” and that readers are “less inclined to trust a devi-
ant character when he or she is also the narrator of the story—possibly,
because of the awareness that he or she might be lying or deliberately
manipulating them” (2016, p. 58). In such a situation, readers are encour-
aged to construct alternative versions of the story:
Character narration confronts the readers with a narrator who is distinct from
the flesh-and-blood author, and whose perspective on the storyworld may be
limited, biased, or otherwise unreliable. Thus, unreliability invites readers to
construct the story as told by the narrator with hypothetical alternative ver-
sions of the events (if the narrator misunderstands what happened), or with
alternative value systems (if the narrator expresses judgments that clash with
what we understand to be the author’s own ethical framework). (p. 45)
Les Bienveillantes can be seen to foreground the readers’ task of construct-

ing such alternative versions of the story and to reflect on the discordance
0
32
between the narrator’s and the implied author’s values. In first-person per-
petrator fiction more generally, this task is more salient and urgent than in
most cases of first-person narration. Such perpetrator fiction typically relies
on knowledge that readers bring to the text, allowing them to “compare the
perpetrator’s description and interpretation of the events with accounts
of victims and historians and to identify moments in which the perpetra-
tor fudges the facts, mischaracterizes the events, or downplays particular
experiences in order to defer responsibility from them” (McGlothlin, 2016,
pp. 261–262). Aue, however, is not a typical perpetrator in this respect, in
that he comes across as largely honest: as Lothe puts it, “there is a sense in
which his brutal honesty and lack of regret make him more, not less, relia-
ble as a reporter,” even if this does not “grant him narrative authority, and
certainly not moral authority” (2013, pp. 108–109). His narration, how-
ever, blends the registers of sincerity and irony, and everything he says is
“troubled by its site of enunciation” (Sanyal, 2015, p. 210).
The most influential starting point for discussion on unreliability has
been Booth’s definition, according to which a narrator is “reliable when he
speaks for or acts in accord with the norms of the work (which is to say the
implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not” (1961, pp. 158–159).
To this day, discussions on unreliability tend to pay inadequate attention
to the way in which all narrators narrate from a particular, subjective, and
limited perspective (even when they pretend to be objective, omniscient,
etc.). A narrator (such as Aue), whose views are in tension with the implied
author’s views, can still be a reliable witness of his own experiences, and
it is from such a perspective that he appeals to the readers to win their
trust—he asks them to consider the possibility that he will recount his
experiences in an honest, sincere way, and that it may be worth their time
to engage with those experiences because they concern the reader, too,
even if the ironic aspects of the narration simultaneously encourage the
reader to stay cautious.31
Fourth, the opening thematizes readers’ resistance to engage with the
perpetrator and presents them with a certain personal challenge as a condi-
tion for reading further, namely a willingness to think that they, too, might
have done similar things had the circumstances been different:
Once again, let us be clear: I am not trying to say I am not guilty of this or that.
I am guilty, you’re not, fine. But you should be able to admit to yourselves that
you might also have done what I did. . . . I think I am allowed to conclude, as a
fact established by modern history, that everyone, or nearly everyone, in a given
set of circumstances, does what he is told to do; and, pardon me, but there’s not
much chance that you’re the exception, any more than I was. (2010, p. 20)32

The narrator goes on to argue that even if there are some psychopaths
in all wars, the state machinery is ultimately made of ordinary men, and
that is where the real danger lies: “The real danger for mankind is me, is
you. And if you’re not convinced of this, don’t bother to read any further”
(pp. 21–22).33
The narrator’s central argument and justification for the claim that
the narrative concerns the reader is the view that the success of National
Socialism arose from the willingness of ordinary people to obey orders,
take care of the duties assigned to them, and refrain from critically reflect-
ing on the objectives that the machinery ultimately served. This phenom-
enon is integral to modern Western society, and hence concerns us all.
From this perspective, Aue provocatively suggests that it is by no means
evident that what he is about to tell is actually over. He goes through
other, temporally or otherwise less distant genocides and colonial violence
(including the elimination of the American indigenous populations, the
crimes of British Empire [p. 590], and the massacre of the Vietnamese and
Algerians of whom “you never speak . . . in your books or TV programs,”
p. 16) and asks, “Now of course the war is over. And we’ve learned our
lesson, it won’t happen again. But are you quite sure we’ve learned our les-
son? Are you certain it won’t happen again? Are you even certain the war
is over?” (p. 17).34
The novel asks us to reflect on how the narrated concerns us in the cur-
rent world—how the legacy of the Holocaust implicates us today. It chal-
lenges our tendency to consider others (the Nazis, the terrorists) as evil
so as to ignore the potential for evil within ourselves—a tendency that
importantly structures our culturally shaped narrative unconscious. As
Sanyal (2015) puts it, the way in which the novel reverberates “within the
contemporary global political horizon, in relation to Iraq, Afghanistan,
Palestine, and other sites of conflict and war,” places it “in the cultural
legacy of ironic complicity” in which “its memorial knots entwine forms
of terror both in the European past and within our contemporary world”
(p. 189) and create “links to past and ongoing histories of imperialism,
occupation, and genocide” (p. 203).35 The uncomfortable position it
offers for the reader is one of an implicated subject. Littell speaks of the
“moral implication” that readers can experience as they confront their
own “potential for perpetration” (Littell & Nora, 2007, pp. 43–44). In
what follows, I analyze how the novel engenders an experience of moral
implication through a narrative dynamic that simultaneously encourages
immersion and critical distance. This interplay lies at the heart of the
way the novel deals with the ethics of engaging with the legacy of the
Holocaust.
2
3
EMPATHY, IDENTIFICATION, AND PERSPECTIVE-TAKING
Ricoeur argues that fiction plays a particularly important role in dealing

with the Holocaust due to its “capacity for provoking an illusion of pres-
ence, but one controlled by critical distance” (1988, p. 188). The interplay
between immersion and critical distance is essential to much of Holocaust
fiction, and it is particularly salient in Les Bienveillantes. It is precisely
through this interplay that the text responds to the challenge described
by scholars as “imaginative resistance.” This concept refers to the unwill-
ingness or inability of readers to imagine things that a fictive text invites
them to imagine (Gendler, 2013). While we find it relatively easy to imag-
ine impossible or counterfactual states of affairs in a fictive world, we find
it much harder to imaginatively engage with the perspective of a character
whom we find immoral (p. 31).
Les Bienveillantes is acutely aware of the reader’s resistance and
addresses it by bringing it into play as an essential part of the novel’s nar-
rative dynamic. The novel responds to the reader’s imaginative resistance
by showing how it is possible to emotionally engage with an ethically prob-
lematic life-world so that one both imaginatively immerses oneself in that
world and retains critical distance from it. Imagining the perspective of an
SS officer does not mean adopting his values or accepting his orientation to
the world. As we saw in Chapter 3, the ability to perceive the world from the
perspective of the other does not imply letting go of one’s own values and
beliefs; instead, it means considering a different mode of experience from
the perspective of one’s own interpretative horizon. The narrative dynamic
of Les Bienveillantes particularly encourages the reader’s critical awareness
through its self-reflexive aspects. Encountering Aue’s worldview from the
horizon of their own allows readers to evaluate what is problematic in his
world and why it is nevertheless a human world—a world constructed by
human beings and one that manifests certain aspects of being human—
and a world that may not be in all respects as different from our own as we
would perhaps like to think.
The first-person narration of the novel is motivated by the conviction
that it can be an ethically valuable exercise to engage with the perspective
of a perpetrator directly, without the mediation of third-person narration.
The novel sets out to mobilize our narrative and ethical imagination by
engaging us in an “experientially driven” reflection on how the Holocaust
was made possible by certain mechanisms in modern Western society that
still shape our everyday lives. In particular, it invites us to reflect on the
ethical implications of a mode of living in a bureaucratic world in which
most people focus on efficiently and diligently carrying out orders imposed

on them, and few people have the courage to question the ultimate values
and goals that steer their actions. The ethical underpinnings of the novel
have been evident for many—McGlothlin, for example, describes the novel
as an example of a “markedly pedagogical and ethical approach” (2016,
p. 253), and Adams discusses it in terms of a “radical ethics of encounter”
(2011, p. 28)—but a number of established scholars have more ambiva-
lent sentiments. While Charlotte Lacoste dismisses the invitation “to
fraternize with evil in a guided tour of the Jewish genocide” (2010, p. 46),
Susan Rubin Suleiman voices, in a more nuanced manner, a central ethical
concern of critical responses to Les Bienveillantes by asking whether a pro-
tagonist such as Aue should be “allowed the privilege of the narrative voice,
given the almost automatic call to empathy that accompanies first-person
narrative” (2009, p. 2).
The first-person perspective is certainly likely to humanize the protag-
onist, but does it automatically invite empathy? It seems evident that Les
Bienveillantes does not provoke simple, straightforward empathy of the
type evoked by sympathetic characters with whom we can easily identify.
The protagonist appears unlikable, even abhorrent, to most readers, and
this disrupts and complicates any empathy that the first-person perspec-
tive may elicit from the reader. Moreover, we should acknowledge that
empathy is not a uniform phenomenon, but refers to a complex range of
overlapping phenomena that involve both perspective-taking and affec-
tive responsiveness to others’ emotions and situations (Lissa et al., 2016,
44; Davis, 1983). Many contemporary accounts emphasize that empathy
does not imply taking on the other’s emotions or taking the side of the
other (as in sympathy), and that it involves awareness of the other’s alter-
ity (e.g., Goldie, 1999, p. 398; LaCapra, 2004, p. 65; Coplan, 2011). Eric
Leake defines empathy as “a cognitive and affective form of identification
and understanding” that relies on perspective-taking, an “effort in feeling
toward the positions and decisions of another”; it is not about sharing the
other’s feelings in the sense of experiencing them oneself—rather, it is
about “reaching out toward the other person’s situation” (2014, p. 176). At
a minimum level, empathy may designate simply the affective recognition
of the other’s experiential perspective as a human perspective and finding
in it aspects that one can relate to.
While it is currently widely recognized that our engagement with fic-
tion involves empathetic perspective- taking, the complexity of such
engagement may not have been adequately appreciated when it comes to
the ethically ambiguous and challenging protagonists of literary fiction.
Lissa, Caracciolo, Duuren, and Leuveren suggest that research on “the real-
world effects of engaging with fiction” tends to “downplay an important
4
3
2
distinction between fiction and literary fiction”: although a stark opposi-

tion between the two appears problematic, it should be acknowledged that
literary fiction often “tends to challenge—rather than confirm—readers’
beliefs and expectations” and this challenge is “at least in part created by
morally ambivalent characters” who “overstep readers’ comfort zone, con-
fronting them with perspectives and worldviews dramatically different
from their own” (2016, pp. 44–45). With a similar concern for the speci-
ficity of ethically challenging literary fiction, Leake distinguishes between
easy and difficult empathy. The former refers to “non-threatening empathy
that does not much challenge our views of ourselves” (2014, p. 175); the
latter, in contrast, unsettles us and “pushes the limits of our understanding
in reaching out to those with whom we might not otherwise wish contact
or association” (p. 176). From this perspective, he defends the value of dif-
ficult empathy for social critique:
If we only empathize with those who reassure us and confirm our sensitivi-
ties, then we will be unable to understand through empathy a wider range of
human actions, many of which are in particular need of greater understanding
and address. . . . [T]‌hat critique is directed more at prevailing social values and
our own acceptance and recognition of them as part of our identities, too. . . .
Difficult empathy pushes us to not only see others differently but to also per
haps see ourselves differently and more expansively through problematic others
and their social conditions. (p. 184)
If Les Bienveillantes invites empathy, it such difficult, uneasy empathy—

a limited, ambivalent form of empathy that involves distancing, reser-
vations, and doubt. It is empathy at the minimum level of the affective
recognition of the other’s experience as a human experience.
However, because in common usage empathy frequently connotes par-
ticipation in the feelings of and concern for someone who suffers, it may
not be the best concept to use in the analysis of perpetrator fiction. We
speak about empathy less often with reference to people whom we per-
ceive to be thriving or evil than with reference to people whom we perceive
to be suffering or vulnerable. This also concurs with much of the research
on empathy. Batson, for example, uses the concept of “empathy to refer
to other-oriented emotion elicited by and congruent with the perceived wel-
fare of someone in need” (2011, p. 11). McGlothlin argues that “given the
positive connotations associated with empathy not only in the general
popular understanding of the term but also in narrative theory,” it may
be necessary to avoid the language of empathy because it risks implying
a willingness “to absolve [perpetrators] of responsibility for their crimes”

(2016, p. 258). She suggests that identification is a more fruitful concept for
analyzing engagement with perpetrators, and she usefully distinguishes
between different aspects of “the fluid and multidirectional operation of
identification” (p. 259): she calls them existential, perspectival, affective,
and ideological identification (pp. 260–264).
Of these aspects, most relevant in the case of Les Bienveillantes is exis-
tential identification, which concurs with what I earlier called empathy in
the minimum sense: it “involves the reader’s basic recognition of the per-
petrator as a human agent involved in particular historical circumstances”
(p. 260). In contrast, the reader is least likely to engage in ideological iden-
tification, or alignment with the protagonist’s ethical worldview, which
McGlothlin considers to exist “only as a potentially dangerous but abstract
specter and not as a likely possibility” for Littell’s reader (p. 364). Relevant
is also perspectival identification, which for her refers “to the measure of
the reader’s readiness to view the events of the narrative through the eyes
of the perpetrator-protagonist and to exclude some or all alternate points
of view” (p. 260). McGlothlin argues that it necessarily remains partial and
provisional in the case of a perpetrator novel like Les Bienveillantes (p. 261).
She asserts that our affective identification most probably takes place pri-
marily with the perpetrator’s life “outside his identity as a victimizer, which
is much more available to the reader for identification” (p. 263). We should
acknowledge, however, that both in terms of perspectival and affective
identification, the reader’s response is likely to shift and vary throughout
the reading process. If readers were asked about their affective response
to the protagonist, they would most probably express critical, distanced
attitudes, as they have in empirical studies on engagement with dislikable
characters, but the process of engagement involves an affective dimension
that differs from evaluation after the process of reading: measuring “read-
ers’ self-reported empathy as an outcome of reading a certain text . . . does
not necessarily reflect what happened while reading. . . . Readers may have
imaginatively entertained the protagonist’s viewpoint while reading even
as other aspects of their experience eventually led them to distance them-
selves from the character” (Lissa et al., 2016, p. 60).
McGlothlin argues that identification “better conveys the ethical dimen-
sion of the reader’s relationship to a given character, as it implies a sense
of active agency or conscious alignment on the part of the reader, even as
unconscious mechanisms are also at play” (2016, p. 258). It seems to me,
however, that identification can be as visceral as the feeling of empathy
and as much beyond the conscious control of the subject. It has also been
associated, particularly in Holocaust studies, with an ethically problematic
assimilation of the other.36 I consider engagement and perspective-taking
6
3
2
the most useful umbrella terms for analyzing the ethical dimension of our
responses to perpetrator fiction. While empathy is an other-oriented con-
cept and identification (in the form it is frequently used) a self-oriented
concept (in the sense that the focus tends to be on the I who identifies with
someone or something else), engagement and perspective-taking place the
emphasis on the interaction between the self and the other. Engagement
with literary narratives always involves some form of perspective-taking,
because it is elemental to narratives that they are told from a particular
perspective with which the recipient needs to engage. I see identification
as a strong form of perspective-taking that affects the subject’s identity,
that is, his or her sense of self, which I conceptualized, in Chapter 2, not
in terms of sameness but in terms of a temporal process of identifications-
with. Perspective-taking is often entwined with empathy, a feeling toward
the other, which can range from minimal empathy to strong empathy that
involves taking the side of the other.
Identification is a useful term in describing an important aspect of read-
erly engagement, but it should be qualified in two important ways. First,
identification should not be conceptualized as a process of merging or
assimilation, but rather as one that always involves both distance and prox-
imity. McGlothlin suggests that we engage in “perspectival identification”
insofar as we are willing to exclude “some or all alternate points of view”
(2016, p. 260). Others use the vocabulary of merging and fusion, as when
Carroll defines character-identification in terms of thinking of oneself as
“identical to or one with the character—i.e., a state in which the audience
member somehow merges or fuses with the character” (2004, p. 90; see
also LaCapra, 2014, p. 27). In thinking about identification as a form of per-
spective-taking, however, the model of merging or of exclusion (of one’s old
views, for example) appears problematic to me because identification takes
place across difference: one identifies with someone who is different from
oneself and, particularly insofar as such identification has ethical potential,
it cannot involve giving up one’s own values and commitments but, rather,
putting them into play. When identification is conceptualized in terms of
perspective-taking, it is a process in which one’s identity is enlarged and a
new dimension is added to it by enriching the repertoire of perspectives from
which one views the world. This is not an exclusion of one’s old perspectives
but an enlargement of one’s horizon as one engages in a dialogue with dif-
ferent perspectives. Second, the concept of identification should not lead
to a character-centered approach that dismisses identification with the
narrative’s larger intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical project (see Chapter
3; Felski, 2016). Identification with the work can entail looking at the

world from the perspective opened up by the work as a whole, not merely
by the protagonist.
The ethical impetus of Les Bienveillantes is largely based on the way it
invites the reader to identify with its overall project, rather than with the
protagonist. What makes this task particularly demanding for the reader
is that the protagonist-narrator’s perspective is so dominant in the novel.
As LaCapra observes, “Littell offers scant opportunity for victims to speak
or even for exchanges between Nazis and Jews”; he is worried that other
characters fail to “offer viable critical alternatives” to Aue’s views (2011,
p. 76). The narrative is so ethically challenging precisely because it is not
overtly dialogic, that is, it does not offer for the reader’s consideration a
range of different voices. Integral to the ethical challenge that it presents
to the reader is the task of engaging in a dialogue with a perpetrator whose
dangerousness is not separate from his monological style of existence. On
the other hand, Aue does engage in dialogue, not only with different char-
acters, but also with a range of social theorists, philosophers, historians,
and poets. This dialogue makes the novel more polyphonic than it may first
appear. Nevertheless, the protagonist’s communicative style is not particu-
larly dialogic, and the implied author encourages the reader to see through
his pseudo-dialogical gestures, starting with the opening sentence.
The social diagnostic dimension of Les Bienveillantes—its way of inviting us

(in dialogue with a range of social theorists) to observe how our own world
continues the legacy of instrumental rationality that made the Holocaust
possible—is only one aspect that complicates its narrative dynamic and
cautions us against simple empathy; another complicating factor is the
novel’s mythical dimension. It is essential to the novel’s interpretation of
history that its mythical frame is placed in a tensional relation with the
novel’s exploration of the modern instrumental rationality underlying
the Holocaust. Through the Orestes myth, the question of responsibility
acquires a classic Greek dimension. According to the Ancient Greek concep-
tion of guilt, we are responsible for our actions, irrespective of whether or
not we understand what we have done (Littell, 2010, p. 592; 2006, p. 546).
The novel suggests that ultimately the Holocaust eludes the human capac-
ity to comprehend, and yet it places a responsibility upon us. The dedica-
tion of the novel reads “For the dead” (“Pour les morts”), and it is because
of our responsibility to the dead that we must try to understand how it is
possible that what happened could actually happen; yet at the same time,
we must not fall prey to the hubris of believing that we have reached an
exhaustive explanation.
8
32
The use of the Orestes myth and Bach’s baroque suite as structural prin-
ciples highlights that history in itself does not follow a narrative order;
literature must bring order to it. In the end, however, the use of the Orestes
myth does not provide any overall explanation, and we should acknowl-
edge its playful, parodic aspect. Aue compares the policemen Clemens
and Weser, who act in the role of “the Furies,” to Laurel and Hardy (2010,
p. 753; 2006, p. 693) and kills them before they have a chance to turn into
“the Kindly Ones.” In the end, it is futile to seek correspondences between
the characters and the myth. Aue refers to the Kindly Ones only once, in
the final sentence of the novel, when Clemens and Weser have already been
killed:
I felt all at once the entire weight of the past, of the pain of life and of inalter-
able memory, I remained alone with the dying hippopotamus, a few ostriches,
and the corpses, alone with time and grief and the sorrow of remembering, the
cruelty of my existence and of my death still to come. The Kindly Ones were on
to me. (p. 975)37
Here the Kindly Ones seem to allude to the haunting of a past that does not
let go of us, maybe also to the “dead” to whom the novel is dedicated and
to whom we have an obligation to try to understand the past, not from the
perspective of vengeance—hence the reference is to the Kindly Ones, not
to the Furies—but in order to end the vicious circle of violence.
The mythical frame transcends the consciousness of the narrator and
functions as one way in which Littell emphasizes the difference between
the I-narrator and the work as a whole: the latter is not of Aue’s design
and construction. Aue is an Orestes figure who does not know it; he is
blind to his own actions and yet guilty. Blindness becomes a central trope
in the novel, and it is personified in the final scene, where a blind man
wanders the streets to the sound of cannon fire and the Red Army taking
over Berlin: “ ‘Where are you going?’ I asked, panting.—‘We don’t know,’
the blind man replied.—‘ Where are you coming from?’ I asked again.—‘ We
don’t know that either’ ” (p. 970).38
The theme of blindness reinforces the novel’s intertextual relation to
Michel Tournier’s Le Roi des Aulnes (1970, The Erl-King), which is an early
example of perpetrator fiction. Its protagonist is a car mechanic who iden-
tifies with mythical ogre figures; similarly to Les Bienveillantes, the mythi-
cal and the historical-realistic function concurrently in the novel, and the
mythical level is linked to the intertextual emphasis on the nature of the
novel as a literary artifact. Like mythical ogre figures, the protagonist is
myopic, and blind to what he becomes: he identifies with the legendary

figure of Saint Christopher, who carries the young Christ safely across a
river, but as he collaborates with the Nazis and recruits boys to a Napola
(Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten), he ends up becoming more like the
Erl-King, who carries children to their death.39 The names of both Tiffauges
and Aue allude to the German word for eye (Auge); both are eyewitnesses
of horror, and both are to an important extent blind. Both novels retell
the myth indicated in their titles in a way that escapes the awareness of
the protagonist and points not only to his personal blindness, but also to a
more pervasive cultural blindness, linked to the limitations and distortions
of cultural self-understanding in relation to the Holocaust.
“A QUESTION WITHOUT AN ANSWER”
Narrative hermeneutics is committed to the hermeneutic conception of

the singularity of each literary text and the need for interpreters to let
their preconceptions be challenged in the encounter with the text. A cer-
tain strand of “unnatural narratology” has much in common with the her-
meneutic non-reductive ethos, namely the “non-naturalizing approach,”
which, as Stefan Iversen puts it, “argues in favor of keeping open the possi-
bility that unnatural narratives produce effects (emotions and experiences)
that should not be immediately, if at all, transformed back into graspable
proportions” (2013, p. 151).40 However, I find problematic the concept of
“unnatural narrative,” which is frequently used interchangeably with “anti-
mimetic narrative.” It is based on the shared endeavor of “unnatural nar-
ratologists” to challenge what they claim to be the dominant “mimetic
understanding of narrative,” that is, a tendency to treat fictional works “as
if they were primarily lifelike reproductions of human beings and human
actions” (Alber et al., 2013, pp. 2, 4). Their criticism of “mimetic under-
standing” is problematic insofar as it rests on a naïve conception of mime-
sis as imitation and dismisses the long tradition of acknowledging how
mimesis is a dynamic poetic activity of creation and construction, which is
“completely contrary to a copy of some preexisting reality” (Ricoeur, 1984,
p. 45).41
While I agree that fictive and nonfictive narratives require different
strategies of reading, in unnatural narratology this emphasis often seems
to be fused with the problematic assumption that the aesthetic is separate
from the spheres of ethics and understanding. In order to illustrate the dif-
ference between how we read fictive and nonfictive first-person narratives,
Iversen compares Les Bienveillantes to interviews with former inmates of
German concentration camps: allegedly, we relate to the interviews as we
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42
do to “acts of communication,” where we try to understand the speaker,

whereas we read a fictive narrative more “as an artifact in itself,” which calls
for Kantian “ ‘interesseloses Wohlgefallen’ (disinterested pleasure)” (2013,
p. 152). Here Iversen explicitly commits himself to the Kantian tradition of
aesthetic formalism in which the sphere of the aesthetic is seen as separate
from the spheres of ethics and knowledge. This tradition risks reducing
the literary work to its production of aesthetic pleasure and ignoring how
works of art also function as ethically charged modes of making sense of
the world. Literary works are meaningful wholes that not only produce aes-
thetic pleasure but also, among other things, provide interpretations about
the world (past, present, and future), expand our sense of the possibilities
of human existence, and shape the narrative in-between that is part and
parcel of intersubjective reality.
This difference can be illustrated through the scene from Les
Bienveillantes that has probably given rise to most scholarly debate and
which Iversen also cites: the scene in which a bullet passes through Aue’s
head. The scene has baffled readers because it is here that an apparently
realistically constructed text begins to break down, rendering a realist read-
ing insufficient. It is precisely this insufficiency that is the starting point
for non-naturalizing reading. In the bullet scene, we are not, in fact, told
that a bullet hits the protagonist’s forehead; we can only eventually recon-
struct this storyline. The scene in which Aue is wounded is first depicted
thus: “Ivan was running toward me, but I was distracted by a slight tap on
my forehead: a piece of gravel, perhaps, or an insect, since when I felt it, a
little drop of blood beaded on my finger. I wiped it off and continued on
toward the Volga” (2010, p. 414).42 The reader realizes the inadequacy of
a realist reading at the latest when Aue dives under the ice and sees there
the smiling body of his former colleague who had died long ago in another
place, or when he climbs up to a Zeppelin that can turn into a giant spider
and leap over the edge of the world. As he tries to follow his sister Una,
whom he sees going down the river in a bridal boat, he is stopped by vio-
lent stomach cramps, and undergoes an experience that echoes the story
of Minos, on whom Pasiphae placed a spell that made him ejaculate snakes,
scorpions, and the like: “but instead of shit, living bees, spiders, and scor-
pions gushed out of my anus” (p. 424).43
Iversen (2013, p. 156) depicts this narration as “non-conventional” and
“unnatural” and argues that reading the novel from the perspective of
unnatural narratology enables one to see it as a riddle that concerns the
possibilities and limits of the representation of consciousness. In his inter-
pretation, the novel is about aesthetic experimentation with the represen-
tation of consciousness, and the riddle concerns primarily the narrator: “Is

Aue unreliable? Unbelievable? Unlikely? Unreadable? Unnatural?” (p. 155).
I agree that there is a riddle at the center of the novel and that this riddle
is ultimately unresolvable, but I am not convinced that the riddle primar-
ily concerns the representation of consciousness (one of the dominant
interests of narratology). We should ask what the significance of “non-
conventional” narration is in the novel as a whole. The distinctive narrative
strategies of the novel are intimately linked to its themes, to the interplay
of form and content in its narrative dynamic, and to its overall functioning
as a signifying whole.
In my interpretation, the fragmentation of the narration, which begins
in the bullet scene and continues later in the form of hallucinations, empha-
sizes first and foremost the breaking down of narrative mastery. This, in
turn, is central to the novel’s way of taking part in the discussion on the
ethics of understanding and narrating the Holocaust. The narrative struc-
ture of the novel is directly linked to the exploration of the possibilities and
limits of a narrative understanding of atrocity.
While the novel begins with a gesture of narrative authority—“let
me tell you how it happened” (p. 3)—that underpins the first half of the
novel, the wound in Aue’s head marks a turning point in the narration;
afterward, the sense of narrative mastery increasingly begins to falter. The
fragmentation of the narration is linked to the way in which Aue’s experi-
ences become detached from intersubjective reality. After being wounded,
the subsequent long passage acquires hallucinatory features, and it is dif-
ficult for the reader to know whether the stream of consciousness should
be interpreted as a dream, a hallucination, or some kind of retrospective
reconstruction of Aue’s experiences at the time. The “narrating I” (the old
Aue) does not organize the narration retrospectively into a coherent, logi-
cally proceeding narrative in the way he had before; instead, the “narrating
I” and the “experiencing I” become more and more entangled. The expe-
rience of disorientation increasingly penetrates the very structure of the
narration.44
As Aue is wounded, he loses his capacity for narrative sense-making: he
can no longer link events to each other in the form of a narrative. When
he is in the hospital, Himmler visits him with several SS officers: “I didn’t
understand much of what Reichsführer said: isolated phrases bubbled to
the surface of his words, heroic officer, honour of the SS, lucid reports, cou-
rageous, but they certainly didn’t form a narration in which I could recog-
nize myself” (p. 434).45 The bullet through the head acquires a symbolic
meaning as it epitomizes a structural hole at the center of the novel. Aue’s
orientation to the world changes drastically and begins to revolve around
the hole: “My thinking about the world now had to reorganize itself around
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2
this hole” (p. 436).46 The hole stands in a metonymic relation to the larger
lack at the center of the novel: all the narrative explanations cannot change
the fact that in the end there is a blind spot at the center of everything, a
hole that the narrator cannot see, understand, or explain, as there is in our
own way of seeing the world and in our own entanglement in history.
Aue later hears how he was wounded, but this story, told in a traditional,
linear, quasi-causal narrative form, remains emphatically detached from
reality. This version no more captures what really happened than did Aue’s
earlier, hallucinatory depiction of the events:
I listened to his story attentively, and so I can report it, but even less than the
rest, I could connect it with nothing; it remained a story, a truthful one no
doubt, but a story all the same, scarcely more than a series of phrases that fit
together according to a mysterious and arbitrary order, ruled by a logic that had
little to do with the one that allowed me, here and now, to breathe the salty air
of the Baltic. . . . (p. 438)47
The narrator points here to a gaping chasm between his experience—or his
transformed sense of life—and the narrative logic of his account.
Through the breakdown of narrative mastery, the novel demonstrates how

the Holocaust resists explanation, how it persists as an unanswerable ques-
tion, haunting humanity and demanding interminable reflection: “for me,
as for most people, war and murder are a question, a question without an
answer, for when you cry out in the night, no one answers” (p. 24).48
The irresolvable nature of this question acquires a particular urgency due
to the poignant tension between the I-narrator’s apparently calm, unregret-
ful manner of reporting the events and his bodily symptoms that express
repressed trauma and palpable distress. Engaging with the haunting past
proves to be more difficult than Aue initially expects, and the process of
telling and recounting involves re-enactment of the traumatic experiences
in ways that gradually disintegrate the very form of the narration. The proc-
ess of confronting the memories and affectively engaging with them entails
exposure to forces that are beyond one’s control. Aue reacts in emphatically
corporeal, visceral ways and suffers from regular vomiting attacks:
A brief interruption while I go and vomit, then I’ll continue. That’s another one
of my numerous little afflictions: from time to time my meals come back up,
sometimes right away, sometimes later on, for no reason, just like that. It’s an
old problem, I’ve had it since the war, since the autumn of 1941, to be precise, it
started in the Ukraine, in Kiev I think, or maybe Zhitomir. (p. 8)49

The vomiting underlines the palpable intertwinement of the “narrating I”
and the “experiencing I.” The “narrating I” relives the bodily experiences he
recounts, and the very process of telling evokes certain experiences; the
“experiencing I” of the past, in turn, is rendered to the reader through the
interpretations and experiences of both the “narrating I” and the “experi-
encing I” of the narrative present (the time of the narration). This dynamic
produces multilayered temporalities in which past and present experiences
impregnate one another.
The process of storytelling manifests Aue’s attempt to confront aspects
of himself—and of humanity—that resist narrative appropriation. These
aspects resist taming, like the scratching, volatile cat to which Aue com-
pares his memories, as he tries to convince himself and the readers that he
is acting in good will (like the bienveillantes who wish for good):
Whenever I tried to pet it, to show my goodwill, it would slip away to sit on the
windowsill . . . ; if I tried to pick it up and hold it, it would scratch me. At night,
on the other hand, it would come and curl up in a ball on my chest, a stifling
weight, and in my sleep I would dream I was being smothered beneath a heap
of stones. With my memories, it’s been more or less the same. The first time
I decided to set them down in writing, I took a leave of absence. That was prob-
ably a mistake. . . . I began thinking. (pp. 5–6)50
The narration draws a contrast between everyday life in which we lose our-
selves in daily activities, without stopping to think, and moments of genu-
ine reflection that can disrupt the comfortable flow of everyday life:
Yet if you put your work, your ordinary activities, your everyday agitation, on
hold, and devote yourself solely to thinking, things go very differently. Soon
things start rising up, in heavy, dark waves. At night, your dreams fall apart,
unfurl, and proliferate, and when you wake they leave a fine, bitter film at the
back of your mind, which takes a long time to dissolve. (p. 7)51
The novel thereby shows how narrative self-reflection does not necessarily
lead to a coherent, integrated narrative sense of self but can, rather, trigger
a disintegration of the self—a coming apart of the illusion of a coherent,
integrated self.
The comparison of these memories to the volatile cat is a way of suggest-
ing that the novel deals with a process of taming an aspect of our humanness
that we tend to be terrified of and which we are tempted to repress—the
human capacity for evil. At the same time, the novel is a process of con-
fronting a traumatic past that haunts one no matter how adamantly it is
42
repressed. Narrative engagement with the traumatic past is not a task that
can be completed, resolved, or taken care of so that one could move on to
other things. It is always there and will not vanish; it refuses to become
neatly appropriated or domesticated. Yet, the novel suggests, putting one-
self at risk and engaging with that part of human history that horrifies us
and which we are tempted to demonize or repress as something completely
external to us is the only way to avoid even more damaging blindness.
The very form of Les Bienveillantes dramatizes how no single narrative
can provide a comprehensive understanding of what happened and why,
and it manifests a process of narrative engagement that becomes increas-
ingly aware of its own limits. I would argue that it is precisely the novel’s
awareness of its own limits that gives it a particularly hermeneutic flavor.
Contrary to a common misunderstanding, hermeneutics is not about the
pursuit of happy, harmonious understanding, but about acknowledging
that true understanding unsettles us and shows us that we do not actually
know what we thought we knew. As Gadamer (1997, p. 362) wrote, at the
heart of philosophical hermeneutics is docta ignorantia, knowing that one
does not know. Narrative hermeneutics suggests that in order to be ethi-
cal, narrative knowing should be aware of its own interpretative nature, of
being only one version, always contestable, limited, incomplete, and unfi-
nalizable. As such, self-conscious narrative knowing could be characterized
as a form of ethical inquiry that takes the affirmative form of simultane-
ously knowing and not-knowing.
Different approaches to the possibility of understanding the Holocaust
have been sometimes divided into two main strands. On the one hand,
there is the long tradition of scholarship— classics of which include
Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) and Browning’s Ordinary Men
(1992)—that emphasizes the ordinariness of the evil that underpins the
Holocaust. On the other hand, there are those who stress the ineffabil-
ity and incomprehensibility of the Holocaust, some of whom consider
even attempts to understand it ethically suspicious. Lanzmann (1995)
and several poststructuralistically oriented scholars exemplify this line of
thought, which relies on the subsumption model in taking all understand-
ing to be ethically problematic (see Chapter 3). Rothberg (2000, pp. 3–4)
calls these the realist and anti-realist positions: while the first refers to the
“epistemological claim that the Holocaust is knowable” and to the “rep-
resentational claim that this knowledge can be translated into a familiar
mimetic universe,” the latter refers both to the claim that the Holocaust
is not knowable and to the position that it “cannot be captured by tradi-
tional representational schemata.” In a sense, Littell positions himself in
the realist tradition by seeing the Holocaust in connection to other forms

of state violence and as part of the history of genocides, which are all, in
their own ways, exceptional:
The question I’m interested in is the question of state violence, mass societal vio-
lence, as opposed to individual criminal violence. The German case is the most
extreme case of societal violence. . . . I personally understand the arguments
for the exceptionality of the Holocaust, but I don’t agree with them. The basic
argument is that the Nazis wanted to kill all the Jews, but I don’t see the dif-
ference between that and an extermination policy that was aimed—and imple-
mented on a large scale—at groups such as the peasants in the Soviet Union or
in Cambodia. Every genocide is exceptional. (Uni & Littell, 2008)
In aesthetic terms, however, Littell’s novel questions the dichotomy between

realism and anti-realism, in similar ways as work that Rothberg (2000) dis-
cusses under the rubric of “traumatic realism.”52 Les Bienveillantes shows—
through experimental narration that breaks the mimetic illusion—how the
Holocaust is both beyond any exhaustive explanation and a result of the
mechanisms of modern society that pervade our everyday lives.
Littell stands in the tradition that does not accept the so-called rep-
resentation ban, the influential view that fictional representations of
the Holocaust are intrinsically ethically questionable. Lanzmann (2006),
one of the most famous representatives of this position, considers Les
Bienveillantes to be particularly questionable because it provides a fic-
tional representation of the Holocaust from the perspective of a perpetra-
tor. Lanzmann’s position, however, does not take sufficiently into account
how the novel presents the Holocaust ultimately as a question without
an answer. In terms of different narrative logics, narratives that reflect
on their own narrative nature and on the limits of storytelling tend to be
ethically less problematic than narratives that mask their own narrative,
interpretative, and perspectival nature and pretend to provide a totalizing
narrative explanation. While naturalizing narratives risk collapsing into
myth (in the Barthesian sense) by masking their own narrativity and tak-
ing the guise of “natural” explanations, self-reflexive narratives caution us
against these pitfalls and concomitant gestures of narrative mastery.
THE FORCE OF “US”
This chapter has explored the complexity of narrative perspective-taking in

relation to narrative dynamics. It has fleshed out and provided support for
rethinking perspective-taking along the lines suggested in Chapter 3. The
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analysis of the readerly engagement with an ethically problematic protag-

onist, a Nazi perpetrator, has suggested that it can be ethically valuable to
engage with the perspectives of characters who are neither sympathetic,
innocent victims nor any sort of aspirational role models. It is too restric-
tive to define one kind of emotional engagement with other perspectives—
empathetic concern for the other in need—as the only ethically valuable
type of narrative perspective-taking. We have also seen that perspective-
taking does not imply merging with the other’s perspective and letting go
of one’s own values and beliefs but, instead, exposing them and bringing
them into dialogue with a different perspective—in an encounter that can
prove challenging. While this is always true, some narratives—typically
self-reflexive literary narratives—particularly encourage us to engage in
critical self-reflection on our own values, beliefs, and preconceptions. Les
Bienveillantes is a good example of a literary narrative that provokes us to
reflect on our own ethical identity and on the interpretative horizon from
which we engage with the perpetrator, including our presuppositions con-
cerning the “evil other.” It shows that in the temporal process of engaging
with the other’s perspective, a broad range of affective responses can be val-
uable, depending on how they mobilize our ethical imagination. Affective
engagement with the perpetrator can facilitate understanding of evil—both
past and present—in its complexity, as something that implicates us.
One of the pivotal questions with which the readerly engagement with
Littell’s novel confronts us is the issue revolving around our willingness
or unwillingness to identify with the perpetrator in the minimum sense
of accepting him as human. If we fail in this minimum identification, we
repeat the failure of the Nazis who refused to acknowledge the Jews, the
Roma, homosexuals, the disabled, and various groups of dissidents as
human. Are we able to include the Nazis in the realm of “us”—or even in
our first-person narratives—in our understanding of who we are? This is
what Littell’s novel asks us, and this is what Knausgård insists in his auto-
biographical Min kamp 6 (My Struggle, vol. 6):
[W]‌e all know, even if not all are willing to admit it, that had we lived at the
time, we ourselves probably would have marched under the Nazi flag. . . . Most
of us think what everyone thinks, do what everyone else does, and we do this
because this “we” and this “everyone” are those who decide the norms, rules,
and morality in a society. Now that the Nazis have become “they,” it is easy to
take distance from them, unlike when they were “us.” If we want to be able to
understand what happened, how it was possible, we have to understand this
first. . . . The force of “us” is great, its strings almost unbreakable, and we can
only wish that our own “us” is a good “us.” Because when the evil comes, it will

not come in the guise of “they,” as something strange that we can easily reject, it
comes in the form of “us.”53
While Knausgård reflects on the “force of ‘us’ ” through the mode of essay-
istic autobiographical narration, Littell addresses it by engaging our imag-
inative powers. Les Bienveillantes is an imaginary autobiography— an
attempt to imagine what might have transpired if he had been born in that
world—of someone raised in the shadow of Vietnam: “We saw it on TV
every day of my entire childhood. My childhood terror was that I would
be drafted and sent to Vietnam and made to kill women and children who
hadn’t done anything to me. As a child there was always the possibility of
being a potential perpetrator” (Uni & Littell, 2008).
Watching the production of the genocide through the eyes of the per-
petrator creates a sense of complicity during the reading process, and it
has the potential to turn into a more lasting sense of implicatedness. As
Aue acknowledges, the witnesses are also responsible (2010, p. 482; 2006,
p. 445). The implication is that we should reflect on how the legacy of past
genocides and the violence that is happening in the world right now—and
that we are witnessing (through our screens)—implicate and obligate us.
A similar ethos of implication underlies the work of all the authors dis-
cussed in this book. Grossmann encapsulates it by suggesting that we
should all ask ourselves whether we are “consciously or unconsciously,
actively or passively, through indifference or with mute acceptance, collab-
orating at this very moment with some process that is destined to wreak
havoc on another human being, or on another group of people”: we need
to recognize the mechanisms, in the contemporary world, that are similar
to those at work in Nazi Germany—mechanisms that “blur human unique-
ness and evade responsibility for the destiny of others”—because it is not
only genocides that kill, “hunger, poverty, disease and refugee status can
defile and slowly kill the soul of an individual, and sometimes of a whole
people” (2007).
While defending the view that both fiction and nonfiction provide inter-
pretations of the past, I have sided with those who emphasize that fiction
requires specific modes of engagement. But instead of understanding this
specificity in terms of a separation of the aesthetic sphere from the spheres
of ethics and understanding, I have emphasized their interpenetration,
arguing that fiction requires complex interpretations that engage with the
literary work as a whole, including its narrative organization and overall
narrative dynamic. Such an approach has shown how the narrative dynamic
of Les Bienveillantes, marked by the interplay between immersiveness and
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critical distance, is ethically relevant for engaging with the perpetrator’s

perspective: through its dynamic, the novel does not ask readers to accept
the protagonist’s perspective, but rather encourages them to engage with it
in a simultaneously affectively participatory and critical way. It is through
such an interplay that the novel invites us to reflect on Nazi Germany as a
space of possibilities that encouraged certain types of experiencing, speak-
ing, and acting and discouraged others, on the possibilities and limits of
representing the Holocaust, and on the ultimate impossibility of narrative
appropriation. Taking the novel seriously requires attentiveness to its spe-
cific aesthetic means of developing its own interpretation of history, includ-
ing its ways of reflecting on the limits of understanding the Holocaust.
Understanding both fictive and historical narratives as interpretations
of the human being in the world is a productive starting point for analyz-
ing the specific ways in which fictional and historical narratives imagine
past worlds as spaces of possibilities. Exploring how narrative fiction can
produce new insights into history requires rigorous textual analysis that
not only scrutinizes isolated passages, but also reflects on what the work
as a whole suggests through the interplay of its various, often tensional
dimensions. Such an analysis benefits from a consideration of how fiction
cultivates our sense of history as a sense of the possible as we struggle to
understand the past and the present—and to imagine the not-yet.
Les Bienveillantes takes part in negotiating the cultural memory of the
Holocaust through narrative strategies that endeavor to bring the thinking
of the possibility of the Holocaust into contact with critical examination
of modern Western society more broadly. This is not a gesture of playing
down the incomprehensible horror of industrial mass murder; rather, it
is a gesture of encouraging critical self-reflection on our complicity in the
mechanisms that made the Holocaust possible. Our narrative imagination
concerning the Holocaust is crucial to our ethical imagination at large,
including our ways of perceiving more recent and contemporary structures
of violence. As inhabitants of the post-Holocaust world, we still have to
ask ourselves: How is it possible that Western civilization led to the mass
destruction of millions of people, and what are the implications of that for
how we understand ourselves today and for how we navigate in the nexus
of narrative, identity, and ethics? What are the continuities and disconti-
nuities between the fascism of the 1930s and the rise of far-right populist
and racist movements in the contemporary world?
As a vehicle of cultural memory, storytelling can be put to wildly differ-
ent uses. An ethics of storytelling must acknowledge that different narra-
tive forms mobilize our ethical powers in divergent ways. While attempts at
totalizing narrative mastery are intimately linked to violence and suffering,

the ethical potential lies with storytelling that explores self-reflexively the
conditions of possibility for different forms of violence and the risks of
narrative appropriation.
NOTES
1. On the new perspective on perpetrators that has emerged in fiction and literary
criticism, see McGlothlin, 2010. Well-known examples of perpetrator fiction
include Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991), Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser
(1995, The Reader), Tony Morrison’s A Mercy (2008), and Joshua Oppenheimer’s
and Christina Cynn’s The Act of Killing (2012). Earlier examples of perpetrator
fiction include Michel Tournier’s Le Roi des aulnes (1970, The Erl-King) and Edgar
Hilsenrath’s Der Nazi und der Friseur (1971, The Nazi and the Barber).
2. “Je songeai à ces Ukrainiens: comment en étaient-ils arrivés là? La plupart
d’entre eux s’étaient battus contre les Polonais, puis contre les Soviétiques, ils
devaient avoir rêvé d’un avenir meilleur, pour eux et pour leurs enfants, et voilà
que maintenant ils se retrouvaient dans une forêt, portant un uniforme étranger
et tuant des gens qui ne leur avaient rien fait, sans raison qu’ils puissent
comprendre. Que pouvaient-ils penser de cela? Pourtant, lorsqu’on leur en
donnait l’ordre, ils tiraient, ils poussaient les corps dans la fosse et en amenaient
d’autres, ils ne protestaient pas. Que penseraient-ils de tout cela plus tard?”
(2006, p. 86).
3. “Je pensais à ma vie, au rapport qu’il pouvait bien y avoir entre cette vie que
j’avais vécue—une vie tout à fait ordinaire, la vie de n’importe qui, mais aussi par
certains côtés une vie extraordinaire, inhabituelle, bien que l’inhabituel, ce soit
aussi très ordinaire—et ce qui se passait ici. De rapport, il devait bien y en avoir
un, et c’était un fait, il y en avait un” (2006, p. 95).
4. “ ‘Mais c’est impossible, voyons,’ dit Callsen. Il semblait supplier. . . . Oh
Seigneur, je me disais, cela aussi maintenant il va falloir le faire, cela a été dit,
et il faudra en passer par là. Je me sentais envahi par une horreur sans bornes,
mais je restais calme, rien ne se voyait, ma respiration demeurait égale. Callsen
continuait ses objections: ‘Mais, Herr Standartenführer, la plupart d’entre nous
sont mariés, nous avons des enfants. On ne peut pas nous demander ça’ ” (2006,
p. 99).
5. “Une bouffée d’amertume m’envahit: Voilà ce qu’ils ont fait de moi, me disais-je,
un homme qui ne peut voir une forêt sans songer à une fosse commune” (2006,
p. 645).
6. “[P]‌erd en même temps un autre droit, tout aussi élémentaire et pour lui peut-
être encore plus vital, en ce qui concerne l’idée qu’il se fait de lui-même en tant
qu’homme civilisé: le droit de ne pas tuer. . . . L’homme debout au-dessus de la
fosse commune, dans la plupart des cas, n’a pas plus demandé à être là que celui
qui est couché, mort ou mourant, au fond de cette même fosse” (2006, p. 24).
7. “Cette tendance s’étendait à tout notre langage bureaucratique, notre
bureaucratische Amtsdeutsche, comme disait mon collègue Eichmann dans les
correspondances, dans les discours aussi, les tournures passives dominaient, ‘il a
été décidé que . . . ,’ ‘les Juifs ont été convoyés aux mesures spéciales,’ ‘cette tâche
difficile a été accomplie,’ et ainsi les choses se faisaient toutes seules, personne
ne faisait jamais rien, personne n’agissait, c’étaient des actes sans acteurs, ce
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52
qui est toujours rassurant, et d’une certaine façon ce n’étaient même pas des
actes, . . . il y avait seulement des faits, des réalités brutes soit déjà présentes,
soit attendant leur accomplissement inévitable, comme l’Einsatz, ou l’Einbruch
(la percée)” (2006, p. 581).
8. “Y aurait-il eu un autre domaine d’activité qui m’aurait mieux correspondu,
où je me serais senti chez moi? C’est possible, mais c’est difficile à dire, car
cela n’a pas eu lieu, et au final, seul compte ce qui a été et non pas ce qui aurait
pu être. C’est dès le départ que les choses n’ont pas été comme je les aurais
voulues: à cela, je m’étais fait une raison depuis longtemps (et en même temps,
il me semble, je n’ai jamais accepté que les choses soient comme elles sont, si
fausses et mauvaises . . . ). Il est vrai aussi que j’ai changé. Jeune, je me sentais
transparent de lucidité, j’avais des idées précises sur le monde, sur ce qu’il devait
être et ce qu’il était réellement, et sur ma propre place dans ce monde; et avec
toute la folie et l’arrogance de cette jeunesse, j’avais pensé qu’il en serait toujours
ainsi; que l’attitude induite par mon analyse ne changerait jamais; mais . . . je
ne connaissais pas encore la force du temps, du temps et de la fatigue. Et plus
encore que mon indécision, mon trouble idéologique, mon incapacité à prendre
une position claire sur les questions que je traitais et à m’y tenir, c’était cela qui
me minait, qui me dérobait le sol sous les pieds” (2006, p. 700).
9. “Les Juifs sont les premiers vrais nationaux-socialistes, depuis près de six mille
ans déjà . . . Toutes nos grandes idées viennent des Juifs, et nous devons avoir la
lucidité de le reconnaître: la Terre comme promesse et comme accomplissement,
la notion du peuple choisi entre tous, le concept de la pureté du sang. . . Ce sont
nos seuls vrais concurrents, en fait. Nos seuls rivaux sérieux” (pp. 420–421).
10. On Levinas’s discussion of the face, see Levinas (1980, pp. 198–214; 1996,
pp. 17–18).
11. “J’en suis arrivé à la conclusion que le garde SS ne devient pas violent ou sadique
parce qu’il pense que le détenu n’est pas un être humain; au contraire, sa rage
croît et tourne au sadisme lorsqu’il s’aperçoit que le détenu, loin d’être un
sous-homme comme on le lui a appris, est justement, après tout, un homme,
comme lui au fond, et c’est cette résistance, vous voyez, que le garde trouve
insupportable, cette persistance muette de l’autre, et donc le garde le frappe
pour essayer de faire disparaître leur humanité commune. Bien entendu, cela
ne marche pas: plus le garde frappe, plus il est obligé de constater que le détenu
refuse de se reconnaître comme un non-humain. À la fin, il ne lui reste plus
comme solution qu’à le tuer, ce qui est un constat d’échec définitif” (2006,
p. 574).
12. “. . . ce regard se planta en moi, me fendit le ventre . . . je voulais . . . lui dire que
ça allait, que tout irait pour le mieux, mais à la place je lui tirai convulsivement
une balle dans la tête” (2006, p. 126).
13. Similarly, Sanyal interprets the execution of the young female Russian partisan
as the “parody of a Levinasian face to face” (2015, p. 195).
14. As Eaglestone puts it, the Levinasian “originary relation to the
other . . . underlies any system or organization (any ‘said’) and is made
manifest—especially, in fact—in the act of murder” (2004b, p. 311).
15. “[J]‌’étais envahi d’une rage immense, démesurée” (p. 126).
16. “Leurs réactions, leur violence, leur alcoolisme, les dépressions nerveuses, les
suicides, ma propre tristesse, tout cela démontrait que l’autre existe, existe en tant
qu’autre, en tant qu’humain, et qu’aucune volonté, aucune idéologie, aucune quantité
de bêtise et d’alcool ne peut rompre ce lien, ténu mais indestructible” (p. 142).

17. “[M]‌ême si, objectivement, le but final ne fait pas de doute, ce n’est pas en vue
de ce but que travaillaient la plupart des intervenants, ce n’est pas cela qui les
motivait et donc les poussait à travailler avec tant d’énergie et d’acharnement,
c’était toute une gamme de motivations, et même Eichmann . . . au fond ça lui
était égal qu’on tue les Juifs ou non, tout ce qui comptait, pour lui, c’était de
montrer ce qu’il pouvait faire, de se mettre en valeur, . . . la seule chose dont il
ne se foutait pas, c’était qu’on se foute de lui . . . et pour les autres c’est pareil,
chacun avait ses raisons” (p. 718).
18. “[A]‌vec toute la rigidité de son organisation, sa violence absurde, sa hiérarchie
méticuleuse, . . . une reductio ad absurdum de la vie de tous les jours” (2006,
p. 572).
19. While Phelan (2005, 2007, 2017) uses “narrative progression” as the main
concept under which he analyzes the textual and readerly dynamics, I use the
notion of narrative dynamics to refer to the interaction between the textual and
readerly dynamics.
20. “[R]‌egarder engage autant ma responsabilité que faire” (2006, p. 445).
21. This perspective has particularly dominated the German reception of the novel
(see Asholt, 2012).
22. For a more nuanced reading that places the emphasis on Aue as a reliable
historical and moral witness but sees the transgressive dimension of the novel as
a potential weakness, see Suleiman (2012).
23. In addition to the Orestes myth, seven baroque dances that follow the sequence
of a Bach suite—from Toccata to Gigue—form another structuring principle of
the novel (Littell & Millet, 2007, p. 9).
24. On the intertextual dimension of the novel, see Sanyal (2015, pp. 199–201).
While LaCapra suggests that Littell’s use of myth risks absorbing history “into
the transhistorical and the mythological” (2011, p. 80), to me the mythical frame
appears as an emphatically literary one, and I do not see it as implying any
kind of commitment to a mythological worldview. As far as I can see, the novel
questions fatalism by using sideshadowing that shows the indeterminacy and
openness of each moment of action; rather than on fate, the emphasis is on the
way in which things could have gone differently.
25. “Frères humains, laissez-moi vous raconter comment ça s’est passé. On n’est pas
votre frère, rétorquerez-vous, et on ne veut pas le savoir. Et c’est bien vrai qu’il
s’agit d’une sombre histoire, mais édifiante aussi, un véritable conte moral, je
vous l’assure. Ça risque d’être un peu long, après tout il s’est passé beaucoup de
choses, mais si ça se trouve vous n’êtes pas trop pressés, avec un peu de chance
vous avez le temps. Et puis ça vous concerne: vous verrez bien que ça vous
concerne” (2006, p. 11).
26. “Et si vous n’en êtes pas convaincu, inutile de lire plus loin. Vous ne comprendrez
rien et vous vous fâcherez, sans profit ni pour vous ni pour moi” (2006, p. 28).
27. “[V]‌ous disposez d’un pouvoir sans appel, celui de fermer ce livre et de le jeter
à la poubelle, ultime recours contre lequel je ne peux rien, ainsi, je ne vois pas
pourquoi je prendrais des gants” (2006, p. 720).
28. On this intertextual reference, see Koppenfels (2012, p. 142).
29. Sanyal describes the mode of narration established in the opening scene as
“ironic complicity,” which “coerces the reader into solidarity with the narrator, yet
simultaneously sabotages this identification through irony” (2015, p. 191). The
pulp elements of the novel (evident, for example, in relation to such characters as
Clemens and Weser) also contribute to the ironic dimension of the novel.
2
5
30. This self-reflexive dimension seems not to be properly acknowledged by critics

who have suggested that the “family strand” of the narrative, depicting Aue as
“driven mad by complex incestuous and oedipal rage,” functions as a “swerve”
away from confronting the “evil of the ‘ordinary Nazi’ ” and leads us to assume
that Aue is a psychopath (e.g., Eaglestone, 2011, pp. 22–23; see also Adams,
2011, p. 42).
31. I agree with Adams that the novel’s provocative mode of narration can be seen
to “dislodge the reader from a passive orientation towards the text, eliciting a
questioning and interrogative form of reading that is valuable as a means of
responding to the novel’s ethical provocations” (2011, p. 42).
32. “Encore une fois, soyons clairs: je ne cherche pas à dire que je ne suis pas
coupable de tel ou tel fait. Je suis coupable, vous ne l’êtes pas, c’est bien. Mais
vous devriez quand même pouvoir vous dire que ce que j’ai fait, vous l’auriez
fait aussi. . . . Je pense qu’il m’est permis de conclure comme un fait établi
par l’histoire moderne que tout le monde, ou presque, dans un ensemble de
circonstances donné, fait ce qu’on lui dit; et, excusez-moi, il y a peu de chances
pour que vous soyez l’exception, pas plus que moi” (2006, p. 26).
33. “Le vrai danger pour l’homme c’est moi, c’est vous. Et si vous n’en êtes pas
convaincu, inutile de lire plus loin” (2006, pp. 27–28).
34. In the French version, the reference is to “votre petite aventure algérienne,”
in the English version to “your little Vietnam adventure” (2010, p. 16; 2006,
p. 23). “[V]‌ous n’en parlez pour ainsi dire jamais, dans vos livres et vos
émissions . . . Bien sûr, la guerre est finie. Et puis on a compris la leçon, ça
n’arrivera plus. Mais êtes-vous bien sûrs qu’on ait compris la leçon? Êtes-vous
certains que ça n’arrivera plus? Êtes-vous même certains que la guerre soit
finie?” (p. 2006, p. 23).
35. Like Sanyal (2015), I consider Littell’s background—he worked for 10 years on
humanitarian missions around the world, for example, in Bosnia, Chechnya,
Congo, and Sierra Leone (see Uni & Littell, 2008)—and his interviews to be
factors that inevitably inform the process of readerly engagement. As Korthals
Altes puts it, textually induced ethos interacts with “extratextual ethos clues”
(2014, pp. 11–12) as readers construct an author’s overall ethos, which, in turn,
affects the way the author’s texts are read.
36. For discussion of identification as appropriation, assimilation, and consumption
in the context of Holocaust studies, see Adams (2011, pp. 34–35). On Les
Bienveillantes as a “challenging treatment of identification itself,” see Sanyal
(2015, p. 198).
37. “Je ressentais d’un coup tout le poids du passé, de la douleur de la vie et de la
mémoire inaltérable, je restais seul avec l’hippopotame agonisant, quelques
autruches et les cadavres, seul avec le temps et la tristesse et la peine du
souvenir, la cruauté de mon existence et de ma mort encore à venir. Les
Bienveillantes avaient retrouvé ma trace” (2006, p. 894).
38. “ ‘Où allez-vous?’ demandai-je en pantelant. –‘Nous ne savons pas,’ répondit
l’aveugle. –‘D’où venez-vous?’ demandai-je encore. –‘Nous ne le savons pas non
plus’ ” (2006, p. 889).
39. For a more detailed discussion of Le Roi des Aulnes, see Meretoja (2014b).
40. On the non-naturalizing approach, see also Nielsen (2013, p. 72).
41. See also Halliwell (2002); Polvinen (2012); Meretoja (2014b). “Non-naturalizing
narratology” might be a more appropriate term for those “unnatural
narratologists” who want to distance themselves from a naïve criticism of

mimesis and from the concomitant distinction between unnatural/anti-mimetic
and natural/mimetic and, instead, insist on the importance of non-naturalizing
reading strategies. One might ask, however, if good literary research that does
justice to the specificity of literature is not all “non-naturalizing” in this sense;
this ethos of reading is hardly unique to “non-naturalizing narratology.”
42. “Ivan courait vers moi, mais je fus distrait par un léger heurt sur mon front: un
morceau de gravier, peut-être, ou un insecte, car lorsque je me tâtai, une petite
goutte de sang perlait sur mon doigt. Je l’essuyai et continuai mon chemin vers
la Volga” (p. 2006, 383).
43. “[P]‌lutôt que de la merde, ce furent des abeilles, des araignées et des scorpions
vivants qui jaillirent de mon anus” (2006, p. 392).
44. Suleiman (2012, p. 116) acknowledges that the “loss of control in the narration”
can be seen as “textually mirroring the disintegration of Berlin,” of Aue himself,
and of “realist narrative,” but does not consider the significance of the loss
of narrative mastery to the novel’s overall interpretation of—and ethics of
representing—the Holocaust.
45. “Je compris peu de choses aux propos du Reichsführer: des termes isolés
barbotaient à la surface de ses paroles, officier héroïque, honneur de la SS, rapports
lucides, courageux, mais cela ne formait certes pas une narration où j’aurais pu me
reconnaître” (2006, p. 402).
46. “Ma pensée du monde devait maintenant se réorganiser autour de ce trou”
(2006, p. 404). Aue believes that the wound in his head opens a “pineal eye”
that allows him to see a deeper truth behind the apparent reality; as McGlothlin
(2014) argues, the “pineal eye” marks a shift from a realist, documentary style
of reporting the historical events to hallucinatory narration concerning both the
historical reality and Aue’s sexual fantasies. It seems to me that the pineal eye
can be interpreted either as the implied author’s parodic way of accentuating
Aue’s delusional self-perception and blindness to what is happening or as
symbolizing the way in which he begins to engage with what evades narrative
mastery, that is, with the chaotic reality behind the apparently orderly unfolding
of events.
47. “[J]‌’écoutai son récit avec attention, et je puis donc le rapporter, mais moins
encore que le reste je ne pouvais le raccorder à rien, cela restait un récit,
véridique à n’en pas douter, mais un récit néanmoins, guère plus qu’une suite de
phrases agencées selon un ordre mystérieux et arbitraire, régies par une logique
qui avait peu à voir avec celle qui me permettait, à moi, de respirer l’air salé de la
Baltique” (2006, p. 405).
48. “[P]‌our moi, comme pour la plupart des gens, la guerre et le meurtre sont une
question, une question sans réponse, car lorsqu’on crie dans la nuit, personne ne
répond” (2006, p. 30).
49. “Une brève pause pour aller vomir, et je reprends. C’est une autre de mes
nombreuses petites afflictions: de temps en temps, mes repas remontent, parfois
tout de suite, parfois plus tard, sans raison, comme ça. C’est un vieux problème,
ça date de la guerre, ça a commencé vers l’automne 1941 pour être précis, en
Ukraine, à Kiev je pense, ou peut-être à Jitomir” (2006, p. 15).
50. “Quand je tentais de le caresser, pour faire preuve de bonne volonté, il filait
s’asseoir sur le rebord de la fenêtre . . . ; si je cherchais à le prendre dans mes bras,
il me griffait. La nuit, au contraire, il venait se coucher en boule sur ma poitrine,
une masse étouffante, et dans mon sommeil je rêvais que l’on m’asphyxiait sous
un tas de pierres. Avec mes souvenirs, c’a été un peu pareil. La première fois que
4
52
je me décidai à les consigner par écrit, je pris un congé. Ce fut probablement une
erreur . . . je me mis à penser” (2006, p. 13).
51. “Or si l’on suspend le travail, les activités banales, l’agitation de tous les jours,
pour se donner avec sérieux à une pensée, il en va tout autrement. Bientôt
les choses remontent, en vagues lourdes et noires. La nuit, les rêves se
désarticulent, se déploient, prolifèrent, et au réveil laissent une fine couche âcre
et humide dans la tête, qui met longtemps à se dissoudre” (2006, p. 4).
52. For Rothberg, ”Traumatic realism mediates between realist and antirealist
positions in Holocaust studies and marks the necessity of considering how
the ordinary and extraordinary aspects of genocide intersect and coexist”
(2000, p. 9).
53. The translation is my own (the English translation of the sixth volume has
not yet appeared).”[A]‌lle vet vi det, selv om ikke alle erkjenner det, at vi selv,
om vi hadd vært en del av den tiden, . . . sannsynligvis ville ha marsjert under
nazismens fane. . . De aller fleste av oss mener det alle mener, gjør det alle
mener, og det gjør vi fordi dette ‘vi’ og dette ‘alle’ er det som bestemmer både
normene, reglene og moralen i et samfunn. Nå når nazismen har blitt ‘de’, er
det lett å ta avstand fra den, men det var det ikke da nazismen var ‘vi.’ Skal vi
kunne forstå det som hendte, hvordan det var mulig, er det det første vi må
forstå. . . . Stor er vi-ets kraft, nesten uavslitelige dets bånd, og alt vi egentlig kan
gjøre, er å håpe at vårt vi er et godt vi. For kommer det onde, kommer det ikke
i formen av ‘de,’ som noe fremmed vi lett kan avvise, det vil komme i formen av
‘vi’ ” (Knausgård, 2011, pp. 791–792).

CHAPTER 7
Transforming the Narrative In-Between

Dialogic Storytelling and David Grossman
T hroughout this book, I have suggested that in a sense storytelling

is always dialogical: it takes place in relation to existing narrative
practices—to narrative webs in which we are entangled and narrative tra-
ditions that we have inherited. However, there are important differences in
the kinds of dialogical forms that narrative practices take. They range from
minimum dialogicality that structures even the most monologic narratives
to overt dialogicality that seeks to cultivate an ethos of dialogue. A similar
distinction can be made in the fields of psychology and philosophy between
weak and strong dialogicality: the minimum sense in which our selves are
always dialogical (as articulated in Chapter 2), on the one hand, and the
cultivation, on the other, of an affirmatively dialogical mode of existence
that cherishes our being in relation to others, our being vulnerable and
exposed to others, and the ethical potential in our being-affected-by-
others. Theoretical discourse on our dialogical condition often oscillates
between the ontological and normative meanings of the term.
In what follows, I will discuss dialogic storytelling by looking at two nar-
ratives by the Israeli writer David Grossman: To the End of the Land (2010,
Isha Borachat Mi’bsora, 2008) and Falling Out of Time (2015, Nofel mi-huts
la-zeman, 2011). Unlike the other literary narratives discussed in this book,
these are not about the Second World War—they are situated in the pres-
ent or “out of time”—and yet their narratives unfold under the shadow
of a series of wars and disasters from the Holocaust to the present. These
narratives are particularly interesting from the perspective of the narrative
6
5
2
in-between: To the End of the Land shows how the narrative in-between is
created and transformed in dialogic interaction, and Falling Out of Time
explores the breaking down of the narrative in-between and the limits
of storytelling. Both have an autobiographical connection to Grossman’s
personal loss.
GROSSMAN’S LOSS
Grossman has been a politically engaged writer for a long time, actively
fighting against the occupation of the Palestinian territories by Israel. For
many years, however, he kept his political writings and fiction separate and
did not overtly deal with the Israel-Palestine conflict in his prose. The situa-
tion changed for him in May 2003. His older son, Yonatan, was six months
from completing his military service—which in Israel takes three years—
and his younger son, Uri, was 18 months from beginning it. At that point
he felt an acute need to write about the Israel-Palestine conflict; in fact, he
felt unable not to write about it (Cooke & Grossman, 2010).
Grossman started To the End of the Land, a novel about a middle-aged
woman, Ora, whose son, Ofer, is discharged from military service but vol-
unteers to rejoin the army in an operation against the Palestinians at the
start of the Second Intifada. In the desperate situation of not knowing how
to survive while her son is on the frontline, Ora is overcome by the irra-
tional, magical thought that she can protect Ofer by leaving her house so
that the army “notifiers” cannot come to inform her of his death. So she
embarks on a long walk across Israel to Galilee. As we will see, the novel
parallels walking and writing as strategies of survival; the latter, in particu-
lar, was Grossman’s lifeline when Uri was on the frontline. Not unlike Ora,
he indulged in the half-magical thought that if he just kept on writing, it
might keep his son safe:
Uri was very familiar with the plot and the characters. Every time we talked on
the phone, and when he came home on leave, he would ask what was new in the
book and in the characters’ lives. (“What did you do to them this week?” was his
regular question.) He spent most of his service in the Occupied Territories, on
patrols, lookouts, ambushes, and checkpoints, and he occasionally shared his
experiences with me. At the time, I had the feeling—or rather, a wish—that the
book I was writing would protect him. (Epilogue of Grossman, 2010)
The charm seemed to work for a while, but then, on July 12, 2006, war broke
out, after Hezbollah attacked Israeli soldiers on patrol near the Lebanese

border. Over the next 34 days, 165 Israelis, approximately 500 Hezbollah
fighters, and 1,191 Lebanese civilians were killed.
Although Grossman was terrified for his son Uri, who was serving as
a tank commander at the front, he was not initially opposed to the war,
which he saw as a form of self-defense. But as weeks went by, he started
to feel that it was Israel’s duty to find other solutions, and on August 10,
together with his fellow writers Amoz Oz and A. B. Yehoshua, Grossman
held a press conference, where he urged the government to agree to a cease-
fire and to negotiate peace: “We had a right to go to war. . . . But things
got complicated. . . . I believe that there is more than one course of action
available” (Cooke & Grossman, 2010). Only two days later, shortly before
the Israeli government accepted a UN-brokered ceasefire, Grossman’s
20-year-old son Uri was killed in southern Lebanon when his tank was
hit by a rocket while he and his crew were trying to rescue soldiers from
another tank.
In his eulogy to Uri, Grossman (2006) recounts how the notifiers came
to their house in the middle of the night: “The person said through the
intercom that he was from the army, and I went down to open the door,
and I thought to myself—that’s it, life’s over,” but when he and his wife
went to tell their little daughter the terrible news in the morning, they
promised her that they will keep on living despite everything. Grossman
continued to write, which meant for him “a way of choosing life” (Cooke &
Grossman, 2010). He also continued to fight for peace: in November 2006,
he addressed a crowd of about 100,000 Israelis in the Tel Aviv square where
Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated 11 years earlier for trying to make peace
with the Palestinians. He fiercely criticized the politics of Ehud Olmert’s
government for its inability to open “a new horizon for Israelis” (Silver,
2006). Grossman denounces the apathy with which the Israelis have come
to respond to the failure of the peace process, and he argues for reaching
out to the ordinary, moderate Palestinians:
Appeal to the moderates among them, those who are opposed like you and me
to Hamas and its path. . . . Speak to their deep wound, recognise their suffer-
ing. . . . Just for once, look at them not only through the sights of a gun and
not beyond the closed barrier. You will see there a people that are tormented no
less than we are, an occupied and oppressed and hopeless people. Look at the
overwhelming majority of that miserable people, whose fate is linked to ours,
whether we want it or not. (quoted in Silver, 2006)
Both his resilience as a political activist1 and his work as a writer are aimed
against cynicism, against the “diminishing of the soul”:
T r a n s f or m i n g t h e N a r r at i v e I n - B e t w e e n [ 257 ]
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52
I learned from Uri that . . . [w]‌e have to guard ourselves, by defending ourselves
both physically and morally. We have to guard ourselves from might and sim-
plistic thinking, from the corruption that is in cynicism, from the pollution of
the heart and the ill-treatment of humans, which are the biggest curse of those
living in a disastrous region like ours. Uri simply had the courage to be himself,
always and in all situations—to find his exact voice in every thing he said and
did. That’s what guarded him from the pollution and corruption and the dimin-
ishing of the soul. (Grossman, 2006)
The view that emerges from Grossman’s thinking is that literature should
function as a counterforce to such diminishing of the soul: it can create
a space that has power to increase the agency of both the author and the
readers. After his son’s death, writing felt to Grossman like a search for a
way of making one’s experiences one’s own—becoming the agent of one’s
experiences, rather than merely a sufferer and a victim:
[I]‌magining, infusing life into characters and situations, I felt I was building my
home again. It was a way of fighting against the gravity of grief. . . . It was so
good that I was in the middle of this novel [To the End of the Land], rather than
any other. A different book might suddenly have seemed irrelevant to me. But
this one did not. . . . I feel I was thrown into no-man’s-land and the only way
to allow my life to coexist with death is to write about it. When I write about
it, I’m not a victim. . . . The great temptation is not to expose yourself to these
atrocities. But if you do that, you’ve lost the war. The language of war is narrow
and functional. Writing is the opposite. You describe your reality in the highest
resolution even when it’s a nightmare and in doing so, you live your own life, not
a cliche others have formulated for you. (Cooke & Grossman, 2010)
Grossman testifies here to the empowering potential of exploring painful

experiences through storytelling. Precisely this empowering potential is
one of the central themes of To the End of the Land.
DIALOGIC STORYTELLING
While Littell’s novel exposes us to the dangers of monologic storytelling,

Grossman’s To the End of the Land is a compelling novel on the power of
dialogic storytelling. It presents storytelling as a process of mutual shar-
ing of experiences, and it shows its ontological and epistemological sig-
nificance: the novel foregrounds how narrative interaction is part and
parcel of who the characters are and of how they (re)interpret, construct,

and reshape their lives in a dialogic relationship to one another. Over and
beyond this, it explores the ethical potential of this performative activity
in connection to how it shapes the sense of the possible of the characters,
their narrative in-between, and their understanding of themselves and
others. In the novel, dialogue is both something that happens between the
characters and something that structures the entire novel as it engages in
a dialogue with other narratives and draws the reader to dialogic engage-
ment. While in this section I will focus on the first two levels of dialogi-
cality, sketched in Chapter 2—dialogue between characters and internal
dialogue—in the subsequent sections I will expand on how the characters
and the novel as a whole engage in a dialogue with culturally mediated nar-
rative models of sense-making.
At the center of the novel are the interconnected life stories and love
triangle of Ora, Avram, and Ilan, unfolding against the backdrop of the
Israel-Palestine conflict. Their lives are bound together already in 1967,
during the Six-Day War, when they get to know each other as teenagers in
a darkened isolation hospital, half forgotten, and delirious with fever. The
opening section is narrated in the form of a dialogue—voices piercing the
darkness—through which the reader witnesses the encounter between the
characters, curious to get to know one another:
Don’t sleep, watch over me.

Then talk to me. Tell me.
About what?
About you. (2010, p. 17)
After the opening section, the narration shifts to the year 2000 and leaves
it to the reader to piece together, step by step, the events between 1967 and
the narrative present. The narrative is rendered through story fragments
in Ora’s and Avram’s dialogue and third-person narration, which blends
(often through free indirect discourse) description of the characters’ expe-
riencing and reminiscing self in the narrative present (as they look back at
their past experiences) and representation of their past experiencing self.
For example, here the narrative discourse begins as a description of how
Ora remembers the hospital episode as something so precious that she did
not want to talk about it to anyone else afterward, but then, through the
deictic “now,” shifts to conveying her experience at the time it was lived:
Ora knew that what had happened to her there all those nights was too precious
and rare to be handed over to strangers, and this was all the more true of what
was happening to her with them now, with both of them; the duality presented
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a mystery she did not even try to decipher. . . . But from day to day it grew more
obvious, until she knew with unimpeachable certainty: they were both neces-
sary to her. (p. 332)
We learn that the three of them became inseparable and formed a mini-
community that defied the rules imposed on them by conventional social
morality. In her early twenties, for a year, Ora shared her life and love with
both Avram and Ilan, but then a catastrophe befell them and their lives
were forever changed. The 1973 Yom Kippur War erupted as Ora had just
finished her military service, and Ilan and Avram were still soldiers. On
leave, they visited Ora and asked her to put their names in a hat and pull
out one. As Ilan won, Avram returned to the frontline, was captured by the
Egyptians, and, as an intelligence officer, tortured unmercifully. During his
captivity, he held onto life through stories:
[H]‌e had the sketch he wrote while he was on duty in Sinai, until the war started,
with its complex plots and multiple characters, and he kept returning to a sec-
ondary plot that had never preoccupied him before he was taken hostage, but
this was what saved him over and over again. (p. 162)
Here we encounter again the idea of storytelling as an art of survival, but

this time it is intimately linked to reflection on the limits of storytelling.
There is a limit to how far anyone can survive on stories. For Avram, the
breaking point comes when he is forced to dig his own grave and he sees an
Egyptian officer take a picture of him being buried alive:
[S]‌trangers, in a strange land, are pouring earth on his face, burying him alive,
throwing dirt into his eyes and mouth and killing him, and it’s wrong, he wants
to yell, it’s a mistake, you don’t even know me, and he grunts and struggles to
open his eyes to devour one more sight, light, sky, concrete wall, even cruelly
mocking faces, but human faces—and then, above his head to the side, some-
one takes a photograph, a man stands with a camera, it’s the dhabet, a short,
thin Egyptian officer with a large black camera, and he takes meticulous pictures
of Avram’s death, perhaps as a souvenir, to show the wife and kids at home,
and that is when Avram lets go of his life, right at that moment he truly lets
go. . . . Avram no longer wanted to live in a world where such a thing was pos-
sible, where a person stood photographing someone being buried alive, and
Avram let go of his life and died. (pp. 161–162)
This passage seems to begin like a flashback that hits Avram as he watches
Ora dig the earth with her hands, in the beginning of their hike, but the

shifting of the third-person narration to the present tense makes tangibly
present the event as it is unfolding, at a time when Avram is still truly alive
and different possibilities lay ahead. At the moment when he “let go of his
life,” the narration shifts to the past tense as if to signal how abruptly the
future was closed down on him.2
Upon Avram’s return, more pain is inflicted on him by Israeli intel-
ligence, as they interrogate him harshly, suspecting that he may have
revealed information to the Egyptian torturers. Ora and Ilan are deter-
mined to nurse him back to life, but Avram withdraws, and it crushes them
to see that he is unable to “understand what was once the spirit of his life”
(2010, p. 353). Avram used to write all the time, on his own and with Ilan,
and get excited by creative possibilities that he saw everywhere: “[A]‌ll the
endlessly possible. Remember?” (p. 142). He used to be the embodiment of
a heightened sense of possibilities, characterized by spontaneous orality,
verbal flights of fancy, and constant fabulation: his mind would not stop
skipping “to the brink of possibilities” (p. 46). The trauma of the torture
destroys all that at one stroke, leaving mere “silence, lights out” (p. 143).
Avram becomes a walking wound. The state of his soul is epitomized by a
physical wound close to his spine that refuses to heal: “[T]‌he wound was the
focal point of concern for Ora and Ilan. . . . The word ‘wound’ was uttered
so often that it sometimes seemed Avram himself was fading away, leaving
only the wound as his primary being” (p. 186). Avram’s trauma becomes a
shared trauma in the sense that they all feel implicated in it, and it para-
lyzes all three of them: “It was his actual existence—empty, hollow—that
devoured them constantly, so she felt at the time, and sucked the life out
of them” (p. 187). Everything that happens in their lives afterward—all
actuality—bears the traumatic mark of the possible, of what could have
happened. This is the case not only for Ora but also for Ilan, who is tor-
mented by the thought that his own life and family could have been
Avram’s: “There will be a child here who’ll grow up and be an entire world,
and over there he’ll be a living dead, and this child could have been his, and
you could have been his too, if only—” (p. 194). This alternate reality of the
if only accompanies them—like a shadow—in everything they do.
Previously so full of love and life, the traumatic experience leaves both
men feeling incapable of love or intimacy. Ilan has a child with Ora, but
feels unable to love him (p. 195) and leaves Ora and their son Adam. While
Ora and Ilan are separated, Avram gets Ora pregnant but does not want the
child or “anything to do with life” (p. 256), whereas Ilan returns and wants
to raise Avram’s son, Ofer, as his own, as if raising and loving him could
heal the old wound. Ora and Ilan live together for 20 years and raise the
two boys, but in the narrative present Ilan has left Ora again.
2
6
Ora and Ofer had planned to walk across Israel to Galilee to celebrate the
end of his military service, but as he volunteers to continue, she decides
to go anyway, to avoid the “notifiers,” and she asks Avram to accompany
her. When they embark on the walk, Ora wants to tell Avram about Ofer
so that he could get to know his son (whom he has never met). After first
refusing, Avram eventually gives Ora the permission to talk about their
son, but asks her to “start from a distance” (p. 175). What follows is a
step-by-step movement from silence and muteness to talking and listen-
ing: “We’re practicing together, Avram and I. Practicing on Adam, before
we get to Ofer. Exercising vocabulary, boundaries, endurance” (p. 203).
Talking is as difficult to Ora as listening is to Avram, but they take the
leap together, both terrified and certain of its necessity: “She realizes that
perhaps she is no less afraid to tell these things than he is to hear them”
(p. 192).
The narrative shifts back and forth between two life-changing, trans-
formative phases of their lives: the six years they shared in their youth
and the present time, when their son is doing his military service as they
are trying to cope with the uncertainty and deal with the trauma that
has marked their lives. The dialogic process is not only about exchang-
ing information and getting to know and understand the other, it is also
about bearing together a traumatic past and vulnerability in the face
of a terrifying present (p. 106). Sharing stories alleviates them both of
their pain, as hearing the other say out loud what one has been strug-
gling with alone is in itself liberating: as Avram says, “Ora, it’s my finally
hearing from the outside something I’ve been hearing inside my head for
years,” Ora responds, “You know, it’s strange, but it’s the same way for
me” (p. 194).
As they walk, Ora eventually tells Avram more and more about Ofer, and
gradually Avram gets to know him through these stories:
And for the first time, she describes Ofer to him in detail. The open, large, tanned
face, the blue eyes that are both tranquil and penetrating. . . . The words tumble
out of her, and Avram swallows them up. Sometimes his lips move, and she real-
izes that he is memorizing her words, trying to make them his, but it occurs to
her that they will never really be his until he writes them down himself.
She is embarrassed by her fluent gush of speech, but she cannot stop because
this is exactly what she needs to do now: she must describe him in minute detail,
especially his body. . . . This is it. This is why she brought Avram with her. To give
a name to all these things, and to tell him the story of Ofer’s life, the story of
his body and the story of his soul and the story of the things that happened to
him. (p. 465)

The narration here shifts into free indirect discourse whereby Ora’s thoughts
and idiom emerge from the third-person narration. Such passages of free
indirect discourse alternate with dialogue that conveys the direct speech
between Ora and Avram. This mode of narration gives the reader access
both to the characters’ dialogue and to the internal dialogue conducted by
Ora in her mind (particularly with her construction of Avram) and to some
extent by Avram (with his construction of Ora).3 Thereby the novel not
only illuminates the two levels of the dialogicality of the subject discussed
in Chapter 2, but also draws attention to their intertwinement and to how
the one mobilizes, maps onto, and feeds into the other. The internal dia-
logue in which Ora engages within her mind includes Ora’s dialogue with
herself or with the voices of different Oras, such as her construction of
the resilient, resolute Ora, that is, herself as determined to bring Avram
back to life and to keep Ofer alive. This resilient, resolute Ora reassures the
vulnerable, anxious Ora: “Go on, keep going. Talk, tell him about his son”
(p. 202). This internal dialogue then flows into the dialogic action of telling
Avram more and more stories.
In their dialogic exchange, Ora and Avram take on the role of storytell-
ers as they tell each other of the years in which they led separate lives. But
they are not only “narrating selves”; they are just as much “experiencing
selves” to whom the very process of exchanging memories through sto-
rytelling forms a transformative experience. The new experiences they
go through as they walk through Israel are mediated through the stories
they have told and are in the process of telling, and their new experiences
prompt them to retell their stories in new ways. Hence, living and telling
are woven together in complex ways. It is salient that Ora tells Avram of
her family life from the perspective of the present moment, and the stories
are interpretations that play a part in constructing a shared past for the
purposes of the present and future. It is simultaneously a process of look-
ing back and moving on; it is an activity of transforming their narrative
in-between so as to create a new space in which unprecedented experiences
and identities—such as that of a shared parenthood—become possible.
Storytelling takes the form of a transformative travel, and it is hence an
experience in the strong hermeneutic sense. As Gadamer puts it, Erfahrung
(experience) alludes to traveling and is only worth the name when it does
not leave the one who has it “unchanged” (1997, p. 100).
Dialogic storytelling is so central to To the End of the Land that it can be
said to structure the entire novel. The novel not only thematizes the world-
creating power of storytelling—“Avram and Ilan created a world in almost
everything they did” (Grossman, 2010, p. 246)—but also shows the very
process of such world-creation. Through the dialogic exchange between
4
6
2
Ora and Avram, the novel displays the power of dialogic storytelling to
create and transform intersubjective reality: as the characters share their
memories, these narrative interpretations are not so much representations
of the past as part of a performative activity that creates a new reality in
the present: “Ora realizes that now, having crossed the stream, he is begin-
ning to grasp that he has left behind what used to be, and that from here
on there will be a new reality” (p. 132).
The gradual process of Ora finding the courage to tell more and more
about her and Ofer’s life and of Avram becoming ready and able to lis-
ten is also a process in which readers assemble a narrative from the story
fragments that they receive from the meandering narration. As Hoffman
observes, the opening scene imposes on readers the “utter inability of these
three young people to fathom what is going on around them,” as the “stac-
cato dialogue” is “like waking up in the middle of the night and not know-
ing where you are” (2012, p. 46). The reader has to piece together their life
stories from a narrative that then shifts back and forth between different
temporalities. The narration is emphatically polyphonic: it presents differ-
ent voices and perspectives side by side, without the narrator privileging
one over another. The non-linearity of the narration emphasizes the way
in which different times coexist in the present, as we look back on the past,
and it foregrounds narrative sense-making as a connection-creating activ-
ity: it simultaneously shows how Ora and Avram engage in reaffirming and
enriching their connection, and draws the reader into the action of conjur-
ing up connections.
As readers engage in a dialogue with the novel, they draw on their cul-
tural background and the narrative traditions to which the novel refers.
The novel’s narrative is told against the backdrop of a plethora of both
literary and broader cultural narratives that it comments on, challenges,
and draws on. For the purposes of the present discussion, the most impor-
tant literary intertext of the novel is One Thousand and One Nights and
its way of dealing with storytelling as an art of survival (to which I will
come back).4 The novel also engages critically with the cultural narratives
of Israeli nationalism by showing what war does to families, describing,
in Grossman’s words, “how the cruelty of the external situation invades
the delicate, intimate fabric of one family, ultimately tearing it to shreds”
(2008, p. 64). While it resonates with and perpetuates the mythical nar-
ratives of the lengths to which maternal love can go, the family of three
adults challenges conventional, heteronormative narratives of monoga-
mous love, marriage, and parenthood. Hence, To the End of the Land both
takes part in a dialogue of interpretations and deals with dialogic story-
telling on several levels.

NON-S UBSUMPTIVE UNDERSTANDING
As we saw in Chapter 2, our being is dialogical not only because of the inter-
nal dialogue that goes on in our minds and the external one that we conduct
with others, but also because we engage in a constant dialogue with cul-
tural narrative models of sense-making as we orient ourselves to the world
and negotiate our identities. First, To the End of the Land conveys a sense
of how, rather than determining our experiences and our understandings,
cultural narratives shape the space in which we orient ourselves, and how
we often must struggle with dominant narrative models in order to find our
own path. Second, the novel highlights that in addition to the minimum
structural dialogicality of all sense-making (in that it takes place in relation
to cultural webs of meaning), storytelling can be dialogical in the stronger
sense in which it involves affirmatively non-subsumptive understanding and
transformative encounters between individuals. While arguments against
narrative sense-making often suggest that narratives are ethically prob-
lematic in imposing order on singular experiences and events, Grossman’s
novel shows how storytelling—when it is dialogical in the strong sense—
can function non-subsumptively as a means of encountering the other in
his or her singularity. The ethical counterpoles that emerge from the novel
are, on the one hand, subsumptive cultural narratives that reinforce cultural
stereotyping and contribute to the perpetuation of social conflicts and, on
the other, non-subsumptive dialogic storytelling that opens up the possibil-
ity of ethical encounters and transformations.
The agency of individuals consists in their capacity to initiate something
new, and integral to this capacity is the reinvention of themselves through
co-fabulation. This creativity necessarily takes place in relation to cultural
narrative frameworks. Ora and Avram tell their stories by drawing on and
reinterpreting stories that their cultural situation has bestowed on them,
but instead of mechanically repeating culturally available stories, they
retell them in their own ways, whereby they invent new ways of dealing
with their loss, grief, anxieties, and hopes. The novel suggests that families,
couples, and friends can partly co-create their own, shared mythologies
and narrative in-betweens, and it shows how these intersubjective narra-
tive webs exist through the process of being interpreted and reinterpreted
in the circular movement of the triple hermeneutic. There are important
differences, however, in whether individuals follow blindly the prevalent
narrative unconscious or question the narrative models imposed on them
in order to find their own paths.
When Ora and Avram first meet, in the dark hospital, their whole lives
lie ahead of them, but are on hold as they are cut off from their normal
62
lives. Avram likes the way they neither see each other nor know each oth-
er’s name. The darkness and the surreal situation allows them to encoun-
ter each other as raw souls, as it were, without the customary process of
ascribing identity categories to others based on their visual characteris-
tics. The voices in the dark place the emphasis on listening, rather than
seeing, and listening is of course the foundation of dialogic storytelling.5
As Freeman puts it, responding to the “call of the Other” requires listen-
ing (2014b, p. 217), and such responsiveness is the condition of genuine
dialogicality. The opening scene also draws attention to the importance of
narrative imagination in the dialogic engagement with the other. Avram
keeps fictionalizing his own experiences and thoughts of Ora and narrating
them to her in the third person, which compels Ora, too, to tell him about
herself—in the third person—what she would not have been able to tell
him otherwise: “She doesn’t know, Ora said after a long pause, unwillingly
seduced by his style and finding that it was actually more comfortable to
talk about herself this way” (2010, p. 34).
During the years that follow, Ora, Avram, and Ilan are able to break free
from conventional relationship normativity and create something unique
that defies labeling. This involves negotiating the meaning of ethically
charged words like “family” and “love.” When Avram is at the hospital, after
being tortured by the Egyptians, the nurse asks whether Ora and Ilan are
his family; Ora hesitates but then replies affirmatively: “ ‘So tell me, what
are you to him? You and the tall guy. Family?’ ‘Sort of. Well, yes, we’re his
family’ ” (p. 352). Having partially lost his memory, Avram wants to know
about Ora’s relationship to him and Ilan. Words and categories fail them as
they try to understand the singularity of what they felt:
“And Ilan. . . . You loved him, right?”

Ora nodded. She pondered how it was possible to use the very same word to
describe such different feelings.
“So how . . . I mean, how did we also. . . . ” (p. 352)
Avram asks whether Ilan knew, and Ora says that he was smart enough
to know, but then feels the crushing inadequacy of the word: “The word
‘smart’ explained nothing. There was something broad and deep, wonder-
ful in its own way, in what the three of them had been given in that silenced
year” (p. 354).
The narrative dynamic of the novel is shaped by a movement from a
heightened sense of the possible to a radical, traumatic diminishing of pos-
sibilities and then back to a joint, faltering search for a new sense of the
possible. The latter involves building a connection to their prior lives and

bringing back to life aspects of it, while at the same time implicitly pre-
paring themselves for a possible new catastrophe in the near future. Ora’s
stories of Ofer mobilize Avram’s narrative imagination, but he first finds it
straining:
There’s this guy, a person, who is Ofer, Avram thinks strenuously, as if strug-
gling with both hands to stick a label that says “Ofer” onto a vague and elusive
picture that constantly squirms in his soul as Ora speaks. And she is telling me
a story about him now. I’m hearing Ora’s story about Ofer. All I have to do is
hear it. (p. 181)
This is not the first time, however, that Avram engages in such imagin-
ing: “as Ofer’s discharge date had grown closer, he would sometimes pick
out a boy at the right age in the restaurant where he worked, or on the
street, and observe him stealthily, even follow him for a block or two, and
try to imagine how he saw things” (p. 153). But this time Avram’s imagi-
native perspective-taking is a response to stories told by Ora about their
lived, everyday life, which gives it a different weight and reality. Gradually,
his narrative imagination is set alight and he cannot get enough of Ora’s
stories. Imagining becomes an extension of reality as he weaves what Ora
tells him into the narrative fabric of his own life.
Ora, in turn, is first anxious about not knowing what to tell and how,
acutely aware of the problems in telling someone’s life:
How do you tell an entire life? A whole decade would not be enough. Where do
you start? Especially she, who is incapable of telling one story from beginning to
end without scattering in every direction and ruining the punch line—how will
she be able to tell his story the right way? (p. 182)
She also worries about not really knowing Ofer:
And perhaps this is the fear that is pressuring her brain . . . : she doesn’t really
know him. . . . And what, really, will she say about him? How can you even
describe and revive a whole person, flesh and blood, with only words—oh God,
with only words? (pp. 182–183)
The tension between the real, singular flesh-and-blood person and the sto-
ries of him underlies the whole narrative. The person is always so much
more than words can convey, but at the same time a person can become
more, as it were, through the stories. Ora feels that her telling about Ofer
is a way to “give him strength” (p. 157)—that by weaving “the feeling of
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Ofer inside her like a game of connect the dots,” Ofer is “growing a little
stronger while she talks, while Avram listens” (p. 198). The hesitant need
to tell grows into confidence that telling about Ofer’s life in detail gives it
new reality and dignity. For example, when Ora tells about his first steps,
she feels overwhelmed by the enormity of the event: “It takes off inside her
now, the greatness and the wonder of the act, the bravery of her little astro-
naut” (p. 233). She would like to cherish every aspect of his life by weaving
it into a story: “There should be a whole story about that moment, when Ofer
sucked his toes” (p. 263).
How is it possible that stories can augment someone’s existence? The con-
dition of possibility for this phenomenon is non-subsumptive understanding.
The novel shows in concrete terms what non-subsumptive narrative under-
standing can mean. Ora and Avram reach toward each other through dialogic
storytelling that is not an attempt to appropriate or define the other, but a
search for understanding that involves thinking beyond their preconceived
categories. Here, dialogic storytelling is not a means of subsuming individ-
ual experiences under what they already know, but rather a fluid, temporal
activity: an interaction in which meanings are in the process of being created.
Non-subsumptive dialogic storytelling is presented as a potentially creative
process in which new meanings and possibilities emerge and the partners of
dialogue understand better both themselves and the other, as well as take
part in creating and transforming the shared space between them.
As a process of understanding simultaneously the other and—through
the other—oneself, dialogic storytelling is presented as an activity that
takes time. There is no quick route to understanding the other or one-
self: the temporal process of engaging with the other’s perspective is pivotal
to both self-understanding and understanding the other within the fictive
world, as well as to the reader’s process of engaging with the perspectives
opened up by the novel. Ora’s and Avram’s long trajectory of walking and
talking is elemental to the understanding it elicits. When Avram wants to
know why Ofer started to eat meat after being a vegetarian for years, Ora
responds: “ ‘Wait, I’m not there yet.’ We still have a long way to go, she
thinks; we’ll understand it slowly, together” (p. 274). Here, the dialogue
with the other blends into the internal dialogue that Ora conducts with
herself in her mind, and the two together take part in slowly transforming
their narrative in-between.
By telling stories of Ofer’s childhood to Avram, Ora understands better
both Ofer and her own life, and she sees things that she had missed earlier:
As she recounts the story, she realizes something she missed at the time: the
moment of Ofer’s choice between them, and his distress when they forced him

to choose. She shuts her eyes and tries to guess his thoughts. He had no words,
after all, just the inner push-and-pull, and she and Ilan and Adam cheered and
danced around him, and Ofer was torn as only a baby can be torn. (p. 235)
Ora went through a similar experience of self-understanding as she puts her

experiences into words during a period of correspondence with Avram: “As
she wrote the letters, she gradually found that dim and burdensome things
became clear when she laid them out on paper” (p. 333). This dialogic
exchange illuminates the hermeneutic insight that self- understanding
takes place in relation to the other. Avram’s response and understanding
are integral to Ora’s narrative self-reflection and to her process of becom-
ing herself: “she started to feel that she wanted, needed, to write, and that,
no less than that, she wanted Avram to read what she had to say and to tell
her more and more of what he saw in her” (p. 333). Self-understanding and
becoming oneself are mutually intertwined processes that unfold in rela-
tion to the other, so that this relationship becomes ontologically constitu-
tive of who one is. This is salient in Ora’s case, as she feels that only with
Avram does she exist in the proper sense of the word:
[S]‌he was always easy with Avram, letting him see all of her, almost from the
first moment she met him. . . . He was the only one who could truly know her
and could pollinate her with his look, with his very existence, and without him
she simply did not exist, she had no life, and so she was his, she was his prerog-
ative. (p. 239)
The quotation captures beautifully our fundamental dependency on those

whom we let see all of us.
Theorists of dialogism and the dialogical self use the adjective “dialogical”
sometimes in an ontological sense, to describe the fundamental structure
of human existence, and sometimes in a normative sense, to characterize
a regulative idea of sorts. Often they oscillate between these two mean-
ings, which are clearly not entirely separable, because when one develops
into a more dialogical direction in the ethical sense, becoming more open
and receptive to the other, this affects one’s whole existence and hence has
ontological bearing. For analytical purposes, however, it is useful to dis-
tinguish between different senses of the dialogical. To the End of the Land
emphasizes our ontological dialogical constitution as subjects by demon-
strating how we become who we are in relation to others and to cultural
webs of meaning, but it also conveys an ethos of dialogue that characterizes
a particular ethical mode of being in relation to others.
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In the light of Grossman’s novel, we can characterize the ethos of dia-

logue as an ethos of receptivity, responsiveness, and openness. It is an ethos
of cherishing the ability to break free from one’s boundaries and being able
to be affected and transformed by the other. This ethos values movement,
fluidity, and transformation against fixity, boundaries, and control. Life is
about becoming, changing, and moving; storytelling that captures this per-
petual change does justice to the flow of reality. This is a key challenge for
Ora: how to show life in a state of becoming through stories:
It’s a bit like describing how a river flows, she realizes. Like painting a whirlwind,
or flames. It’s an occurrence, she thinks, happily recalling one of his old words: A
family is a perpetual occurrence. And she shows him: Adam at six and a bit, Ofer
almost three. Adam lies on the lawn at the house in Tzur Hadassah. His arms are
spread-eagled and his eyes are closed. (p. 383)
Ora realizes that she has to use storytelling as a means of showing the
events in their state of perpetual change, and she starts to narrate, in the
present tense, which accentuates the quality of the events being alive and
changing, not fixed like they often seem to be in past-tense narratives.6
Perspective-taking is integral to this process of showing. Ora repeatedly
takes the perspective of her past self and of Ofer, Ilan, and Adam in vari-
ous stages of their lives. For example, as she talks about Ofer as a toddler
following a horse, this involves a complex structure of her present self tak-
ing the perspective of her former self, her as the toddler’s mother who was
“seeing through his eyes the wonder of the large, emaciated beast” (p. 311).
The dialogic exchange between Ora and Avram also involves perspective-
taking through listening that expresses the willingness to consider the oth-
er’s mode of experience and through the invitation for the other to imagine
what one has experienced and thought: “ ‘Just imagine. . . . ’ He turns to
face her. The bags under his eyes glow, and now he is entirely here, shin-
ing with life, and the pillar of fire he used to be is visible through his skin”
(p. 291). The dialogic narrative imagination that they cultivate through
such perspective-taking contributes to a singular sense of connection that
makes their being-in-relation more and more reciprocal and fluid so that
eventually “she can see all the pores of his soul opening up” (p. 296).
In addition to perspective-taking, and partly overlapping with it, an impor-

tant vehicle of non-subsumptive narrative understanding is question-asking.
Genuine questions are open in the sense that they do not predetermine the
answer: they indicate a willingness to learn and alter one’s preconceptions.
Implicit in Gadamer’s and Bakhtin’s dialogism is that although all use of

language is dialogic in a sense, some forms of speech are more dialogic than
others. Here we can see the use of “dialogic” in the ontological and norma-
tive/regulative senses. For example, when both Gadamerian and Bakhtinian
hermeneutics emphasize that language lives first and foremost through dia-
logue and that (tacit) questions drive dialogue forward, they make general
ontological claims about the nature of language: “With meaning I give answers
to questions. Anything that does not answer a question is devoid of sense for
us” (Bakhtin 1986, p. 145). However, while this primacy of questions applies
to all conversation and speech, dialogue animated by the ethos of dialogue
is driven by genuine questions that open a space for answers that are them-
selves open: “Questioning opens up possibilities of meaning, and thus what is
meaningful passes into one’s own thinking on the subject” (Gadamer, 1997,
p. 375). Such questioning non-subsumptively enriches one’s understanding
of the subject matter.
To the End of the Land foregrounds how questions function as the
motor of dialogue for both the characters and readers. The questions
are not always spelled out, but they are the hidden force that drives the
dialogue forward. Particularly the big questions that revolve around the
characters’ traumatic experiences are always there, at the back of their
minds: What happened to Avram—will he ever regain his creativity and
capacity for love? In what sense is he and could he be a father to Ofer?
Will Ofer survive? Some of these are spelled out in free indirect discourse
or in internal dialogue: “For a moment Ora thinks she knows exactly what
she is seeing, and the next moment she flings herself away. . . . What did
they do to him there? Why doesn’t he ever talk?” (2010, p. 377). The
closer Ora and Avram grow during their walk, the more they start to ask
questions from each other. From a listener, Avram grows into a ques-
tioner and interlocutor. Genuine questioning is a way of reaching toward
the other and being open to the other’s response. The discussion between
them grows gradually effortless: “And without even noticing it, they’re
having a conversation. Two people conversing as they walk on one path”
(p. 290).
That questions function as the motor for dialogue is thematized when
Avram and Ora come across a man who walks along the same route as they,
but in the opposite direction. He asks them two questions, and they are
left wondering who he is and where he comes from. It turns out that he
and his wife had planned to take this trip together, but the wife fell ill and
died. Before her death she made him swear that he would walk that route
nevertheless, even if alone. She tried to think of something for him to do,
and she came up with the idea that he could ask questions, as Ora learns
from a boy to whom the man had told his story:
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“In the end she had this idea . . . that every time he met someone, he’d ask them
two questions.” . . . [Ora] tries to picture the woman. She must have been very
lovely, with a ripe, glowing beauty, spiritual yet corporeal, with flowing, honey-
colored hair. For a moment she forgets her troubles and clings to this stranger—
Tammi, Tamar, he’d called her, Tamysha—who had tried, on her deathbed, to
find that “something else” for her man. Or someone else, she thinks, and smiles
with affection and subtle appreciation for this woman who knew her husband
so well . . . and equipped him with two questions that no woman could resist.
(p. 566)
The questions he asks are about “longings and regrets”: “What do we miss
most? What do we regret?” (pp. 381–382). This question-asking functions
as a mise en abyme that reflects the way in which mutual question-asking
initiates an exchange of stories and hence is a connection-creating activity.
By asking genuine, open questions about the other’s longings and regrets,
one shows interest in and openness to the other as a singular being—and
such interest and openness contribute to creating a space of possibilities
for sustained non-subsumptive dialogue.
UNBEARABLE COMPLICITY: AGAINST SUBSUMPTIVE

CATEGORIES
Although work on the dialogical self places emphasis on the relationality of

subjectivity, it still usually focuses on the self at the expense of how socio-
historical webs, in which individual subjects are entangled, condition and
affect the dialogic processes in which subjectivities take shape. Hermans
envisions a sociocultural approach to the dialogical self, which would entail
studying how the I-positions within the self are “influenced, organized,
limited, stimulated, and changed by significant historical or cultural devel-
opments in the society at large” (2015, p. 291), but to date work on the dia-
logical self is mainly centered on individual psychology and development.7
Conceptualizations of the dialogicality of narrative and subjectivity would
have room to acknowledge more thoroughly how we are implicated in his-
tories beyond our own agency and how we often have to struggle to main-
tain or regain a sense of narrative agency in fraught social conditions and
in response to (personal, familial, national, and transnational) histories of
violence. This implication complicates the ethical challenges that individu-
als face in their relationships.
To the End of the Land addresses these issues both as a novel about the
Israel-Palestine conflict and as a novel about how our storytelling activities

are conditioned by the historically constituted narrative webs in which we
are entangled. An important part of the inherited legacies of violence that
the Israelis have to deal with is the legacy of the Holocaust, and the entire
Israel-Palestine conflict unfolds in its shadow. Ora’s mother is a Holocaust
survivor, and as a teenager Ora tells Avram that her mother is a particular
expert on suffering and loss because of her past (p. 23). This is why she
listened to her mother’s advice when her best friend Ada died when they
were young: she did not visit Ada’s parents and stopped going to the shop
that they kept. Avram finds this inhumane and responds to Ora’s trauma
by offering to visit Ada’s parents with her, insisting on the importance of
breaking the silence that has come to weigh so heavily on her. The novel
shows that being a victim does not automatically make anyone ethically
superior, and the roles are easily reversed. Ora is tormented by “constant,
exhausting efforts to guess the reasons for her mother’s anger and for
the implied accusations that were concealed in the space of the house like
dense, inescapable netting”; her mother would regularly shut herself in her
room and hit herself, whispering to herself: “Garbage, garbage, even Hitler
didn’t want you” (p. 333). The trauma haunts her as physical self-hatred
that erupts as bursts of anger at herself and her family.
To the End of the Land problematizes a black- and-white dichotomy
between victims and victimizers through the story of Ora, the child of a
Holocaust survivor, and the ex-officer and torture victim Avram, both of
whom belong to a nation that is occupying the land of the Palestinians.
The violent history of their country inevitably colors their relationships
with the Palestinians. In the novel, the fraught relationship between the
Jews and the Arabs is addressed most directly through Ora’s relationship
with the family taxi driver Sami. He is an Arab, from Jerusalem, “one of
ours,” “almost one of the family” (p. 49), but at the same time theirs is a
power relationship: Sami is dependent on his Jewish employers, “his main
livelihood” (p. 49). Ora thinks of him sympathetically, as a man whose
“earthy charm encircled everyone he met” (p. 54), but their relationship
grows tense when Ora asks him to drive her and Ofer to the meeting point
as Ofer decides to return to the army. Ofer is furious: “ ‘What’s the matter
with you?’ he whispers into her face. ‘What if they find an Arab here and
think he’s come to commit suicide? And didn’t you think about how he
feels having to drive me here? Do you even get what this means for him?’ ”
(p. 64). Ora quickly realizes that she is making Sami complicit in the war
waged by the government against his own people, “asking him to add his
modest contribution to the Israeli war effort” (p. 57). Feeling “tormented
over her rudeness to Sami” (p. 59), Ora tells him that she owes him a favor;
in response, Sami asks her to take the sick child of an illegal Arab to a secret
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hospital in Tel Aviv. This creates tension between them, and when they are
having a fight, Sami uses the expression “you people”: “Ora’s cheeks are
flushed. It was the way he shoved her into that ‘you people’ that riled her
up . . . as though she really is not facing him alone—as though she is with
them” (p. 100).
It is hurtful for both Ora and Sami to feel that the other is seeing one-
self through the dichotomous categories of “us” and “them” and not as an
individual, but awareness of this proves insufficient to make things right.
Despite years of friendship, their narrative in-between—their mutual
sense of “us” that defies the socially available categories of commonality—
is fragile: “And she knew, somewhere in the margins of her brain, she
remembered, that if she only spoke to him candidly, if she only reminded
him with a word, with a smile, of themselves, of the private little culture
they had built up over the years, within the roaring and the drumming,”
but she is overcome by a painful “desire to subdue him” (p. 136). In her
internal dialogue, the empathetic, great-hearted Ora loses the battle to the
proud, cruel Ora, and she falls prey to a similar cultural stereotyping that
offended her just a while before:
What has he done to you, tell me, other than merely exist? This was all true, Ora
retorted to herself, but it made her crazy to see that he could not give in to her
even an inch, not even out of basic human courtesy! It’s just not in their culture,
she thought. Them and their lousy honor, and their never-ending insults, and
their revenge, and their settling of scores over every little word anyone ever
said to them since Creation, and all the world always owes them something, and
everyone’s always guilty in their eyes! (pp. 136–137)
The novel presents as a key ethical challenge the effort to remain one-
self, true to one’s own singularity and open to that of others, in the face of
a conflict in which both the Israelis and the Palestinians are tormented by
hurtful cultural stereotyping. Ora appreciates the way in which Sami “still
managed to be himself within all this” (p. 55). She values his goodness, and
her sense of the possible includes a keen awareness of how their positions
could be, one day, reversed:
There were also times when it occurred to her that she was learning from him
what she would need to know, one day, if—or when—the situation in Israel was
reversed, God forbid, and she found herself in his position, and he in hers. That
was possible, after all. It was always lurking behind the door. And perhaps, she
realized, he thought about that too—perhaps she was teaching him something
by still being herself in all this. (p. 55)

Despite her aspiration to be herself, she clearly fails to be the person she
would like to be and feels crushed by her own “stupidity, her failure in the
principled and complicated matter of being a gentle human being in this
place, in these times” (p. 55). She decides to talk with him properly, about
“the roots of my mistake today, the fears and the hatred we both drank
with our mothers’ milk,” and thinks that maybe their dialogue hasn’t really
even started yet (p. 92). The drive, however, ends in a fight, with Sami curs-
ing both the Jews and the Arabs.
Despite all her determinacy, Ora finds herself repeating gestures and
choreographies that are not her own and that she reprehends, not only in
her relationships with Arabs, but also as a mother taking her child to war:
“In every car sits a young boy, the first fruits, a spring festival that ends
with a human sacrifice. And you? she asks herself sharply. Look at you, how
neatly and calmly you bring your son here, your almost-only-son, the boy
you love dearly, with Ishmael as your private driver” (p. 63). She hates all
aspects of this play they enact, and she despises the euphemisms created
by the military to cover up the brutality of their actions: “meetery, they call
this, and she thinks in her mother’s voice: barbarians, language-rapists” (p.
64). Here the Jews are paralleled to the Nazis who created euphemisms for
the Holocaust. The mother’s voice in Ora’s mind demonstrates how we are
partly constituted by voices we have internalized, and how they are medi-
ated by inherited histories of violence.
The novel addresses the question of how our affective responses are
shaped by the narrative unconscious—by culturally mediated models of
sense-making that we draw on without realizing it. It alerts us to how our
experiences, gestures, and actions have layers that may not feel our own.
In the fraught situation in which Ora and Sami have to live, it is hard not to
repeat the emotional and behavioral patterns ingrained in their minds and
bodies from early on. Ora feels betrayed and devastated when she realizes
how she and her son repeat narrative models that she detests:
An even greater treachery, and an intolerable foreignness, resided in his ability

to be such a soldier-going-to-war, so able to do his job, so insolent and joyful and
thirsty for battle, thereby imposing her role upon her: to be wrinkled and gray,
yet glowing with pride (a poor man’s coat of arms: Mother of Soldier). . . . (p. 74)
She is not one of those mothers who sends her sons to battle. . . . Yet she is
now surprised to discover that that is exactly what she is: she escorted him to
the battalion “meetery” and stood there hugging him with measured restraint,
so as not to embarrass him in front of his friends, and she shook her head and
shrugged her shoulders as required, with a proud grin of helplessness at the
other parents who were making all the same moves—where did we learn this
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choreography? And how do I obey it all, obey them, those people who send him
there? (p. 80)
What makes her enact this choreography is, to a large extent, the narrative
unconscious that her social and cultural situation has bestowed on her. She
is not so much confronting here aspects of her narrative unconscious that
“have not yet become part of one’s story,” to recall Freeman’s (2010, p. 120)
definition, but rather aspects of her being from which she is unable to
break free and which create in her a sense of self-alienation, which the pre-
ceding passages of free indirect discourse convey. She finds herself enacting
a culturally inherited choreography that she cannot identify with. She feels
entrapped and powerless, as if her own moral agency were suspended and
taken over by forces beyond her control. Grossman’s novel explores how we
are caught in processes that are not of our own design and how we struggle
to regain a sense of (narrative) agency in conditions that threaten to reduce
us to mere sufferers.
Both Ora and Sami respond to their self-alienating situation by engag-
ing in acts of resistance: Sami by taking the son of an illegal immigrant to
a hospital, Ora by refusing to sit home and wait—to play the part expected
of soldiers’ mothers in the game of violence imposed on her. These acts
of resistance are vital to them in the historical world in which the con-
flict with Palestine infiltrates all aspects of their lives. Ora expresses her
desperation to escape by asking Sami to drive her to “where the country
ends” (p. 133). She wants to run away from the destruction that her coun-
try has descended upon her, but ultimately she cannot escape her own life,
which unfolds between the disaster in her past and the possible catastro-
phe of the near future. No matter how much she tries to dissociate herself
from the “situation” (p. 54), she is powerless to prevent it from taking hold
of her life: “The general, almost eternal conflict from which she had dis-
connected herself years ago kept on making its dark circles” (p. 67). She
feels that she already lost Adam when he did his military service because
children “don’t really come back” from the army: “Not like they were
before. . . . [T]‌he boy he used to be had been lost to her forever the moment
he was nationalized—lost to himself, too” (p. 68). She fears that like Avram
at the same age, Ofer’s world of possibilities will be reduced, and he too will
return as a diminished soul: “Everything in him looked possible and open
and propelled. The future itself lit up his face, from inside and out. And now
this operation suddenly comes along” (p. 68).
Going away for the long walk, not being there to receive the notifiers, is
Ora’s desperate “protest” (p. 94), which she fails to fully understand her-
self: “if they don’t find her, if they can’t find her, he won’t get hurt. She

can’t understand it herself. She tries to. She knows it makes no sense, but
what does?” (p. 81). It is a frantic struggle against a narrative choreogra-
phy laid out for her and an attempt to reduce her unbearable complicity to
bearable proportions. She feels that if she “agrees to receive notification
of her son’s death, thereby helping them bring the complicated and bur-
densome process of his death to its orderly, normative conclusion, and in
some way also giving them the pronounced and definitive confirmation of
his death, which would make her, just slightly, an accessory to the crime”
(p. 95). But she feels guilt all the same and is full of self-accusations: “What
have I done. I took Ofer to war. I brought him to the war myself. . . . I didn’t
stop him. I didn’t even try. . . . With my own hands, I did” (p. 110).
Her life becomes a permanent “emergency state” in which the only thing
she can do is to stay “constantly in motion” (p. 130). Walking is paralleled
to storytelling: through this double movement, Ora and Avram create
their own reality and regain a sense of being in charge of their lives—or
at least of living their own lives—instead of just waiting, at the mercy of
what befalls them.8 This double movement transforms their narrative in-
between in such a way that makes it possible for them to feel that they are
being heard and recognized as unique individuals with agency and trans-
formative power. This non-subsumptive space follows a logic that forms
the polar opposite of the subsumptive, self-alienating narratives that are
imposed on their lives.
The novel suggests that subsumptive narratives based on labels such as
“enemy” or “terrorist” tend to perpetuate conflicts by masking the singu-
larity of the human experience behind them. For Grossman, the novelist’s
task is to bring us face to face with the singularity of human experience and
make us see individuals in their uniqueness, so that we can relate to the
other’s experience and see its humanness. While general, abstract catego-
ries present the world as stable and fixed, the writer can convey a sense of
reality in the state of becoming: “when we write, we feel the world in flux,
elastic, full of possibilities—unfrozen” (2008, p. 64). A similar sense of the
world in the process of becoming emerges from the dialogues in which the
characters weave a shared reality. Both literary and interpersonal storytell-
ing can put the world back in flux, making us alive to how reality is created
through speech and action. Grossman suggests that writing can function
as a space in which the paralyzing power of memory can be overcome and
turned into future-oriented action:
The consciousness of the disaster that befell me upon the death of my son Uri
in the Second Lebanon War now permeates every minute of my life. The power
of memory is indeed great and heavy, and at times has a paralyzing effect.
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Nevertheless, the act of writing creates for me a “space” of sorts, an emotional

expanse that I have never known before, where death is more than the absolute,
unambiguous opposite of life. . . . I write, and the world does not close in on me.
It does not grow smaller. It moves in the direction of what is open, future, pos-
sible. (2008, pp. 64–65)
Storytelling functions, for both Grossmann and his characters, as a process

of regaining agency in a situation of loss or paralyzing fear of loss.
BEYOND THE DIALOGICAL SELF: TRANS-S UBJECTIVE

BECOMING-T OGETHER
Dialogical conceptions of the self and subjectivity tend to place the empha-
sis on intersubjectivity in the sense of what happens between subjects
or selves: on how subjects become who they are in a dialogue with one
another. We should think of dialogicality, however, not merely in terms
of a dialogue between subjects, but more radically: as primary in relation
to the subjects who emerge and are transformed in the dialogic space. We
become who we are in a dialogic space of possibilities. In thinking about this
dialogic space, it is important to take seriously both the possibility of dia-
logic storytelling that functions as a form of non-subsumptive understand-
ing and the socially conditioned character of our dialogic engagements. In
what follows, I suggest that this entails a need to think beyond intersub-
jectivity about the trans-subjective dimension of dialogical encounters and
spaces. The dialogic in-between exceeds the limits of individual psyches. I
will address this issue in relation to the embodied nature of the dialogical
self and the transformative potential of dialogic storytelling.
Foucault provides a useful model for thinking about the primacy of the
intersubjective space with respect to individual subjects. When he describes
power relations in terms of an “open field of possibilities,” he acknowledges
that power is productive and makes available different subject positions
and options for action.9 He does not consider, however, how the interac-
tion of the subjects can also change the field of possibilities. His later focus
on the “aesthetics of existence,” in turn, comes across as gesturing toward
a relatively solitary project of individuals shaping their lives into works of
art. To complement this vision, I suggest that we need an aesthetics of co-
becoming that builds on sustained reflection on how dialogic interaction
can transform trans-subjective spaces in ways that expand our sense of the
possible.

When storytelling is dialogic in the strong sense of embodying what
I have here called the ethos of dialogue, it can be a mode of encounter
that has transformative potential. This is what happens between Ora and
Avram. Their dialogic transformative experience can be described as an
encounter-event. Bracha L. Ettinger uses this term to characterize an event
in which “becoming-subjectivities” meet and go through what she calls “co-
transformation-in-difference” (2005, p. 705). Such events have creative
potential in allowing subjects to become and produce together something
singular and unprecedented: “Co- poietic transformational potentiality
evolves along aesthetic and ethical unconscious paths: strings and threads,
and produces a particular kind of knowledge” (p. 703). Encounter-events
can create new forms of trans-subjectivity through largely unconscious
affectivity:
[B]‌y affective, empathic, intuitive and even quasi-telepathic knowledge and by

erotic investment and sensual and perceptive sensitivities . . . I and non-I are
cross-printing psychic traces in one another and continuously transform their
shareable threads and sphere. While continually inspiring one another, I and
non-I create a singular shared trans-subjectivity where even traces of each one’s
earlier or exterior trans-subjective co-emergences . . . influence the newly arising
time-space. (p. 704)
Such a process of co-emergence or co-poiesis—which involves “reaching

one another beyond each one’s personal boundaries” (p. 704) and a joint
creation of a trans-subjective space—describes the processual dynamic
of dialogic becoming-together that would not be possible on one’s own.
Ettinger acknowledges the risks in transgressing individual boundaries—
which can be potentially traumatizing—but when it happens in a space
of “compassionate hospitality,” it can engender “response-ability in wit(h)-
nessing,” a form of “ethical working-through” of trauma (p. 706).10
In To the End of the Land, the non-subsumptive process of encounter-
ing the other—through exchanging experiences and memories in the
back-and-forth of telling stories—is a transformative process in which the
subjects (Ora and Avram) create together a singular affective and mean-
ingful trans-subjective space in an unexpected process of co-emerging and
co-poiesis. The new space that opens between them makes it possible for
them to feel, express, and understand things that they were not able to feel,
express, or understand before. It makes it possible for Avram to share and
process his traumatic experiences and to listen, for the first time, to Ora’s
story of how, after Avram was deserted in the middle of a territory taken
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over by Egyptian soldiers, Ilan set out to rescue him. Avram is baffled and
insists that he would never have done the same, to which she responds:
“Yes you would have. That’s exactly the kind of thing you would have done.” An
act of greatness, she thinks. A misdeed. . . . “And I’ll tell you something else. It
was exactly because of everything he’d learned from you over the years that he
knew it could be done.” (2010, p. 472)
Ora and Avram engage in co-telling the traumatic event, and this dialogic
process becomes for them a strategy of survival, a shared mode of working
through suffering, uncertainty, and guilt, as well as a mode of co-imagining
new narrative identities. Their exchange of stories is linked to a sense of
what could have happened and of how grasping unrealized possibilities in
the past can open up new possibilities for the future in a dialogic process of
imagining the not-yet.
The dialogic encounter with Ora allows Avram to become a father in
a sense that he had never been able to experience before and to imagine
becoming involved in Ofer’s life. Ora overcomes a sense of impossibility
and creates “memories” for Avram: “How could she explain this to Avram?
This moment between a mother and her child. Yet she does explain it,
right down to the last detail, so he’ll know, so he’ll hurt, so he’ll live, so
he’ll remember” (p. 393). Memory is essential for Avram’s process of mak-
ing Ora’s stories his own. Ora “sees his lips moving, as though he is try-
ing to engrave her words inside him” (p. 306), and when he shows that
he remembers, Ora feels that this is the inaugural moment when they are
transformed into “Ofer’s parents”:
“Always, in any situation, he chose Adam.”

“From his first step,” Avram reminds her generously.
“That’s right, you remember,” she says happily.
“I remember everything.” He reaches out to embrace her shoulders. They
walk on that way, side by side, his parents. (p. 384)
“His parents” gives expression to a trans-subjective being that would not

be possible without the dialogic narrative in-between that they have cre-
ated and transformed together.
Memory is also elemental to the way in which exchanging stories func-
tions for Ora and Avram as a way of reviving the bond between them: “Avram,
do you remember us?” (p. 320). As we saw in Chapter 3, Brockmeier shows
how narratives often serve primarily the function of “connecting”: narra-
tives can keep alive the “affective fabric” that forms “the common ground

of a shared life” (2015, pp. 203, 210, 216). Precisely such an affective fabric
is integral to what I have called the narrative in-between. Ora and Avram
keep asking “remember?” and through this dialogic reminiscing they both
affirm the affective connection they had in the past and continue to build
on it and further enrich it in the present.
The love and affection that becomes eventually possible in Ora’s and
Avram’s transformed in-between is a complex, multilayered combination
of different affective intensities. On a certain level, it is about what Ettinger
describes as “deep human compassionate connectivity” (2005, p. 709); it is
nourished by compassionate hospitality and generosity and has a healing
power. It is also directed toward “the not yet emerged” (p. 709): they expose
themselves in their vulnerability to each other as they head together toward
an unknown future that is beyond their control.
Storytelling as an art of survival is a central theme of To the End of the Land.

Ora, Grossman’s Scheherazade, believes that she can keep Ofer alive by tell-
ing stories about him. While the novel refrains from revealing what ulti-
mately happens to Ofer, the storytelling in any case makes him alive for the
reader and Avram, who get to know him through these stories. Storytelling
functions in the novel as an art of survival, first and foremost by bringing
Avram back to life, by restoring both his and Ora’s agency, and by giving the
two of them a new life as friends and lovers. Like Franck’s Die Mittagsfrau,
it suggests that true survival means that one survives as a being capable of
moral agency and of giving and receiving love.11 It brings a new dimension
to the idea of storytelling as an art of survival by emphasizing how our sur-
vival is always fundamentally dependent on the survival of others. Ultimately,
we survive or are destroyed as relational beings. Butler articulates this view
in relation to the precariousness of human existence:
After all, if my survivability depends on a relation to others, to a “you” or a set

of “yous” without whom I cannot exist, then my existence is not mine alone, but
is to be found outside myself, in this set of relations that precede and exceed the
boundaries of who I am. . . . [L]‌ife itself has to be rethought as this complex, pas-
sionate, antagonistic, and necessary set of relations to others. . . . If I survive, it
is only because my life is nothing without the life that exceeds me, that refers to
some indexical you, without whom I cannot be. (2009, p. 44)
Ora not only depends on others; her loved ones are so integral to her nar-
rative identity that she feels she is nothing without them. Through free
indirect discourse, the narration conveys to us Ora’s sense of how “without
[Avram] she simply did not exist” (Grossman, 2010, p. 239). It is only as a
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dialogical being that Ora can survive, and she needs Avram in her struggle
with the fear of losing Ofer. As Butler writes, we are “undone by each other”
as we are “not only constituted by our relations but also dispossessed by
them”: passion, grief, and rage “tear us from ourselves, bind us to others,
transport us, undo us, implicate us in lives that are not our own” (2004,
pp. 23–25).
Ultimately, then, the ethics of implication that emerges from the novel
takes the form of an ethics of relationality: it emphasizes how we are, as
beings inescapably dependent on one another, both capable of inflicting
violence and vulnerable as destructible beings. It gives expression to what
Butler describes as the precariousness of our lives as social beings who are
thoroughly “dependent on what is outside ourselves, on others, on institu-
tions, and on sustained and sustainable environments” (2009, p. 23): “the
subject that I am is bound to the subject I am not, . . . we each have the
power to destroy and to be destroyed, and . . . we are bound to one another
in this power and this precariousness” (p. 43). Grossman’s novel is a nar-
rative of the complex entanglement of the individual’s life in human rela-
tionships and in the broader social world, including its webs of power and
violence—entanglement that erases any clear boundary between the indi-
vidual and the social. In fact, family functions in the novel as a metaphor
for our mutual dependency and for how we ontologically co-constitute one
another: “Ofer is always also Adam, and Ilan, and me. That’s the way it is.
That’s a family” (2010, p. 359). This dependency of individual subjectivity
on others recalls Freeman’s way of emphasizing that “the Other is the inspi-
ration and primary source” that constitutes us as subjects (2016, p. 148).
Our dependency on the intersubjective means both fundamental vulner-
ability and implicatedness in processes of violence. In the novel, storytell-
ing functions as a form of cultural self-reflection on both of these aspects
of our relationality. It conveys a sense of the simultaneous cruelty and vul-
nerability of humans and shows how the narratives of those in power are
fabulated to cover up the violence inflicted on others. Often the moments
of insight are provoked by the perplexion of a child. For example, Ora tells
Avram how devastated Ofer was when he first found out where meat comes
from: “Then he asked if they take the meat from a cow that’s already dead
so it doesn’t hurt her. He was really trying to find some dignified way out
of the mess, you see, for me, but somehow also for all humanity” (2010,
p. 271). His disbelief opens Ora’s eyes:
[T]‌hen he asked me if there are people who kill the cow so they can take her
meat. . . . And he stood there and yelled: “You kill her? You kill a cow to take her
meat? Tell me! Yes? Yes? You do that to her on purpose?” And at that moment

I got it. Maybe for the first time in my life I got what it means that we eat living
creatures, that we kill them to eat them, and how we train ourselves not to real-
ize that the severed leg of a chicken is sitting on our plate. (p. 272)
Going back to this event triggers in Ora the memory of how her own mother
had told her about the concentration camps. She wonders if in both cases
telling the child about atrocity had something cruel in it, or “even a bit of
gloating,” as if telling Ofer about meat “was also, somehow, his punishment
for having joined . . . the game of the human race” (p. 274).
The main cruelty that the novel deals with, however, is of course war.
To the End of the Land is a powerful antiwar novel that shows how those
who wage war try to hide the precariousness of human existence. Butler
demonstrates how war is “framed” so as to prevent us from recognizing
the people who are to be killed as living fully human and hence “griev-
able” lives (2009, p. 22). She shows how nations such as the United States
and Israel, when they argue that their survival is served by war, commit a
“systematic error” of thought “because war seeks to deny the ongoing and
irrefutable ways in which we are all subject to one another, vulnerable to
destruction by the other, and in need of protection through multilateral
and global agreements based on the recognition of a shared precarious-
ness” (p. 43).
Grossman’s novel conveys a sense of such precariousness. Ora has been
aware of human vulnerability from early on, having lost her soul mate Ada
as a child in a traffic accident, but as a mother she becomes even more
“keenly aware of how fragile things are,” as she ponders “what the future
will bring for the boys and where their lives will lead them” (2010, p. 406).
Throughout the narrative, she keeps reflecting on this fragility—on how
easily even the strongest bonds are dissolved: “How can we both be this
paralyzed? How can we disintegrate so quickly? . . . What’s happening
to us? Tell me, explain to me, why can’t we do anything?” (p. 397). Her
struggle is to a large extent a struggle to retain agency in the face of the
paralyzing feeling of powerlessness. What she ultimately comes to under-
stand and accept is that she cannot affect what happens to Ofer on the
frontline: “though she is his mother and he came out of her body, now, at
this moment, they are merely two specks floating, falling, through infinite,
massive, empty space” (p. 298).
The novel as a whole suggests that our narrative agency lies somewhere
between the “randomness in everything” (p. 298) and our ability to shape
the fabric of the intersubjective world in which we live. The force of Ora’s
narrative agency is most evident in her power to bring Avram back to
life, but she is also a precarious subject, and the reader feels the tangible
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uncertainty of her future, bound together with Ofer’s fate, which the nov-
el’s ending leaves open.
That we need the sense of connection that dialogic storytelling can create
and strengthen does not mean, however, that we need a unified narrative
in order to survive as agents capable of love or moral action. In terms of the
relationship between life and narrative, it is noteworthy that the narratives
Ora and Avram exchange do not follow one coherent storyline. They are
story fragments that sometimes fit together and sometimes remain in ten-
sion. Instead of aspiring to the unity of a narrative quest, Ora and Avram
are open to the challenge presented by the other, letting their encounter
unsettle their certainties and alter their narrative self-interpretations.
Through the process of co-telling, they have the power to touch, affect, and
disrupt each other, often in very visceral, embodied ways. Dialogic story-
telling functions as a process of building a connection, but this connection
does not depend on unified narratives.
The novel links dialogic storytelling, in multifaceted ways, to embodied
experiences of connection. Initially, Ora’s and Avram’s exchange of stories
is frequently accompanied by thoughts of physical connection: “She wants
to touch his hand, to absorb some of what’s overflowing from him, but she
doesn’t dare” (p. 194). Eventually their sense of a deepened connection,
receptivity, and fluidity—the way their souls pour into each other—also
finds physical expression. At the same time, their walking evolves from
that of two separate individuals to togetherness through a trans-subjective
becoming-together: “They walk side by side, each within himself, yet
woven together. Capillary channels burst through Avram constantly as Ora
speaks” (p. 303). This creates in Ora a powerful embodied experience of
joy that exceeds verbal expression: “She feels like singing, shouting in joy,
dancing through the field. The things she is telling him! The things they’re
saying to each other!” (p. 303).12
In connection to the process of transforming the narrative in-between,
Grossman’s novel explores the link between dialogic storytelling and the
sense of the possible. It suggests that dialogic storytelling animated by
the ethos of dialogue can expand our sense of the possible and strengthen
our agency when we are able to let the exposure to the other change us. It
shows the ethical potential of a narrative space in which the partners of
dialogue are open to the other and responsive to the unexpected possibili-
ties that open up in their dialogic encounter. The transformation of Ora’s
and Avram’s narrative in-between palpably expands their sense of the pos-
sible: “Excitement flutters down her body: . . . for a moment she almost
believes that anything is possible on this journey strung along on a thin

web of oaths and wishes” (p. 278). By presenting storytelling as interac-
tion, as a process of becoming-together, the novel advocates the ability to
be open to the unexpected in the present—not fixated on living according
to a certain narrative, but willing to try out different possibilities that may
lead to unexpected futures.
In sum, the novel suggests that dialogic storytelling, driven by the ethos
of dialogue, can bring together the six interconnected aspects of the ethical
potential of storytelling discussed in this book. It links the expansion of the
sense of the possible to the ways in which dialogic storytelling opens new
possibilities of understanding oneself and others and of enriching the nar-
rative in-between in ways that unfold new possibilities of being-in-relation.
Perspective-taking is integral to dialogic storytelling, as it involves imagin-
ing the other’s experience and responding to it. The exchange between the
main characters, as well as the novel as a whole, functions as a form of non-
subsumptive understanding, which grows into ethical inquiry into what
makes life worth living. Such inquiry is also part of the process in which
Ora, Ilan, and Avram try to decide what life is about and how they should
live: “ ‘It’s one hell of a job, this life,’ [Ilan] said. As if from within a dark
mine, she said, ‘That’s how I’ve felt for years. Since the war, since Avram’ ”
(p. 257). The reader is drawn to participate in the narrative interpretations
put forward by the work as a whole as it engages in dialogue with other
narratives, including the literary tradition of presenting storytelling as an
art of survival. By showing how the relationship between Ora and Avram
evolves through their dialogic exchange—through their ethically signifi-
cant transformative encounter-event—it proposes to the reader that sto-
rytelling as genuine dialogue holds the promise of an ethical event, in all
six, overlapping senses discussed in this book.
THE POWER AND LIMITS OF STORYTELLING: FALLING OUT

OF TIME
While To the End of the Land deals with the terrifying fear of the death of
one’s child, Falling Out of Time is a book about unbearable grief following
the loss of one’s child. It is also a book that, through its dialogic, lyrical
form, addresses both the limits and the power of storytelling at moments
when one’s world collapses and words fail. Like countless other parents in
his region, Grossman lost his son in war, and after dealing with the desper-
ate fear of such loss in the Israel-Palestine context in To the End of the Land,
in Falling Out of Time he addresses the ways in which loss and grief can dis-
rupt the experience of time and place and take the bereaved to a space that
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seems to exist “out of time.” It is a book that evades genre descriptions.

Written in the form of a hymn, fable, or lyrical play, it is entirely in dialogue
(direct speech) and mainly in verse. In an interview, Grossman says that for
him “poetry is more the language of grief than prose” (Cooke & Grossman,
2010). This idea shapes the book: “poetry /is the language /of my grief”
(Grossman, 2015, p. 160). The importance of silence, the unsaid, and the
spaces that surround the words is foregrounded in the lyrical work, which
not only tells disrupted story fragments and seeks connection through
them, but also reflects on the limits of what can be told and shared.
The characters of Falling Out of Time are emblematic characters with a
mythical quality to them, as in allegories, but at the same time their expe-
riences of pain, loss, and grief are singular. One of them takes on the role
of a narrator and observer, who reports what he sees and hears: the Town
Chronicler, a former jester of the Duke, who—after “the disaster befell”
him when his daughter drowned—has been condemned to “walk the
streets day and night recording the townspeople’s stories of their children”
(p. 110). The protagonist is the Walking Man, whom Edward Hirsch (2014)
describes as a “Giacometti sculpture brought to life, a stubborn, wayward
figure who paces in widening circles around the village and slowly picks up
other distraught, grief-stricken figures.” These include the Net Mender, the
stuttering Midwife, the Cobbler, the Elderly Math Teacher, and Centaur, a
writer figure who seeks to work through his pain by putting it into a story.
Falling Out of Time opens with the Town Chronicler’s report of how a
Man (later to become the Walking Man) is sitting at the dinner table with
a Woman, five years after their son’s death. He suddenly thrusts his plate
away, his bewildered gaze hovers around the woman, and he announces
that he has to go “there.” He can no longer take the paralyzing grief and
sets off without knowing where “there” might be. He desperately needs to
see their dead son one more time, even as the woman insists that there is
no place to go for those who have lost a child: “There’s no such place. There
doesn’t exist!” The man replies: “If you go there, it does” (Grossman, 2015,
p. 4). The longing for “there” is a desperate response to the tormenting
experience of the loved one being both “present and absent” (p. 28), in an
unattainable no-space. For five years, the man and the woman have been
suspended “between the living /and the dead,” “on the gallows of grief”
(p. 30). After hovering for years in this mute space between life and death,
here and there, the man and the woman start to talk to each other, and the
man remembers what life means:
I had forgotten:
life is in the place where you

ladle soup
under the glowing light.
You did well to remind me:
we are here
and he is there,
and a timeless border
stands between us.
I had forgotten:
we are here
and he –
but it’s impossible!
Impossible. (p. 6)
Here the sense of the possible has turned into an overwhelming, all-
encompassing sense of the impossible. The feeling that what one experiences
cannot be possible and hence cannot be integrated into one’s life is integral
to traumatic experience. The traumatized oscillate between the sense of
the impossibility of the traumatic event and the sense of the impossibility
of what used to be one’s life. The woman asks the man to “Come back to
me, /to us,” so that they can together “come back /to life” (pp. 6–7), but
the man replies:
No, this is impossible.

It’s no longer possible
that we,
that the sun,
that the watches, the shops,
that the moon,
the couples,
that tree-lined boulevards
turn green, that blood
in our veins,
that spring and autumn,
that people
innocently,
that things just are. (p. 7)
It feels impossible to the man that their son is dead but equally impossible
to go back to their old life. The man and the woman recall how the news of
the death of their son changed their whole lives in an instant, as if their old
life suddenly stopped growing after the last dying moments: “Our prior life
82
/kept growing /inside us /for a few moments longer. /Speech, /move-

ments, /expressions” (pp. 9–10). As their souls were “uprooted,” they “fell
mute” and “a sombre silence /fell” (pp. 13–14). They sought each other and
their son in being “mute /like him” and in learning “to live /the inverse /
of life,” “without words, /without colours” (p. 14). Eventually their world
shrinks and diminishes, dwindling into a dot:
The world outside shrivelled,

sighed, dwindled
into a single dot,
scant,
black,
malignant. (p. 19)
They feel trapped in this uninhabitable place, and the woman is convinced
that they are forever doomed “to a land of exile” (p. 19). Grossman describes
similarly his own experience of grief:
The first feeling you have is one of exile. . . . You are being exiled from every-
thing you know. You can take nothing for granted. You don’t recognise yourself.
So, going back to the book, it was a solid point in my life. I felt like someone
who had experienced an earthquake, whose house had been crushed, and who
goes out and takes one brick and puts it on top of another brick. (Cooke &
Grossman, 2010)
In Falling Out of Time, several characters experience similar self-alienation,

no longer able to recognize who they are as grief hollows them out: the
Cobbler, for example, feels that there is “no longer anything in me /of
myself that used to be” (p. 111).
Everything they are, see, and experience is marked by their loss and a
concomitant sense of absence: instead of seeing what is, they see what could
have been. The woman asks: “Will I ever again /see you /as you are, /rather
than as /he is not?” (p. 20). Wherever they look, they always see “the empty
space /of him” (p. 22). Every thought and experience takes shape against the
backdrop of what is no longer, against the if only of what could have been, of
the stories that are now forever disrupted: “all that is /(oh, my child, /my
sweet, my lost one) –/all that is /will now /echo /what is not” (pp. 50–51).
Grossman describes a similar experience in his eulogy to his son Uri:
For three days, every thought begins with: “He/we won’t.” He won’t come. We
won’t talk. We won’t laugh. He won’t be that kid with the ironic look in his eyes

and the amazing sense of humour. He won’t be that young person with under-
standing deeper than his years. There won’t be that warm smile and healthy
appetite. There won’t be that rare combination of determination and gentleness.
There won’t be his common sense and wisdom. We won’t sit down together to
watch The Simpsons and Seinfeld, and we won’t listen to Johnny Cash, and we
won’t feel the strong embrace. (Grossman, 2006)
For the grief-stricken, the world appears through prematurely disrupted

broken stories, too quickly cast into the past tense, instead of through sto-
ries that form the dynamic texture of ongoing everyday life in which multi-
ple pathways are open to possible futures.
Everyone deals with grief in his or her own way, and for the Walking
Man it is through walking that he feels able to share “the vast expanse”
that his son’s death created in him: walking is a performative act of giving
the grief an expression—one that signifies for him “not letting go” of his
“lonely /dead /child” (Grossman, 2015, p. 37). When he walks, he feels
like “an unleashed question, /an open shout //My son //If only /I could
/move /you /just /one /step” (p. 39). The Town Chronicler’s Wife won-
ders if “this walk itself is both /the answer and the question?” (p. 177). The
woman, in turn, is afraid that if the man goes “there,” he may not come
back, or that he may come back so different that he does not acutally come
back (pp. 26–27).
This is one of the important questions undergirding the book: When are
we still the same person or the same self? In Chapter 5, I discussed Marya
Schechtman’s ideas on how we become a self by affectively identifying with
certain aspects of our past. How can one be a self if one only identifies with
one’s past, if one’s present life feels like the life of someone else? When
the loss of a loved one cuts off one’s old life so that one feels exiled from
it, the sheer passing of time can become painful, as the Town Chronicler’s
Wife articulates: “The passing time /is painful. I have lost /the art /of
moving simply, /naturally, within it. /I am swept back /against its flow”
(pp. 40–41).
The Walking Man wants to cross the divide and leave those who exist in
ordinary time, in the time that he can no longer inhabit, and he believes
that his problem is the inability to understand what lies outside time:
I seem to understand
only things
inside time. People,
for example, or thoughts, or sorrow,
joy, horses, dogs,
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words, love. Things that grow

old, that renew,
that change. The way I miss you
is trapped in time as well. Grief
ages with the years, and there are days
when it is new, fresh.
So, too, the fury at all that was robbed
from you. But you are
no longer.
You are outside
of time.
How can I explain
to you, for even the reason is
captured in time. A man from far away
once told me that in his language
they say of one who dies in war,
he “fell.”13
And that is you: fallen
out of time (p. 62)
This book, too, has been an attempt to understand different experiences

in time, in a historical, temporal world. But the historical world can break
down; one can fall out of time. This is when one confronts the limits and
failures of narrative understanding: How can one come to terms with expe-
riences for which one’s hermeneutic resources—the culturally available
interpretative tools—are simply inadequate?
Grossman’s answer to this question seems to be an ethos of dialogue
and sharing of affect that does not necessarily require words: it can take the
form of lived, embodied experience of togetherness, commonality, mutu-
ality, empathy, or solidarity. He acknowledges that mourning can separate
and isolate—condemning “the living /to the grimmest solitude” (p. 24)—
but he also shows how it can bind together those who have experienced
loss and create a trans-subjective space in which the loved one continues to
live and grief becomes bearable:
Sometimes, when we are

together, your sorrow
grips my sorrow,
my pain bleeds into yours,
and suddenly the echo of
his mended, whole body

comes from inside us,
and then one might briefly imagine –
he is here. (pp. 32–33)
Lost ones live in the shared memories, embodied experiences, and narra-
tive imagination of those who remember them. Much of the anguish of the
characters in Falling Out of Time stems from their experience of being torn
between the need to remember and the pain of the memory. The book sug-
gests that sharing painful memories can make them bearable, as ever new
people join the Walking Man. They form a community of walkers with its
own collective voice and movement: “They groan and trip and stand, hold
on to each other, carry those who sleep, falling asleep themselves” (p. 113).
They walk together, “shoulder to shoulder,” “hand in hand” (pp. 113–114),
and in the end they form one sleeping, walking, and talking body: “Sleeping
and walking, speaking to one another in their dream, each head leaning on
another walker’s shoulder. I do not know who carries whom and what force
drives them to walk” (p. 128). In the final section of the book, the walkers
speak together as a chorus. They face what they call “the blaze” (p. 106) and
a final wall, a “threshold, /one last line shared both by here /and there,”
where “perhaps, they still can sense /the very tip, /just one more hint, /
the fading embers, slowly dying, /of the dead” (pp. 133–134).
Falling Out of Time can be read as a book about how to take grief as “the
possibility of apprehending a mode of dispossession that is fundamen-
tal” to who we are (Butler, 2004, p. 28). It depicts a process of accepting
vulnerability—that we are given over to others on whom our lives depend
in ways that we “cannot fully predict or control” (p. 46). The question that
drives the narrative forward is how to accept this vulnerability and how
to avoid being so attached to the traumatic past that it paralyzes: How to
continue living? Responding to this question involves asking, “Who am I?”
(p. 148) after the loss of a loved one. The Walking Man observes that his
memories of his son “gradually fade” (p. 85) and lose some of their paralyz-
ing grip, and he wonders, addressing his dead son: “Perhaps, /with remark-
able tenderness, /with your persistent /wisdom, /you are preparing me /
slowly /for it –/I mean, /for the separation?” (p. 86).
Narrative imagination keeps alive, in the present, the memory of the
dead, and while the Walking Man fears that he will one day want the son to
“fossilise,” to “bleed no more” and “not be /so awake, so sharp,” precisely
the power of imagination to make the lost one “so present” is “madden-
ing” for him (pp. 137–138). When the walkers start to realize that their
dead children really are irrevocably dead, they keep repeating, “It can’t be,
it can’t be”—“It can’t be that it happened to me, it can’t be that these words
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are true” (p. 140)—until the fire eats those words and burns them to ashes.
Eventually, the Walking Man realizes that a part of him has to die with his
son so that he can be “reborn” (p. 152). The transition is marked by the
ritual in which the walkers dig graves for themselves and spend a night in
the “belly /of the earth” (p. 177) so that life and death can find an equilib-
rium in them: through this transformative ritual, they acquire an embod-
ied understanding of how life and death constantly “pour /and empty each
into the other” (p. 178). The Walking Man finally comes to understand
that his son is dead: “I know now. /I now can say –though /always in a
whisper –‘The boy /is dead’. /I understand, almost, /the meaning of the
sounds: /the boy is dead. I recognise /these words as holding truth: /he is
dead. I know. /Yes, I admit it: he is dead” (pp. 105–106).14 This acknowledg-
ment is linked to learning “to separate /memory from the pain, . . . at least
in part, . . . so that all the past /will not be drenched with so much pain. /
You see, that way I can remember more of you: /I will not fear the scalding
of memory” (pp. 175–176). This involves learning to separate oneself from
the lost one, but “only enough to allow /my chest to broaden /into one
whole breath” (p. 176).
While the oral exchange of story fragments creates an embodied sense
of connection among the Walkers, Falling Out of Time also acknowledges
that others deal with the experience of loss through writing or reading, like
Centaur, the writer: “But if I don’t write it I won’t understand. . . . I can-
not understand this thing that happened, nor can I fathom the person
I am now, after it happened. And what’s worse, pencil-pusher, is that if I do
not write it, I cannot understand who he is now either –my son” (p. 77).
It is not just any writing, but in particular writing as storytelling that he
needs to engage in, in order to make sense of who he is and what he has
experienced:
That’s how it is with me, clerko, that’s how I’m built. . . . I can’t understand any-
thing until I write it. . . . I must recreate it in the form of a story! . . . That’s the only
way I can somehow get close to it, to that goddamn it, without it killing me,
you know? . . . the thing that struck like lightning and burned everything I had,
including the words, goddamn it and its memory. . . . I have to mix it up with
some part of me . . . try and make it a bit—how can I explain this to you?—a bit
mine. (pp. 78–79)
We encounter here again the idea of storytelling as a form of agency and

as an empowering process of making one’s experiences one’s own. The
Centaur needs to deal with “it” through stories, so that the characters

make it budge even one millimetre, that’s enough, so that at least it moves a lit-
tle on my page, so it twitches, and just
makes it not
so
so impossible
to
anything. (p. 80)
Here we can see how the narrative prose begins to break down when he
tries to utter a painful experience: the sense of the impossible. At the same
time, however, his words testify to the potential of stories to make a dif-
ference, by moving things in some direction—and by making, through that
movement, something possible that felt impossible. But there are situa-
tions, when one is “alone, slowly /diminishing” (p. 112), in which stories
cannot work miracles—when they fail to expand one’s space of possibilities
and can, at most, make the diminishing slightly less unbearable. So the
book brings us to the limit of storytelling, to the place where stories both
break down and remain, despite everything, more necessary than ever. The
stories in Falling Out of Time are wounded story fragments in verse: lyri-
cal stories that abound in absences and silences, undergirded by the pres-
ence of what resists telling. The emptiness and absence that the white space
around the words conveys give expression to the visceral experience of loss
and longing.
At the same time, the fragmentation and fragilization of the narrative
suggests a letting go of the aspiration to narrative mastery and an accept-
ance of how the past and the traumatic loss resist sense-making. The theme
of letting go is developed through the journey from the obsessive fixation
on going “there” to the learning to be “here.” The yearning for “there” evokes
the desperate attempt of Orpheus, in the classical Greek myth, to bring
back his lost beloved Eurydice from the Underworld, where she has been
cast as a mute shadow: Orpheus turns too soon, impatient to make sure
that Eurydice is behind him, only to see her vanish into the Underworld.
Similarly, we can never see the past in a way that would amount to having
full grasp of it, as Butler articulates with reference to Ettinger’s Eurydice
series, to which the cover of my book belongs:
If one is to see Eurydice, one must ask about the site of not-knowing that forms
the contour of that experience. . . . One must find the history of what she can-
not narrate, the history of her muteness, if one is to recognize her. This is not
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to supply the key, to fill the gap, to fill in the story, but to find the relevant rem-
nants that form the broken landscape that she is. (2006, x)
Butler’s reference to “not-knowing” and what goes beyond “the story” sug-
gests that she thinks here of knowledge and stories in terms of the sub-
sumptive model, as is typical in poststructuralist thought. Falling Out of
Time, in turn, attests to the possibility of non-subsumptive, lyrical story-
telling that creates a space—“a broken landscape” of sorts—which invites
us to encounter what cannot be fully grasped. Its fragile and fractured sto-
rytelling has a powerfully affective effect on the reader’s body and soul,
and its lyric qualities draw the reader to a participatory mode that may be
more typical of lyric than of narrative dynamic, as Phelan asserts: “Lyric
progressions often shift readerly activity from observation and judgment
to participation and sharing” (2017, p. 64).
With its plethora of voices, all of them speaking directly, without the nar-
rator’s mediation, Falling Out of Time is as polyphonic as narratives can be;
integral to the reader’s experience of participation is being cast in the mid-
dle of these voices. The dialogue is stammering and faltering, but the need
to connect with others is desperate, and so is the search for consolation—
for words and stories that could function as a means for sufferers to bear
their pain together. Even if no such stories are available for the characters
at their moment of despair, the book as a whole suggests that in a world of
disaster and suffering, writing narratives such as Falling Out of Time can
expand the space in which we can connect as creatures united by our shared
vulnerability and our capacity for love and loss, grief and longing.
THE ETHOS OF DIALOGUE
This chapter has explored different dimensions of dialogic storytelling,

looking into ways in which some forms of storytelling are dialogic in a
stronger sense than others. I have suggested, in dialogue with Grossman’s
narratives, that dialogic storytelling has not only ontological and episte-
mological but also ethical significance: it shapes who we are and how we
understand ourselves and others, but it also fosters response-ability—the
ability to be responsibly responsive to the other’s pain—and can unleash
our creative powers. The notion of the ethos of dialogue has been used here
to characterize narrative practices particularly animated by such an ethical
ambition. Storytelling as social interaction driven by such an ethos func-
tions non-subsumptively: in it, the self is exposed to the other in willing-
ness to be transformed in the encounter.

I believe that interdisciplinary narrative studies would benefit from sys-
tematically acknowledging the continuum from appropriative subsumptive
to non-subsumptive narrative practices, animated by the ethos of dialogue.
Even if it is not always unproblematic to distinguish between subsumptive
and non-subsumptive narratives, the distinction functions as a heuristic
that allows us to reflect on that difficulty. The distinction signals an ethi-
cally important difference in narrative logics, but we must remember that
narrative structures cannot alone determine their ethical effects; what is
decisive is the way in which the narratives function in concrete social inter-
action. Subsumptive narratives, for example, can be reinterpreted non-sub-
sumptively, or turned against themselves by refusing the subject positions
they provide us with, as when Ora refuses the role of the soldier’s mother
who waits obediently and patiently at home for news. Whether narratives
function subsumptively or not is ultimately a question that must be evalu-
ated contextually, looking at what narratives do to us and what we do with
them as we engage with them in specific situations.
The two narratives analyzed in this chapter remind us of the diversity
of narrative forms and functions. The analysis suggests that lyrical narra-
tion (as in Falling Out of Time) can sometimes succeed best in creating a
sense of connection and of visceral affectivity, in the face of inexpressible
loss and grief. Both narratives by Grossman are about regaining agency and
a fluid connectedness through storytelling in a situation in which a vulner-
able subject is reduced—or facing the threat of being reduced—to a mere
sufferer. They are, in a sense, counter-narratives to stories of silencing, and
they provide a mirror image of Franck’s Die Mittagsfrau, a narrative of what
the incapacity to share experiences through storytelling does to a person
(see Chapter 4). We must remember, however, that Ora is in a position of
privilege: a middle-aged, middle-class woman who belongs to the more pow-
erful part of the population, even though she is placed in a vulnerable posi-
tion through the prospect of losing her son. Franck’s Helene, in contrast,
belongs to a persecuted part of the population, facing even fewer choices.
These two mothers, however, are not merely representatives of an ethnic or
social group; they are individuals, vulnerable in their specific ways, as they
face a difficult situation and act upon it in their own desperate manner.
This chapter has suggested that the ethos of dialogue plays a crucial role
in unleashing the ethical potential of storytelling—in all six senses dis-
cussed in this book. At the same time, it has reflected on the limits of nar-
rative sense-making. Narratives cannot work miracles: they cannot bring
the dead back to life, and they cannot keep those on the frontline safe. On
the other hand, however, they also do sometimes make possible miracles
of sorts. In both of Grossman’s narratives, vulnerable subjects paralyzed by
6
9
2
grief, torture, loss, or fear are brought back to life through the connections
that stories weave between souls.
In line with Freeman’s view that psychology should make room for a
“poetics of the Other” (2014b, p. 222), I would suggest that in thinking
about the dialogicality and relationality of the subject, both in narrative
psychology and more widely across the humanities and social sciences,
we should continue to develop a language that articulates the fundamen-
tal dependency of the self on the other. Also, more attention should be
paid to the sociohistorical forces that condition the dialogical formation
of subjectivities, to the ways in which sociocultural webs of meaning only
exist through being dialogically interpreted by individuals in concrete situ-
ations, and to the transformations of trans-subjective spaces to which dia-
logical encounter-events can give rise.
Dialogic storytelling is not just a constituent of all narrative practices,
but also a regulative idea toward which we can strive in our efforts to be
more sensitive and open to the otherness of others, more responsive and
alive to what can happen in unexpected encounters, and more keenly
aware of both our complicities and our vulnerabilities as beings funda-
mentally dependent on one another. Such an ethos of dialogue is ever
more needed in the current world, when globalization increases mutual
dependencies, forced migration creates a responsibility for the privileged
parts of the world to address the call of those in need, and the discourse
of hatred promoted by populist racist movements attempts to numb us to
that responsibility.
This chapter has refined the notion of the sense of the possible by
reminding us of the need to acknowledge how it is inseparable from a
sense of the impossible. One’s sense of the possible is radically diminished
when loss and disaster render impossible what used to be one’s life. At the
same time, we need to be alert to how dialogic encounter-events can create
new dialogic spaces of possibilities that can have healing and transforma-
tive power. What we need is more reflection on how to create conditions
for such life-enhancing encounter-events that strengthen the capacity of
vulnerable subjects to function as moral agents capable of receptivity and
openness to the other.
NOTES
1. In an interview, Grossman describes how he goes to weekly demonstrations with

his children: “They come with me every week to the demonstrations in Sheikh
Jarrah [in east Jerusalem]. We are demonstrating against settlers taking over
houses in Palestinian neighbourhoods, but it’s a kind of weekly reserve service

against the occupation, too. Sometimes, it gets violent. Some weeks ago, we were
beaten by the police” (Cooke & Grossman, 2010).
2. As Anne Golomb Hoffman observes, the camera lens functions here “not to
connect two people, but to objectify one at the hands of the other” (2012, p. 55).
3. An example of Ora’s internal dialogue with her construction of Avram: “There
you go again smiling, she thinks at Avram. Be careful, otherwise it might stick.
Incidentally, I do appreciate your smiles, don’t hold back. At home I didn’t see
much of them from my three wiseacres. . . . She wants to tell him: You know,
Ofer has a laugh exactly like yours. Like a kookaburra in rewind. She hesitates.
Your laugh? That one you used to have? She doesn’t even know how to phrase
it. She almost asks: Do you still laugh that way sometimes, until tears run from
your eyes? . . . Do you laugh at all?” (pp. 303–304).
4. On the references of the novel to Israeli and Hebrew literary and mythological
traditions, see Mintz (2013).
5. On the centrality of the element of voice in the novel, see Ben-Dov (2013).
6. The emphasis on storytelling as showing recurs throughout the narrative. The
narrator stresses that when Ora tells Avram about Ofer, she “shows him to
Avram” (p. 310).
7. However, there are, of course, exceptions: Sunil Bhatia, for example, is
a narrative psychologist who productively combines a dialogical and a
sociocultural approach (see, e.g., 2007).
8. Throughout the novel, it is emphasized that for Ora, walking and writing are
both forms of agency that make her feel safe: “when she writes she doesn’t have
to keep walking and moving. Her whole body knows it: When she writes, when
she writes about Ofer, she and Avram don’t need to run away from anything”
(p. 262).
9. For Foucault, power can only be exercised over subjects insofar as they “are faced
with a field of possibilities in which several kinds of conduct, several ways of
reacting and modes of behavior are available” (2000, p. 342).
10. Ettinger considers this to be crucial to art, which she conceptualizes as “a
compassionate encounter-event of prolonged generosity” (2005, p. 707) and
as a “transport-station of trauma,” but she acknowledges that artwork cannot
“promise that passage of remnants of trauma will actually take place in it; it only
supplies the space for this occasion” (p. 711). See also Ettinger (2006).
11. Hoffman observes that Ora and Avram frequently use the Hebrew word mesugal,
which means “to be capable of,” “to acknowledge their sense of their own
limitations” but also to indicate that they are “capable or incapable of taking
in and absorbing images, memories, and experiences, their own and those of
others”: “We realize that this receptivity—the ability to receive another person’s
story or to recognize one’s own—is really an active capacity” (2012, pp. 57–58).
12. On the central role of embodiment in Grossman’s oeuvre, see Hoffman (2013).
13. This expression can be found in many languages, including English, French,
German, and Finnish.
14. The same words are repeated on p. 192, which gives them particular weight and
pregnancy.
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CHAPTER 8
Conclusion
Struggles over the Possible
T his book has explored the power of storytelling to expand and diminish
the space of possibilities in which we fashion our lives. In this world
where violence and justice are unequally distributed, struggles over nar-
rative agency are struggles over the possible. While oppressive narrative
identities are imposed on some, others are encouraged to imagine ways to
best fulfill their creative potential. The most vulnerable are reduced to dam-
aging silence; the most powerful voice stories that change the world. This
unequal distribution of possibilities emerges forcefully from the narratives
analyzed in the preceding chapters, in which vulnerable subjects struggle
to maintain their narrative agency in the face of atrocity, and implicated
subjects in divergent positions draw on culturally mediated narrative prac-
tices to justify their actions and inactions.
The discussed literary and autobiographical texts have demonstrated
both the ontological significance of narratives—how we are constituted as
storytelling beings—and how, despite the claim of some narrativists, sto-
ries are not inherently ethically beneficial. Throughout this book, we have
seen how narratives function as a means of indoctrination and resistance,
how they reinforce traumatizing processes, and how they empower us to
imagine new identities and modes of relationality. Narratives can lead us to
repeat harmful emotional patterns that we have blindly inherited from our
family and cultural traditions, and they can engage us in reinventing the
world together with others. I have proposed here hermeneutic narrative
ethics as a framework that provides analytical resources for studying and
03
evaluating both oppressive and empowering narrative practices, and for

moving beyond arguments over whether narrative benefits or harms us, by
looking at how narrative practices are used and abused in specific cultural
contexts. The analyzed narratives stir both hope and caution: they suggest
that while even the most desperate situations usually contain a possibility
of resistance, stories—even the most powerful—are limited in terms of
what they can achieve.
The narratives examined in this book bring us to the limits of story-
telling from a range of perspectives. They are self-reflexive narratives that
reflect not only on the ethical potential of storytelling, but also on the pow-
erlessness of narrative fiction to save the characters from the social and
historical worlds in which their lives are entangled. Franck depicts how an
affectionate person, whose narrative imagination is nourished by books
shared by her beloved, turns, in a society that denies her right to exist, into
a mute mother whose capacity for moral agency and human intimacy is
eroded to the point of annihilation. Reading Remarque’s antiwar novel fails
to ignite Grass’s powers of doubt, and Littell’s SS officer reads Orestes but is
unable to see himself re-enact the myth. Grossman’s Avram and Ilan thrive
on the literary works they grow up sharing, but these neither save Avram
from the hands of the torturers nor help him overcome the trauma: we wit-
ness how even the most vivid narrative imagination shuts down when the
human bond is severed beyond repair. At the same time, however, these
narratives also attest to the ethical potential of storytelling in all the six
senses articulated in this book, even if in none of these senses is it realized
without complications.
To revisit these six aspects, first, the guiding idea of this book has been
that an ethically crucial question is whether narrative practices in different
cultural contexts expand or diminish the space of possibilities of people
taking up divergent subject positions. Nazi Germany exemplifies a histor-
ical world in which possibilities were exceptionally unevenly distributed,
and the same narrative practices, such as the Nazi narrative of “Aryans”
as a “chosen people” and of Jews as “vermin,” implied drastically different
consequences for the space of possibilities of different parts of the popula-
tion. The analysis suggests that literary and autobiographical narratives can
expand our sense of the possible by contributing to our historical imagina-
tion in four interconnected ways: they can convey a sense of a past world as
a space of possibilities in which certain modes of thought, experience, and
action were possible and others difficult or impossible; they can cultivate
our sense of how history is an open process that is not predetermined and
that consists in our everyday actions and inactions; they can contribute to
our understanding of how our interpretations of the past shape our space

of possibilities in the present; and they can address the duty to remember
through an ethics of implication that shows how the legacy of past violence
places obligations on us in the present and for the future. The analyzed nar-
ratives contrast the blind perpetuation of the narrative unconscious (such
as that defined by the Nazi ideology) with the way in which dialogic sto-
rytelling enables individuals to thrive and to narratively imagine possible
selves, relationships, and futures.
Second, narratives shape both personal and cultural self-understanding
in ways that are not ethically neutral. They can help us see ourselves more
clearly—as individuals and communities—or they can be abused for vio-
lent political purposes as a means of indoctrination (as Grass describes in
his autobiography) or self-deception (as Littell shows through the Nazi dis-
course of self-legitimation). In the analyzed narratives, it is evident that
self-understanding on both individual and collective levels takes shape
in relation to what is other than self. They foreground, in different ways,
the limits of narrative self-understanding: the way in which, due to our
historical and cultural situatedness, we can only become partially aware
of our own presuppositions, narrative unconscious, and habits of iden-
tification and sense-making, and much of what we do and who we are
remains beyond our consciousness and articulative capacities. At the same
time, they present themselves as works that can potentially contribute
to cultural self-understanding, including our understanding of the ethi-
cally complex roles of narratives in our lives. They suggest not only that
engagement with the legacy of the Holocaust remains integral to our cul-
tural self-understanding, but also, more broadly, that we should shift our
understanding of autobiographical and life-writing in a more sociocultural
direction, emphasizing how our identities are shaped by our embedded-
ness in and our understanding of broader historical processes and cultural
narrative webs.
Third, we have seen that there are different logics of narrative and that
it is ethically decisive whether narratives follow a subsumptive or non-
subsumptive logic. Narrative hermeneutics challenges the dominant
subsumption model of (narrative) understanding and articulates how
storytelling can function as a non-totalizing, non-subsumptive mode of
understanding the other in his or her singularity, particularly insofar as
it foregrounds the temporal process of engagement with the narrated
experiences, acknowledges the limits of narrative understanding, and is
animated by an ethos of dialogue. In response to thinkers who consider
narrative per se to be ethically problematic, I have suggested that narrative
as a temporal process of reinterpretation that reflects on its own interpre-
tative nature and limits is, ethically speaking, very different from attempts
Conclusion [ 301 ]
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at narrative mastery that conceal their own nature as narratives—as per-

spectival interpretations that can always be contested and told otherwise.
The analyzed narratives show how subsumptive and non-subsumptive
narrative practices are linked to naturalizing and self-reflexive narrative
strategies. While naturalizing narrative strategies tend to function sub-
sumptively under the pretense of value-free knowledge and thereby par-
ticipate in reifying human symbolic systems, self-reflexive narratives tend
to function non-subsumptively, in an explorative mode that is open to
change and that reflects on its own cultural mediatedness.
Fourth, we have seen that the inter-and trans-subjective narrative in-
betweens—that both bind people together and separate them—shape
the space of possibilities of individuals, couples, families, and larger com-
munities. Stories are about connections, and they create connections not
only between experiences and events, but also between people who share
stories. One important way in which dialogic storytelling can expand our
sense of the possible is by transforming the narrative in-betweens in ways
that establish trans-subjective spaces for new encounter-events, which
open new possibilities of being-in-relation. Nazi Germany, in contrast, is
an extreme example of a mythological narrative in-between in which nar-
ratives of “us” and “them” led to the annihilation of the latter. As beings
fundamentally dependent on one another, we need to build together more
inclusive narrative in-betweens that also expand the space of possibilities
of the most vulnerable subjects, who are structurally disadvantaged in
struggles over the possible.
Fifth, essential to the sense of the possible is the cultivation of what
I have called perspective-awareness, which entails the ability to perceive the
world and particular situations from a variety of perspectives and the rec-
ognition that one’s own perspective is only one among many. The preced-
ing analyses have suggested that perspective-taking should be understood
not merely in terms of putting oneself in the other’s shoes, but as a process
of entering into a dialogic relation with another mode of experience with-
out letting go of one’s own values and beliefs. Such dialogic perspective-
taking not only allows critical challenging of problematic perspectives, but
also engenders awareness of one’s own preconceptions and of alternatives
to them. Engaging with the dark moments of history can develop our nar-
rative imagination in ethically valuable ways that might teach us some-
thing about ourselves that we might not otherwise be able to see. I have
drawn particular attention to the narrative dynamic that invites readers
to be emotionally engaged with an ethically problematic life-world so that
even when immersing themselves in that world, they retain the ability—
and are encouraged—to view it critically and in such a way that also sheds

light on their own historical world. Self-reflexive narratives not only enrich
the variety of culturally available narratives, in dialogue with which we
can reinterpret and reimagine our lives, they can also promote awareness
of the multitude of perspectives from which the world can be looked at,
of how each narrative is told from a certain limited, ethically and politi-
cally charged perspective, and of how every story can be and often needs
to be told anew from a different angle. Polyphonic, dialogical narratives
are more likely to increase our perspective-awareness, whereas monologi-
cal narratives risk impeding such awareness by pretending that they simply
mirror—rather than interpret—reality.
Sixth, I have suggested that while many cultural narrative practices per-
petuate the dominant social order and conventional morality through nat-
uralizing narrative strategies, self-reflexive literary and autobiographical
narratives can function as a mode of ethical inquiry that provokes critical
reflection on culturally dominant moral conceptions and prejudices. The
narratives I have analyzed engage in complex reflection on the power and
limits of storytelling and on the significance of narrative for who we are.
They suggest that narratives do not make us better people or corrupt us by
exerting power on us in any unilateral way; instead, they provide us with
a space for ethical reflection. What happens in the encounter with new
narratives is an interpretative feat. At best, encountering a literary nar-
rative becomes a transformative encounter-event in which our world and
the world of the text are brought into a dialogue that challenges our pre-
understandings and nuances our theoretical frameworks. As forms of ethi-
cal inquiry, the analyzed narratives have conveyed, directly or indirectly, an
ethos of dialogue and a conception of subjectivity that emphasizes our fun-
damental vulnerability and dependency on one another. They suggest that
we survive or perish as relational, interdependent beings, whose capacity
for moral agency and affective reciprocity is fragile.
Both the hope and the caution that hermeneutic narrative ethics stirs are
linked to the dialogicality of narrative and subjectivity. We have seen that
narrative hermeneutics perceives the relationship between cultural narra-
tive models and the individuals who make sense of their experiences in
light of them as fundamentally dialogical, so that narrative models do not
determine how we act and understand ourselves and others, although they
condition us and set limits on our space of experience and thought. There
is hope because symbolic systems inherently encompass the possibility of
reinterpretation, reorientation, and resistance. The process of retelling—
of reinterpreting culturally mediated narrative models in the context of
concrete life situations—includes the possibility of telling otherwise, in
Conclusion [ 303 ]
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ways that resist and challenge dominant sense-making practices. Ethically

relevant is whether narratives invite us, through an ethos of dialogue, to
such retelling—to a plurality of different versions and reinterpretations—
or pretend, through naturalizing strategies, to be the only possible version.
In the latter case, narratives are less likely to empower us and more likely
to be abused as vehicles of manipulation.
The dialogical conception of narrative and subjectivity cautions us
against individualist, solipsist, principlist ethics by reminding us of our
primordial dependency on our relationships with others and their sto-
ries. In order to survive in the fullest sense—and beyond that, to flour-
ish and to fulfill our potential—we need others and their stories, and
this makes us fundamentally vulnerable. Instead of seeing this as a prob-
lem, we should embrace our vulnerability as a basic condition of being
human, and we should continue to reflect on its political implications.
In these dark times, in this globalized world of mutual dependencies—in
the current age of terror, displacement, global warming, and the rise of
populist, nationalist, and right-wing extremist movements—the need to
perceive the world from a plurality of perspectives is as acute as ever. For
a dialogue to take place, the participants must be able to imagine the
world of the other as a world that—although different from one’s own—
is nevertheless a human world (or, in the case of non-human others, a
world of experience and suffering). The culturally dominant narratives
that circulate in the media rarely foster such dialogue; all too often they
perpetuate, instead, the narratives of conflict between the East and the
West, the Islamic and the Christian world, or the “free” and the “unfree”
world. Yet precisely in this situation, it is pivotal to engage imaginatively
with what the dominant cultural narratives demonize and portray as the
evil other. Such engagement can generate critical awareness of—and pro-
vide us with hermeneutic resources for resisting—the narrative imagi-
naries that perpetuate the uneven distribution of possibilities in the
contemporary world.
This book has aspired to show how a sense of history has far-reaching
ethical consequences. Cultural conflicts are frequently predicated on a lack
of in-depth understanding of the sociohistorical worlds from within which
the “others” make their choices and develop their basic beliefs. Our sense
of ethics is often too abstract and detached from the worlds and concrete
situations in which people act, as well as from the narrative webs that are
a constitutive dimension of these worlds. Much of the ethical power of the
art of storytelling stems from the way it can help us imagine, in more con-
crete terms, ethical situations and spaces of possibilities of actors of ethical
conflicts.

Narrative fiction that questions the adequacy of the perpetrator–victim
dichotomy in dealing with traumatic histories is currently trying to shift
our cultural narrative imagination away from the tendency to deal with
evil by simply demonizing the perpetrators, whether Nazis or terrorists.
It provides us with resources to analyze social and cultural mechanisms
that produce violence and to recognize the ways in which we ourselves are
complicit in perpetuating the conditions of possibility for the unequal dis-
tribution of vulnerability and narrative agency. It is precisely this kind of
self-reflection that the narratives of Franck, Grass, Littell, and Grossman
provoke—by inviting us to engage with the experiential world of impli-
cated subjects entangled in complex histories of violence.
These narratives are about storytelling, but they are also inextricably
stories of silence. The interplay between storytelling and silence is woven
into their fabric so intimately that one does not exist without the other.
Franck’s Helene is reduced to a muteness in which the inability to tell her
own story amounts to the inability to continue her life as a mother; Grass,
after devoting his entire adult life to depicting the damaging silence in
postwar Germany, finally confronts his own silence in his autobiography;
Littell describes blindness that is also muteness—an inability to articulate
aspects of the traumatic past—and provokes readers to confront what the
victors of history keep silent; Grossman explores the struggle against dev-
astating silence that surrounds trauma and loss.
Like Franck’s Helene, Eurydice is mute, but Bracha L. Ettinger’s paintings
(like the one on the cover of this book) create a space in which we can engage
with her story, and if we are able to engage with it in a non-subsumptive,
dialogical way that does not strive for narrative appropriation, then we may
see Eurydice and be affected by her. Butler articulates such a dynamic:
We lost Eurydice because we sought too quickly to know that she was behind
us, and the look that seeks to know, to verify, banished her yet more fully into
the past. And yet, in Bracha’s tableaux, the image is still there, coming toward
us, fading away, a moment frozen in its doubleness, layered, fractured, filtered.
The suspension of time conditions the emergence of a space that suspends the
sequential ordering of time. . . . We see Eurydice, but she does not belong to us at
the moment that we see her. And because she does not belong to us, she comes
forth. . . . (2006, pp. x–xi)
As only the gaze that does not seek to grasp can see Eurydice, only sto-
rytelling that does not aspire to subsumptive appropriation can create an
ethical, dialogic space for connection, recognition, and becoming-together.
Like other forms of art, storytelling, too, can be an activity of building a
Conclusion [ 305 ]
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space for non-subsumptive engagement with what is other. As dialogic

storytellers—beings affected and shaped by one another’s stories—we
need to foster narrative practices that contribute to more inclusive nar-
rative in-betweens that have space for even the most vulnerable to thrive.
I have delineated here an ethics of storytelling that cautions us against
subsumptive narrative logic and is fiercely committed to promoting non-
subsumptive dialogic narrative practices. It reflects on how to move from
a sense of the (im)possible that is imposed on us by narratives that harm
and diminish us to a sense of the possible that we cherish and expand in
dialogic encounters with others. While dominant models of narrative tend
to see storytelling as a form of representing, capturing, or appropriating, we
need to expand our thinking on narrative to include both ethically valuable
and problematic practices and to acknowledge that narrative often func-
tions—particularly in the context of literary fiction—as a mode of engaging
with what we do not know or understand, what perplexes us, unravels us,
moves us viscerally and unexpectedly. The (non-subsumptive) ethos of dia-
logue and relationality of hermeneutic narrative ethics envisions a narrative
agency that is not one of trying to impose one’s narratives onto others, but
rather one that is sensitive to the multitude of perspectives from which the
world is looked at, receptive to the stories of others, and attentive to how
they implicate us. Instead of urging us to impose narrative order on the flux
of the real, this ethos attunes us to reflect on how we could be open and alive
to the change, fluidity, and transformative energies around us. It supports
practices of sharing stories in ways that help us reinvent our lives in dialogic
relations with others, by looking at the world from the perspective of both
difference and commonality.
Time and again, we have been reminded that nothing in narratives
guarantees the actualization of their ethical potential. Narratives are easily
abused if they are framed as an objective rendering of reality; in the guise
of the discourse of truth, they can violently categorize people, reinforce the
repetition of harmful emotional and behavioral patterns, and shut down
conversation instead of opening it up. For this reason, it is pivotal for the
ethics of storytelling to acknowledge the hermeneutic structure of narra-
tives: that they are culturally mediated (re)interpretations of experience
and hence can always be contested and told otherwise. Only narratives that
are aware of their own interpretative nature are likely to foster our dialogic
narrative imagination by actively welcoming a plurality of interpretations.
As beings fundamentally dependent on one another, we rely on each
other in our struggles over the possible. My possibilities are not independ-
ent of your possibilities, and hence we need to build our spaces of pos-
sibilities together. Global warming and the impending ecocatastrophe is a

salient example of how the narrative imaginaries that shape our spaces of
possibilities need to be transformed in ways that make this planet habit-
able for all of us. The struggle over the possible cannot be the struggle of
individual actors and sufferers, but a joint struggle on a shared planet.
Life is a messy affair in which every individual story is entangled in com-
plex ways in other people’s stories, and it is ultimately only as dialogic story-
tellers that we can find new directions for our stories. As storytelling animals,
we are constantly engaged in the process of imagining where we have come
from, who we could become, and what kind of world we will co-inhabit. In
this process we need to think beyond our personal pasts and engage with the
cultural narrative unconscious—the cultural webs of narratives that orient
our sense-making practices without our awareness—in order to expand our
narrative imagination: our ability to creatively reinterpret, transcend, and
enrich the culturally available repertoire of narrative sense-making models,
and to imagine different forms of life, modes of experience, and possibilities
of becoming-together. Such engagement can elicit critical awareness of the
taken-for-granted values that structure our narrative unconscious, so that
we can prevent them from simply affecting us behind our backs, or restrict-
ing the dialogue that we conduct with imaginative variations of how our lives
could unfold and of the futures we might build as communities.
It is only as dialogic storytellers that we can achieve a trans-subjective
transformation of the relationship between our narrative unconscious and
our narrative imagination. As an exploration into the realm of the pos-
sible, narrative fiction can contribute to such transformation: particularly
self-reflexive literary narratives can engender awareness of the narrative
webs imposed on us, provide hermeneutic resources for analyzing the ways
in which different narrative practices function in our lives, and nourish an
ethos of dialogue that makes us more responsive to one another’s wounds
and vulnerabilities, as well as to the ways in which we are implicated in
violent histories that we have inherited—histories in which we silently
or actively participate, or against which we struggle. Narratives driven
by such an ethos have the potential to create a trans-subjective narrative
in-between that opens up pathways to less violent futures. There are no
guarantees that they have such ethical effects. But when they do, this is
importantly due to their power to expand our sense of the possible through
the dialogic narrative imagination that animates our engagements with
the past, the present, and the not-yet. It is this power that cultivates our
sensitivity to the unexplored possibilities for dialogic encounters lying hid-
den within the actual—our sense of how “[e]‌very journey conceals another
journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle”
(Winterson, 2001, p. 9).
Conclusion [ 307 ]
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3
INDEX
Note: Page numbers followed by the letter n indicate material found in endnotes.
Abbott, H. Porter, 51 on the banality of evil, 189–190,

actor-network theory, 77, 144n8 221, 225
actual/possible dichotomy, 14–17, 96, Benjamin and, 117
181, 182, 218, 219 on capacity to act, 53–54, 125–126
Adams, Jenni, 218, 233, 252n31 on idealism, 193
Adorno, Theodor W., 38n7, 188, 201, on ideological thinking, 214n25
215n37, 215n43 on in-between, 117, 120
aesthetics of existence, 13, 69, 278 Kant and, 145n22
affective hermeneutics, 46, 77, 85n4 narrative approach/view of, 54, 107,
affective identification, 68, 87n26, 93, 111–112, 117, 156
207, 235 on narrative identity, 65, 70–71, 111
affective responses, 129, 132, 133, 225, on Nazi perpetrators, 217, 244
235, 246, 275 on the plurality of unique beings,
affectivity, 46, 76, 118, 133, 135, 125–126
279, 295 on sharing “words and deeds,” 159
“Against Interpretation” (Sontag), 7, 43 on totalitarian ideologies,
“against narrativity” movement, 1–2, 191–192, 225
38n1, 57 on understanding others, 111
age of terror, 25, 125, 304. See also Aristotle, 14, 17, 29, 135–137, 139–140,
terrorism 141, 181
Allen, Amy, 81 Assmann, Aleida, 129
All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen Auschwitz, 4, 22, 190, 200, 201, 206,
nichts Neues) (Remarque), 203, 300 209, 210, 215n43. See also the
America First narrative, 22, 113, 121, Holocaust; Nazi Germany; Nazis/
124, 133 Nazism/National Socialism
amnesia, cultural, 95, 180, 201, 202, Auster, Paul, 1–2
204, 211 authorship thesis, 68, 69, 70
Anderson, Benedict, 120 autobiographical
Andrews, Molly, 20, 32, 52 memory, 66, 205
animals, 100. See also nonhuman (actors) autobiographical narratives
anti-mimetic narrative, 218, 227, 239 accuracy of, 183–184, 205
antinarrativists, 51, 84, 108 cultural memory and, 95
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 69 as ethical inquiry, 303
appropriation, narrative as, 51, 107–108, ethics of, 204–210, 212
110–113, 116, 145n27, 171, 243, in everyday interactions, 101
248–249, 305 fictional narratives and, 35, 179, 181,
Arendt, Hannah 195, 205, 211
4
3
autobiographical narratives (cont.) Benhabib, Seyla, 75, 80, 81, 88n39

historical imagination and, 179, 190, Benjamin, Walter, 117
195, 210–212, 300 Bennett, Jill, 14
the Holocaust and, 22, 301 Berger, Peter, 99
interactional approaches to, 124 Berlant, Lauren, 93
narrative identities and, 34, 100 Bildung, concept of, 129
narrative imagination and, 206, 211 Bildungsroman, 147n50, 180
paradoxical status of, 36, 205 Binswanger, Ludwig, 58
of perpetrators, 246–247 blindness, theme of, 69, 144n17, 153,
as self-reflection, 100, 303 157, 160, 164, 169, 196, 238–239,
sense of the possible in, 35, 181, 244, 253n46, 305
211, 300 The Blind Side of the Heart. See Die
significance of, 299, 301, 303 Mittagsfrau (The Blind Side of the
as taking responsibility, 180, 200, 204 Heart) (Franck)
autobiographical storytelling, 34, 101, Booth, Wayne C., 28, 134, 230
200, 204–212 Borradori, Giovanna, 125
Boyd, Brian, 134
Back to Back (Rücken an Rücken) Braidotti, Rosi, 20
(Franck), 152 British “leave” campaign/Brexit, 25,
Badiou, Alan, 156 85n2, 102–103, 123–124
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 11, 47, 62, 74, 77, 79, Brockmeier, Jens, 11, 20, 32, 52, 53, 58,
82, 87n33, 88n38, 95, 121, 197, 60, 66, 100–101, 124, 280
270–271 Brown, Laura S., 151–152
banality of evil, 189–191, 221, 225 Browning, Christopher, 217, 244
Barnwell, Ashley, 165 Bruchstücke: Aus einer Kindheit 1939–1948
Bar-On, Dan, 122 (Fragments: Memories of a Wartime
Barthes, Roland, 12, 51, 108, 245 Childhood) (Wilkomirski), 183
Batson, Daniel, 128, 132, 146n39, 234 Bruner, Jerome, 9, 17, 32, 52, 59, 95
Baudelaire, Charles, 228 Butler, Judith, 23, 31, 37, 81, 281–283,
Beauvoir, Simone de, 158 293–294, 305
Beevor, Antony, 218
Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the capacity to be affected, 46, 170, 199
Onion) (Grass) Caracciolo, Marco, 229, 233
confession in, 180, 209 Carr, David, 59, 60
cultural amnesia and, 204 Carroll, Noël, 38n6, 133, 134, 236
doubt theme within, 193, 201–202 Caruth, Cathy, 114
memory and storytelling in, 204–206 Castano, Emanuele, 3–4
moral agency in, 189, 191, 207 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 20
moral witness in, 188–189 Cat and Mouse (Katz und Maus)
narrative dynamic in, 184, 186 (Grass), 180
narrative strategies of, 186 causality (narrative), 7, 49–51, 53,
the past self and, 199, 206–208 233, 242
the role of narrative fiction in, Cavarero, Adriana, 73, 111, 117, 159
202–204 Cavell, Stanley, 13
space of possibilities in, 35, 184, 189, Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 199
205–206, 211 climate change, 106, 123
time and temporality in, 198–199, co-authorship (of lives/identities),
209–210 71–72, 75, 106, 124
Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) co-emergence/co-poiesis, 279
(Heidegger), 6 cognitive narratology, 8, 24, 33
[ 334 ] Index
Cohn, Dorrit, 15, 17, 54, 181–182, 212n5 cultural trauma, 24, 121–122, 146n33
“common world,” 117, 120 Currie, Gregory, 51, 86n13
Communist terror, 161–162, 167, 188
complicity fiction, 23, 185. See also Danzig trilogy (Grass), 180, 184, 186,
perpetrator fiction 189, 196, 216n62
Coplan, Amy, 126, 132 Davis, Colin, 29, 223
co-telling, 73, 75, 87n34, 156, 280, 284 Deleuze, Gilles, 5, 14, 38n8
counter-narratives, 93, 113, 123, 163, democracy, 3, 25, 125–126, 132, 134,
172, 202–203, 212 136–138
Critical Excess (Davis), 29 Dennett, Daniel C., 70
Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen “Der Erzähler” (“The Storyteller”)
Vernunft) (Kant), 107 (Benjamin), 117
cruel optimism, 93 Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man
Culler, Jonathan, 7 Without Qualities) (Musil), 90
cultural amnesia, 95, 180, 201, 202, Derrida, Jacques, 105, 108, 109–110,
204, 211 138, 145n23, 147n51
cultural history, 16, 33, 37, 215n42 Der Vorleser (The Reader) (Schlink), 150
culturally mediated narrative practices, Dewey, John, 19
2, 7, 12, 13, 19, 47–48, 50, 62, 90, “Diachronics,” 55
171, 259, 299, 302, 303 dialogical conception, of narrative and
cultural memory, 24, 25, 42n46, 95, 120, subjectivity, 74–83
149, 181–183, 215n42, 248 dialogical intertextuality, 62
cultural memory studies, 33–34 dialogicality, 21, 69, 74, 255, 259, 263,
cultural models of narrative sense- 265, 266, 272, 278, 296, 303
making, 11, 48, 61, 67, 79, 82, dialogical self, 37, 78, 87n35, 269,
259, 275 272, 278
cultural narrative imagination, 305 dialogical subjectivity, levels of, 75–83
cultural narratives. See also narrative dialogic narrative agency, 173
sense-making dialogic narrative imagination, 35, 118,
affective structures and, 93 156, 172, 270, 306–307
dialogic relationship with, 41n43, 44, dialogic narrative in-between, 155, 280
62, 84, 99 dialogic storytelling
dominant, 93, 94, 304 ethical potential of, 36–37, 113, 116,
double/triple hermeneutics and, 264–266, 268, 278, 284–285, 294,
62, 164 296, 301–302
engagement with, 264, 307 Grossman and, 255
as interpretative models, 48 in Die Mittagsfrau (The Blind Side of the
narrative psychology and, 32 Heart), 156
narrative therapy and, 18 in narrative hermeneutics, 84–85
narrative unconscious and, 91, 94 narrative in-between and, 37, 124,
narrative understanding and, 66 259, 263, 268, 302
normativity in, 83 non-subsumptive, 113, 116, 265,
reification of, 40n27 268, 278
reinterpretation of, 62 otherness and, 113, 156, 265–266,
self-reflection and, 99, 103 294, 296
stereotypes and, 50 power of, 116, 259, 264
subjects of experience and, 84 sense of the possible and, 284
in To the End of the Land, 264–265 space of possibilities and, 278,
cultural narrative unconscious, 82, 91, 301–302
231, 307 temporal dimension of, 156
Index [ 335 ]
6
3
dialogic storytelling (cont.) Eakin, Paul John, 183

in To the End of the Land, 258–264, Eichmann, Adolf, 189, 193, 222, 225
284–285 Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt), 244
transforming intersubjective emotional engagement, 20, 46, 138, 219,
reality, 264 222, 232, 246, 302
(transformative) ethical potential of, empathetic identification, 19, 104,
36–37, 278, 285, 294, 296, 301 121, 137
unity and, 284 empathetic perception, 58
dialogism, 74, 269, 270 empathetic perspective-taking, 3, 89,
dialogue. See ethos of dialogue 126, 233
Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) (Grass), empathy
180, 185 Assmann on, 129
Die Mittagsfrau (The Blind Side of the as complicating factor, 237
Heart) (Franck) Coplan on, 146n39
abandonment in, 150, 152, 157, 160, ethos of dialogue and, 113, 290
162–167, 169, 172–173 existential identification and, 235–236
culture of silence and, 165–170 fiction and, 3–4, 26, 29, 33,
dialogical logic of, 168–169 146n38, 218
dialogic narrative imagination in, in first-person narrative, 233
156–157, 168, 171 focalization and, 186
from dialogue to muteness in, mourning and, 290
157–165, 168 non-subsumptive narrative practices
ethical inquiry in, 172–173 and, 113, 116
gender system/roles in, 153–154 perpetrator fiction and, 218, 234
historical situation of, 167, 170 perspective-taking and, 126, 132,
intersubjective/shared space 146n39, 186, 235–236
(narrative in-between) in, 153, Shuman on, 166
155–156, 160, 167, 172 empiricism, 8, 39n11, 57, 59
loss of father in, 154 emplotment, 49, 120
mythical narrative/mythologies encounter-event, 37, 279, 285, 296,
in, 153 297n10, 302, 303
narrative imagination in, 69, 72, 153, Ende, Michael, 118
155–157, 163 engagement. See emotional engagement;
perspective-taking in, 156, 160, interpretation; readerly engagement
166–167, 169, 170, 172 “Episodics,” 55
shifting possibilities in, 150–157 epistemic injustice, 91–92, 152, 159
subsumptive narrative practices in, Epston, David, 18
157, 160, 171–172 The Erl-King (Le Roi des Aulnes)
trauma/traumatic experience in, (Tournier), 238
151–152, 161–162, 165, 167, Erpenbeck, Jenny, 95, 106
169, 171 ethical evaluation of narrative practices,
difficult empathy, 36, 234 14, 31, 33–35, 89–144, 179, 180,
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 120, 129 184, 235
docta ignorantia, 36, 244 ethical identity, 32, 246. See also
Dog Years. See Hundejahre (Dog Years) narrative ethical identity
(Grass) ethical imagination, 4, 21, 93–94,
Doležel, Lubomír, 15 97, 132, 139, 141–143, 172, 232,
double hermeneutic, 61, 164 246, 248
“double wall” of silence, 122, 165 ethical inquiry
Duuren, Thom van, 229, 233 autobiographical narratives as, 303
[ 336 ] Index
literature/narrative as, 5, 14, 28, Facebook, 102. See also social media
133–142, 143 Façons de lire, manières d’être (Macé), 29
moral agency and, 133–135 factuality (tacit theory of), 15, 182
narrative imagination and, 91 Falke, Cassandra, 29
narrative knowing and, 244 Falling Out of Time (Nofel mi-huts la-
the novel as, 172, 285 zeman) (Grossman), 23, 36, 255–
professional philosophers and, 41n40 256, 285–295
sense of the possible and, 142–143 family history, 150, 151, 160, 165, 167
ethics of implication, 36, 179, 200–201, family mythology, 156, 164
204, 208, 209, 211, 282, 301 fascism, 22, 108, 133, 146n34, 192, 212,
ethics of memory, 200, 210 213n21, 248
ethics of relationality, 37, 282 Felski, Rita, 6–7, 29, 30, 46–47, 77,
ethos of dialogue 85n4, 97, 104, 119, 144n8, 146n30
dialogicality and, 74, 255 fiction. See complicity fiction;
dialogic storytelling and, 285, 294, perpetrator fiction; reading fiction
296, 307 fictionality (theories of), 15, 96, 182–183
in historical worlds, 290 first-person narrative
narrative hermeneutics and, 30, 301, in autobiographical writing, 180, 204
303–304, 306 empathy and, 233
non-subsumptive narrative practices identification and, 246
and, 36–37, 110, 113, 294, 295, 306 interpretation and, 48
questions and, 271 in perpetrator fiction, 185, 218, 230,
sense of the possible and, 284 232–233
in To the End of the Land, 269–270 perspectives and, 73
transformative potential of, 270, 279 reading strategies and, 239
vulnerability and, 303, 307 reification and, 222
Ettinger, Bracha L., 37, 279, 281, 293, reliability of, 229
297n10, 305 self-encounter and, 101, 202
European humanism, 1, 22, 122 Fludernik, Monika, 7, 8, 39n11, 189
evil, banality of, 189–191, 221, 225 focalization, 131, 167, 186, 218, 229
existence, aesthetics of, 13, 69, 278 Foucault, Michel, 11, 13, 16, 31, 47,
experience 69, 70, 81, 85n6, 213n7, 213n21,
empiricist-positivistic conception of, 278, 297n9
8, 39n11, 57, 59 Fragments: Memories of a Wartime
hierarchical models of, 54–58 Childhood (Bruchstücke: Aus
historical, 8, 24, 39n11, 194, 195, 196 einer Kindheit 1939–1948)
interpretative structure of, 6, 45–46 (Wilkomirski), 183
as mediated/mediatedness of, 8–9, Franck, Julia. See also Die Mittagsfrau
45–61, 83–84 (The Blind Side of the Heart) (Franck)
raw, 8, 39n11, 56, 84 historical worlds and, 300, 305
storytelling/narrative as sharing/ Jewish background of, 24, 165
exchange of, 89, 103, 117, 119, 153, mother figures in novels of, 152
159, 172 muteness/silence in novels of, 162,
temporality of, 57, 60 165, 196, 305
unmediated, 56–57 Frank, Manfred, 80, 87n25
“experiencing I,” 185–186, 199, 241, 243 Freeman, Mark
experiencing self/selves, 55, 59, 259, 263 on experience and narrative,
experientiality, 7, 39n14, 185 60, 86n17
experientially driven storytelling, 106, on life without narrative, 168
126, 232 on narrative and imagination, 20
Index [ 337 ]
8
3
Freeman, Mark (cont.) Go, Went, Gone (Gehen, ging, gegangen)

on narrative psychology, 32 (Erpenbeck), 95, 106
on narrative reflection, 53, 100–101 Goffman, Erving, 72, 76, 87n31
on narrative unconscious, 18, 20, Goldie, Peter, 8, 86n7, 86n8, 87n30,
100, 276 127, 132
on the Other, 266, 282, 296 Gottschall, Jonathan, 134, 146n32
Frege, Gottlob, 15 Grass, Günter
Frey, James, 183 on ability to doubt, 193, 201–202
Fricker, Miranda, 91, 92, 112, 128, 152 Beim Häuten der Zwiebel and, 22–23,
Frie, Roger, 18, 32, 58, 146n29 35, 180, 183–186, 188–189, 191–
futurity, 53, 153 193, 196, 198–199, 202–212
confession of, 180, 209
Gadamer, Hans-Georg cultural amnesia and, 204
affectivity and, 46 on idealism, 192, 201
on application of rules, 88n36 the past self and, 206–208
Aristotle and, 139–141 Grossman, David
on becoming, 47 on demonstrations in
on concepts/language, 109–110 Jerusalem, 296n1
on “consciousness of being affected by ethos of implication of, 247
history,” 196 Falling Out of Time, and, 285–294
Derrida and, 105 on families and war, 264
on dialogism, 77, 80, 87n32, 110, 271 on grief, 288–289
on dialogue/language, 77, 79, 87n32, Jewish background of, 24, 40n32
110, 271 moral/narrative agency of, 258,
on docta ignorantia, 244 278, 305
on encounter of the other, 103 narrative imagination and, 300
on experience (Erfahrung), 45, 57, on novelist’s task, 277
85n1, 263 perpetrator fiction and, 23
on Heidegger, 6 on poetry, 286
on hermeneutics, 6, 28, 39n17, 46, son’s death, 257–258
85n3, 86n11, 99, 244 survival theme of, 281
on history, 10, 16, 212n5 To the End of the Land, 258–285
on interpretation, 10, 45, Guaraldo, Olivia, 117
87n24n99, 212n5
ontological turn of, 5–6 Habermas, Jürgen, 61, 125
on perspective-taking, 129 Hacking, Ian, 31
Ricoeur and, 105 Hämäläinen, Nora, 135, 147n49
on self-understanding, 45, Hawthorn, Jeremy, 27
103, 144n11 Heavey, Emily, 76
temporality of Heidegger, Martin, 5–6, 16, 38n7, 45, 46,
experience and, 57 57, 65, 98, 105, 192, 214n26
on truth, 213n6 Hermans, Hubert J. M., 77, 78, 272
on understanding, 10, 45, 109–110 hermeneutic circle, 47, 51, 62, 85n5,
Gehen, ging, gegangen (Go, Went, Gone) 91, 109
(Erpenbeck), 95, 106 hermeneutic imagination, 52, 86n11
German literature, Second World War hermeneutic justice/injustice, 91–92,
and, 149–150 128, 146n41
Giddens, Anthony, 61 hermeneutic narrative ethics, 2, 13,
Girard, René, 223 89–144, 299, 303, 306
global warming, 304, 306 hermeneutic psychology, 58, 146n29
[ 338 ] Index
hermeneutic resources, 52, 92, 93, 104, conceptions of, 8, 16, 167, 191–192,
119, 128, 199, 290, 304, 307 198, 201, 211
hermeneutics, origination of, 5–6. cultural, 16, 33, 37, 215n42
See also narrative hermeneutics; family, 150, 151, 160, 165, 167
phenomenological hermeneutics; narrative/fiction and, 1, 5, 35, 218
philosophical hermeneutics nature of, 15, 16, 23, 35, 94, 95, 181,
hierarchical models, in narrative 183, 193–194, 211, 222, 238
studies, 54–58 Nietzsche on, 149, 170
Hirsch, Edward, 286 philosophies of, 194, 212n5, 226
historical experience, 8, 24, 39n11, 194, repeating itself, 123, 195, 201, 210
195, 196 sense of, 13, 32, 35, 94, 179, 184, 190,
historical imagination, 32, 35, 93–94, 193, 210, 248, 304
179, 190, 195, 210–211, 300 history/literature relationship, 14, 15,
historical ontology, 31, 88n41 181–183, 218, 225, 248
historical world(s) history/time, experience of,
artwork in, 105–106 190–195, 211
breakdown of, 290 Hitler, Adolf, 22, 184, 187, 273
engagement with, 10, 127 Hitler Youth, 184, 188
fiction and, 15–17, 105, the Holocaust. See also Auschwitz; Nazi
141, 181–182 Germany; Nazis/Nazism/National
in Franck’s novels, 150, 160, 167, Socialism
171, 173 art and, 201
in Hundejahre, 193, 210–211 autobiographical narratives and,
identity in, 159 22, 301
individual experience in, 32, 58, 159 conditions of possibility for, 36, 190,
individual lives in, 32, 74, 128, 130, 201, 211, 220, 232, 237, 248
141, 300 cultural memory and, 24, 248
insights into, 94 empathy and, 166
limits of, 130 ethical imagination and, 21
metaphysic underlying, 16 eyewitness perspective of, 220
in the modern novel, 141 focalization of novels about, 131
narrative ethical identity in, 102 gendered experience of, 162
narrative imagination and, 128 Grossman on, 40–41n32
of Nazi Germany, 159, 160, 167, 179, identification and, 235
185–186, 193, 210, 219, 300 implication of, 209, 231
of Nazi-occupied Europe, 23–24, 219 instrumental rationality underlying,
of 1930s Danzig, 184 213n21, 237
perspective-taking and, 127–128, 167 legacy of, 165, 231, 273, 301
of the present, 25, 102, 303 in Les Bienveillantes, 224, 225,
resistance in, 276 227, 253n44
self-reflexive narratives in, 300, 303 literature/fiction and, 4, 37,
sense-making in, 2, 143 149–150, 232
as space of possibilities, 2, 16, 58, 94, narration/explanation of, 241–242
150, 167, 171, 182, 183, 189, 190, narrative imaginary of, 195, 223
210, 211, 219, 222, 300 perpetrators and, 22, 41n32, 122, 185,
webs of violence in, 173 217–218, 227
historiography/history-writing, 25, 96, power of storytelling in, 21
182, 214 realist/antirealist studies of, 244–245,
history 248, 254n52
“big,” 167 receiving narratives about, 129
Index [ 339 ]
0
4
3
the Holocaust (cont.) imagine-self perspective-taking, 126–127

representations of, 149, 166, immersion (narrative), 24, 36, 130–131,
245, 248 185–186, 191, 219, 222, 227–228,
silence and, 196–197 231–232, 247, 302
Steiner on, 4 implicated subject, 23, 25, 71, 81, 102,
trauma of, 122, 169 165, 190, 196, 200, 231, 272,
understanding of, 36, 150, 237, 239, 299, 305
241–242, 244–245, 248 implication, ethics of, 36, 179, 200–201,
Holocaust studies, 22, 217, 235, 204, 208, 209, 211, 282, 301
252n36, 254n52 Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on
Holzkamp, Klaus, 11 the Western Front) (Remarque),
Hopkins, Brent, 72 203, 300
Horace, 137 indeterminacy (of action/life/future), 53,
horizon of expectation, 16, 154, 194, 95, 166, 191, 192, 251n24
220–221 injustice, epistemic, 91–92, 152, 159
Horkheimer, Max, 188 instrumental rationality/reason, 138,
The Human Condition (Arendt), 65 189, 200, 225, 237
Hundejahre (Dog Years) (Grass), 35, 180, internal dialogue, 49, 75, 79, 259, 263,
186–189, 192–194, 196–199, 201– 265, 268, 271, 274, 297n3
202, 205–206 internarrativity, 62
Husserl, Edmund, 44, 57 interpretation. See also narrative
interpretation(s)
identification as engagement, 6, 7, 10, 46, 47
affective, 68, 87n26, 93, 207 hermeneutic conception of, 2, 6–7,
as appropriation, 252n36 9–10, 43, 44
concept of, 235–237 hermeneutic-Nietzschean conception
empathy and, 233 of, 34, 43–53
habits of, 301 literary, 9, 28, 47
identity and, 146n30 in medias res, 84–85
minimum, 246 narrative as, 19, 44
recognition as, 104 of others, 73
“identifications-with” process, 65, 66, Sontag on, 43–44
119, 236 interpretative continuum, 54–62
identities, as co-authored, 75 intersubjectivity, 14–15, 26, 34, 50, 54,
identity, 26, 41n42, 60, 63, 65, 66, 68, 69, 117–119, 124, 143, 153–155,
72, 75–76, 81, 100, 103, 111, 116, 159, 169, 172, 183, 264–265,
121, 146n30, 158, 236, 248. See also 278, 282
narrative ethical identity; narrative intertextuality, 62, 87n21, 227–229,
identity 238, 251n24
identity categories, 10, 154, 166, Isha Borachat Mi’bsora. See To the End of
172, 266 the Land (Isha Borachat Mi’bsora)
identity power, 112, 171 (Grossman)
imagination. See ethical imagination; Israel-Palestine conflict, 23, 36, 256, 259,
historical imagination; narrative 272–278, 285
imagination Iversen, Stefan, 239–240
imaginative resistance, 33, 36, 232
imaginative variations, 5, 79, 96, 142, Jameson, Fredric, 19
215n42, 307 Jaspers, Karl, 200
imagine-other perspective-taking, Johnson, Mark, 60
126–127, 146n39 Josselson, Ruthellen, 72
[ 340 ] Index
Kant, Immanuel, 13, 40n22, 107, Les fleurs du mal (Baudelaire), 228
145n22, 240 Leuveren, Bram van, 229, 233
Katz und Maus (Cat and Mouse) Levinas, Emmanuel, 13, 40n23, 41n37,
(Grass), 180 51, 86n10, 107, 108–109, 111, 224,
Kearney, Richard, 120 250n10, 250n13, 250n14
Keen, Suzanne, 4, 127 life/lives. See also possible lives
Kempen, Harry J. G., 78 as interpretative process, 63–64
Kidd, David Comer, 3–4 living and telling of, 8–9, 27,
The Kindly Ones. See Les Bienveillantes 54–74, 263
(The Kindly Ones) (Littell) performative dimension of, 73
Knausgård, Karl Ove, 22, 246, 247 life-story theory of identity, 70
Korthals Altes, Liesbeth, 7, life-writing, 68, 101, 103, 301
212n1, 252n35 The Limits of Critique (Felski), 29
Koselleck, Reinhart, 16, 194, 198–199 Lindemann, Hilde, 13, 76, 101, 125
Krimmer, Elisabeth, 167, 176n42 Lissa, Caspar J. van, 229, 233
Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure literature/history relationship, 14, 15,
Reason) (Kant), 107, 145n22 181–183, 218, 225, 248
Littell, Jonathan
LaCapra, Dominick, 163, 177n50, background of, 252n35
177n59, 237, 251n24 Les Bienveillantes and, 23, 36, 217–248
Lacoste, Charlotte, 233 minority status of, 24
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 187 moral implication and, 231
Lagerfeuer (West) (Franck), 167 perpetrator fiction and, 185, 227, 247
language realist tradition and, 244–245
conceptions of, 108 Locke, John, 66
as dialogical, 79–80, 271 logics of narrative, 12, 36, 301
nature of, 86n10, 271 Lothe, Jakob, 27, 230
non-subsumptive model of, 80, 110 Luckmann, Thomas, 99
in social contexts, 80
systems, 79–80 Macé, Marielle, 29, 46
as violent, 108–110 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 13, 26, 63, 71–73,
Lanzmann, Claude, 108, 217, 244, 245 98, 133
Latour, Bruno, 77, 144n8 Mackenzie, Catriona, 11
Laub, Dori, 115, 168–169 male perspective, in German literature,
Leake, Eric, 233–234 149–150
Le Doeuff, Michèle, 20 Mann, Thomas, 200
Le Roi des Aulnes (The Erl-King) The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann
(Tournier), 238, 249n1 ohne Eigenschaften) (Musil), 90
Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) Margalit, Avishai, 188, 210
(Littell) Markus, Hazel, 67
dimension of the possible in, 219–226 McAdams, Dan P., 70, 87n23, 145n28
empathy/identification/perspective- McGlothlin, Erin, 150, 233–236, 253n46
taking in, 232–239 McKim, Elizabeth, 60, 70, 106
multilayered readerly contract in, McLean, Kate, 71, 75
226–231 mediatedness of experience, 8–9, 45,
narrative perspective-taking in, 56–61, 83–84
245–248 memoir, 183, 228–229
questions without answers in, memory, cultural, 24, 25, 33, 34, 42n46,
239–245 95, 120, 149, 181–183, 215n42, 248
social diagnostics of, 237 memory, ethics of, 200, 210
Index [ 341 ]
2
4
3
memory fiction, 122 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 187

Merkel, Angela, 123 “narrating I,” 185–186, 199, 241, 243
metanarrativity, 24, 41n33 narrating self/selves, 55, 59, 263
migrant/refugee crisis, 25, 45, 58, 60, narrative agency
85n2, 95–96, 106, 123, 167, 247 autobiography and, 212
A Million Little Pieces (Frey), 183 co-authorship and, 71
mimesis, 17, 62, 87n20, 239, conditions of possibility for, 31,
252–253n41 173, 305
mimetic/anti-mimetic dichotomy, 218, cultural meaning and, 11–12
227, 239, 252–253n41 dialogical subjectivity and, 75
mimetic desire, 223 ethos of dialogue and, 306
Min kamp (My Struggle) (Knausgård), literature and, 106
22, 246 in Die Mittagsfrau, 170–171, 173
Momo (Ende), 118 in narrative hermeneutics, 97,
moral agency 100, 306
Arendt on, 159 narrative identity and, 66
in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, 172 narrative webs and, 14
conditions of possibility for, 14, 31, 35, notion/concept of, 11–12
46, 169, 173, 300 in perpetrator fiction, 305
development of, 41n43, 101–102 power dynamics and, 81
ethics and, 4, 13–14 sense of (the possible) and, 14,
in Franck’s novels, 35, 166, 91, 276
168–170, 300 socio-historical webs and, 272, 283
in historical worlds, 16 struggles over, 299
imagination and, 96, 128 in To the End of the Land, 276, 283
in literary worlds, 21, 169 narrative appropriation, 51, 107–108,
narrative for, 133, 170, 172 110–113, 116, 145n27, 171, 243,
narrative imagination and, 3 248–249, 305
in narrative therapy literature, 41n43 narrative dynamic, 36, 41n36, 124, 135,
narrative unconscious and, 276 166, 177n58, 184, 186, 218–219,
Nussbaum on, 135–136 225–227, 231–232, 237, 241, 245,
perspective-awareness and, 4 247, 251n19, 266, 294, 312
role of reason in, 139, 141 narrative empathy, 218
self-interpretation and, 11 narrative ethical identity, 102, 106,
social embeddedness of, 26 128, 133
as survival, 281 narrative ethics
temporal process of change and, 130 field of, 26–28, 94
Morson, Gary Saul, 5, 50, 95, 193 hermeneutic narrative ethics, 2, 13,
motherhood 89–144, 299, 303, 306
capacity for, 150, 160, 162, 168 of implication, 36, 179, 200–201, 204,
as socially conditioned, 152 208, 209
storytelling and, 160–161, 169 Phelan’s subfields of, 27
Musil, Robert, 90, 141 narrative experiences, 60–61
My Struggle (Min kamp) (Knausgård), narrative hermeneutics
22, 246 author’s development of, 2–3, 6–11,
myths/mythical narrative/frame, 12, 20– 15, 17, 43–144, 303
21, 99, 107, 118, 120, 124, 153, 197, conception of literature in, 28, 30, 239
227, 229, 237–239, 245, 251n24, critical theory/literary narrative
264, 286, 296, 300. See also family studies and, 6–7, 28–30
mythology; Nazi mythology cultural memory studies and, 33–34
[ 342 ] Index
dialogical conception of narrative and dialogic (cultivation of), 35, 118,
subjectivity in, 74–83, 303 156–157, 169, 172, 266–267, 270,
interrelations of interpretative 302, 306–307
practices in, 43–44 ethical dimensions of, 94, 128, 131,
narrative ethics and, 26–28, 89–144 139, 306–307
narrative philosophy and, 30–31 futurity of, 53, 153
narrative psychology and, 32–33 as hermeneutic imagination, 52
narrative understanding historical dimensions of, 94, 182–183
and, 111, 244 historical worlds and, 128, 131, 180,
non-subsumptive model of, 111–112, 182–183, 300, 302
115, 301 of the Holocaust, 23, 248
perspectivism in, 9–10 indoctrination and, 184
toward a, 5–11 “master narratives” and, 120
narrative identity moral agents/moral agency and,
Arendt on, 70 133, 141
autobiographical storytelling and, 34 narrative identity and, 21, 23, 141
breakdown of, 170 narrative in-betweens and, 35, 118
in children, 75–76 in narrative psychology, 32
construction of, 67, 75–76, 91, 169 narrative unconscious and, 18–21, 83,
development of narrative 91, 100, 155, 184, 307
competence in, 76 Nazi ideology and, 223
dialogical approach to, 13, 74–75, 77, Nussbaum’s approach to, 3, 19, 138
83, 156, 171, 202, 280–281 the past and, 180, 206, 211, 291
ethical identity and, 32 perpetrator-victim dichotomy in,
exploration of, 31 217, 305
identification-with and, 65 possible selves and, 163
as interactional, 66 post-Holocaust, 217
intersubjective dimension of, 69 sense of the possible
narrative imagination and, 21, 248 and, 20, 157, 220
narrative unconscious and, 21 shame and, 163
in narrative webs, 66 in shaping values, 128
in Nazi Germany, 160, 187, 189–190 strain of, 267
performances of, 76 as subversive, 201
as a process of reinterpretation, 65–66 temporality/temporal
Ricoeur on, 64 multidirectionality of, 20, 139
self-responsibility and, 99, 133 of the young, 202
sense of the possible/spaces of narrative in-between
possibilities and, 67–68, 171 affective fabric of, 281
social media and, 103 construction of, 123, 125, 223
subjectivity and, 65 cultural memory and, 120
in To the End of the Land, 281 cultural silence and, 167
narrative imaginary, 20–21, 24, 79, 82, cultural trauma and, 122
92, 133, 163–164, 189, 190, 192, dialogic, 155, 280
195, 201, 220 dialogue/dialogic process of, 120, 124,
narrative imagination 155–156, 255–256, 259, 268
of author/narrator/protagonist, 25 disruption/erosion of, 122, 124, 167
in autobiographical narration, ethically problematic/exclusive, 125,
206, 211 160, 172
in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, 197 ethical potential of storytelling and,
Brockmeier on, 20, 52 117–125, 172, 259
Index [ 343 ]
43
narrative in-between (cont.) narrative philosophy, 30–31

expansion/enrichment of, 125, 156, narrative psychology, 9, 25, 32–33,
240, 285 38n2, 42n44, 42n47, 59, 72, 86n13,
fragility of, 274 116, 296
mythologies and, 118, 153, 265 narrative reflection, 53, 100
narrative agency and, 21, 54 narrative(s)
narrative identity and, 172, 263 as an account, 48–49, 59, 60, 61, 72,
of Nazi Germany, 172, 223 100, 114
official stories of, 160 as culturally mediated interpretative
sense of connection and, 119 practice, 7, 10, 12–13, 44, 47–48,
as shared intimacy, 118 50, 53, 57, 81, 85
of socially progressive forces, 124 dialogical dimension of, 50, 64, 74–83
space of possibilities of, 117, 143, ethical evaluation of the potentials
284–285, 302 and dangers of, 14, 84, 89–144, 265
storytelling and, 117 explanatory force of, 49, 109, 111, 114
transformation of, 119, 123–124, 223, future-oriented aspect of, 34, 53
263, 268, 280–281, 284, 307 hermeneutic conceptualization of,
trans-subjective, 37, 278–280, 290, 43–44, 47–50
296, 302, 307 hierarchical models of, 8, 31, 54–58
narrative interpretation(s) imposition of order in, 8, 57, 277, 306
acts/activity of, 47–49, 61, 73, 264 interactional approaches to, 65,
agency in, 12 101, 124
complex examples of, 45 logics of, 12, 36, 48, 301
continuum of, 61 performative character of, 47, 76, 82
double hermeneutic and, 61 as practices of sense-making, 2–3
of experiences, 48, 59, 61, 84, 187, relation of life to, 9, 62–74
198–199 representational accounts of, 7, 53, 54
as interpretative practice, 44 narrative self-reflection, 55, 98–104,
in life-storying, 205 107, 144n17, 157, 196, 243, 269. See
narratives as, 15, 44, 52, 285 also self-reflexive narratives
narrative unconscious and, 83 narrative sense-making. See also cultural
past/present/future shaping in, 59, narratives
95, 205, 211 as collaborative and dialogical, 75
performative dimension of, 11, 64, as (connection-creating) activity,
82, 264 49, 264
in process of constituting cultural models of, 11, 48, 61, 79, 84
reality, 51–52 everyday, 53
representation in, 50–51 futurity of, 53
situation and, 73 as harmful or beneficial, 84, 265
as social acts, 47 limits of, 295
specificity of, 48 lost capacity for, 241
term usage, 49 as process of sharing experiences, 153
in To the End of the Land, 264, 285 storytelling and, 49, 265
traumatic experience and, 114 narrative therapy, 18–19, 32, 41n43, 101,
narrative mastery, 36, 241–242, 245, 113, 116, 145n28
248, 253n44, 253n46, 293, 302 narrative turn, 1, 38n3
narrative order narrative unconscious
history and, 238 (socio)cultural, 91, 231, 307
imposition of, 1, 68, 306 affective responses and, 275–276
representation of, 51 awareness of, 83, 94
[ 344 ] Index
blind perpetuation of, 91, 106, as webs of violence, 23, 97, 100,
265, 301 173, 273
of a certain historical world, 200 narrativist thesis/contention, 2, 55, 63,
concept of, 17–19 68, 84, 299
critical engagement with, 100 narrativity
cultural models/mechanisms in, 19, Braidotti on, 20
82, 90–91, 99 for/against arguments on, 1, 38n2, 55,
of the current world, 231 57, 143
horizon of expectation and, 220 identity and, 171
individual, 82, 83 masking of, 245
indoctrination and, 184 Ricoeur on, 141–142
literature and, 19, 106 Strawson on, 2, 55, 69, 86n7, 86n14
in narrative identity, 21 narratology
narrative imaginary and, 20–21, 163 cognitive, 8, 24, 33
narrative imagination and, 18–21, 25, distancing from interpretation, 7
91, 155, 157, 307 experience and, 54, 59
narrative webs and, 265, 307 history/past worlds and, 183
of petit bourgeois characters, 193, 195 humanist ethics and, 28
present consciousness of, 199 moral values and, 30
reflection and, 25, 100 “non-naturalizing,” 252–253n41
repression of, 198 rhetorical, 30, 39n13
sense of the possible and, 220 unnatural strand of, 239–240
shame and, 163 nationalist narrative, 22, 107, 192
(socio)cultural, 82 naturalizing narratives/narrative
narrative voice, 202, 233 strategies, 12, 36, 80, 113, 131, 187,
narrative webs 245, 300, 302–304
awareness of, 12, 14, 100, 307 La Nausée (Nausea) (Sartre), 1
as constitutive of ethical Nazi Germany
universe, 14 in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, 180, 184,
dialogical storytelling and, 255, 307 188, 204, 206–208
in historical worlds, 58, 210, 304 historical world of, 209–210, 219, 300
individual interpretations of, 74, 80 in Hundejahre, 187–189, 192–194,
life-writing and, 301 196, 198
as mediating experience, 60, 62 mechanisms of, 247
narrative agency and, 12, 81 narrative in-between of, 302
in narrative hermeneutics, 62, 97, 164 ordinary Germans in, 122
narrative identity and, 21, 102 sense of inevitability in, 191, 194
in narrative in-betweens, 119, 265 as space of possibilities, 35, 184–190,
narrative interpretation and, 57, 211, 248
84, 265 Nazi mythology, 171, 173, 187
narrative self-reflection and, 14, 23, Nazis/Nazism/National Socialism. See
100, 104 also the Holocaust; Nazi Germany;
in narrative unconscious, 18, 83 perpetrator’s perspective
power relations and, 171 ability to doubt and, 193, 203
relationship between individual in Les Bienveillantes, 218, 221,
subjects and, 44, 74–84 226–228, 237
self-interpretation and, 66 complicity with, 164, 176n44, 185
space of possibilities and, 58, 98 Heidegger and, 214n26
temporality of experience and, 57, 60 historical world of, 24, 159–160, 186
understanding of, 82, 102, 301 homosexuality in, 220
Index [ 345 ]
6
4
3
Nazis/Nazism/National Socialism (cont.) vs.subsumptive narratives, 12, 107,

in Hundejahre, 187–189, 192–194, 110–113, 112, 171, 295, 301–302
196–198 in therapeutic process,
ideology of, 192, 223–224 115–116, 145n27
individuals in, 225 in To the End of the Land, 265, 268,
in Lagerfeuer, 167 270–272, 277, 279
in Die Mittagsfrau, 158–160, 163–164, not-knowing, 244, 293, 294
167, 169, 171 not-yet(-real)/yet-to-be, 5, 16, 38n7, 52,
narrative identity of, 99, 172 194, 248, 280, 307
narratives/narrative imaginary of, nouveau roman, 51, 216n59
171, 195 Nünning, Vera, 186
in post-Holocaust narrative, 217 Nurius, Paula, 67
readerly engagement with, 246 Nussbaum, Martha, 3, 13, 19–20, 26, 29,
responsibility (collective) for, 200 93, 126, 127, 132, 134–139
in Le Roi des Aulnes, 238–239
silence and, 122, 158 Oksanen, Sofi, 161, 162
social reality of, 222 One Thousand and One Nights
state violence and, 245 (Scheherazade), 1, 168, 264
storytelling of, 21 On the Uses and Disadvantages of History
Nehamas, Alexander, 9 for Life (Nietzsche), 170
Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 139 ontological assumptions, 15, 27, 34, 56–
Nielsen, Henrik Skov, 15 57, 67, 84, 181–182
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6, 13, 69, 87n24, optimistic attachment, 93
108–109, 149, 170 oral testimonies, 119
Nietzschean-hermeneutic approach, 9, Ordinary Men (Browning), 244
11, 34, 43, 44–54, 84 Orestes myth, 227, 237–238, 300
Nofel mi-huts la-zeman. See Falling Out Oz, Amoz, 257
of Time (Nofel mi-huts la-zeman)
(Grossman) past/present/future (Vergegenkunft),
nonhuman (actors), 39, 40, 125, 195–200
224, 304 Pavel, Thomas, 182
nonreferential narrative/fiction, 15, 17, Payne, Martin, 18
179, 188, 227 Peeling the Onion. See Beim Häuten der
non-subsumptive ethos, 36, 110, Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion) (Grass)
116, 306 perpetrator fiction, 23, 36, 185,
non-subsumptive model of (narrative) 213n12, 218, 230, 234, 235, 236,
understanding, 49, 80, 110–113, 238, 249n1
145n21, 145n22, 145n25, 301 perpetrator’s perspective, 217–219, 228,
non-subsumptive narrative practices. See 232, 245, 248
also subsumptive narrative practices perpetrator-victim dichotomy, 21–25,
in dialogic storytelling, 91, 112–113, 149, 173, 273, 305
116, 278, 294–295, 305–306 perspective-awareness, 4–5, 35, 90, 125,
in Die Mittagsfrau, 171–172 128, 131–132, 302–303
language systems and, 80, 110 perspective-sensitivity, 4, 128, 131–132
as a mode of understanding others, 13, perspective-taking
35, 107–116, 301 affective dimension of, 132
narrative hermeneutics and, 301–302 as a condition for dialogue, 126
political affects and, 113 as dialogic engagement, 20, 24, 125,
in self-reflexive narratives, 12–13, 302 174, 302
storytelling and, 111 empathy and, 126, 233, 236
[ 346 ] Index
ethical potential of, 89–90, 132–133, power (social), 10–11, 16, 19–20, 23,
172, 245–246 25, 29–30, 44, 47, 71, 81–82, 84,
in hermeneutics, 129, 131. See also 88n37, 92, 97, 109, 119, 125, 130,
imagine-other perspective-taking; 143, 145n27, 160, 169, 171, 187,
imagine-self perspective-taking 189, 273, 278, 282
identification and, 236 presentism, 195, 214n31
imagination and, 125, 127–128, psychological narrativity thesis, 55
131–133, 267 psychology of reading, 33, 126
mediatedness of, 127–129, 132, 236 Puhdistus (Purge) (Oksanen), 146n35,
moral reasoning and, 133 161–163
narrative fiction and, 126, 128,
130–132, 246 questioning/question-asking, 9, 142,
Nussbaum on, 3, 20, 132 252n31, 270–272
other-oriented, 126–127, questions without
132, 146n39 answers, 239–245
in perpetrator fiction, 219,
235–236, 246 racism, 88n43, 121, 124, 151, 159,
perspective-awareness and, 125 176n42, 212, 223, 248, 296
in psychological literature, 126 Raggatt, Peter, 67, 78
storytelling as, 270, 285 Rancière, Jacques, 5, 16, 31
perspectivism, 9–10, 167 Randall, William L., 40n24, 58, 60, 70,
Phelan, James, 15, 27, 28, 41n36, 183, 87n29, 106, 146n32
226, 251n19, 294 raw experience, 8, 39n11, 56, 84
phenomenological hermeneutics, Razinsky, Lirian, 224, 226
44–45, 109 The Reader (Der Vorleser)
phenomenological selves, 207–208 (Schlink), 150
The Phenomenology of Love and Reading readerly dynamic, 130, 177n58, 219,
(Falke), 29 225–226, 228, 251n19
philosophical hermeneutics, 6, 10–11, 29, readerly engagement, 27, 36, 172, 217,
38n5, 46, 74, 77, 80, 85n3, 98, 129, 218, 221, 236, 246, 252n35, 264
139, 144n8, 244 reading fiction, 3–4, 6, 19, 27, 29–30,
philosophical imaginary, 20 39n13, 97, 104, 106, 118, 132, 134,
Phoenix, Ann, 9, 39n18 137, 203, 228, 235, 247, 300
phronesis, 38n5, 139–141 realist/anti-realist positions, in
Plato, 135–136, 139 Holocaust studies, 244, 254n52
The Political Unconscious (Jameson), 19 realist readings (of Les Bienvaillantes),
Polvinen, Merja, 131 227, 229, 240
Popkin, Jeremy D., 227 referentiality, 15, 17, 179, 181, 183,
populism, 25, 123, 134, 248, 296, 304 205, 225
positioning theory, 78–79 refugee/migrant crisis, 25, 45, 58, 60,
positivism, 6, 8, 39n11, 57, 59, 182 85n2, 95–96, 106, 123, 167, 247
possibility relationship, 11, 80 reification, 19, 40n27, 74, 82, 95, 99,
the possible. See sense of the possible; 222, 302
space of possibilities relationality, 13, 21, 32, 37, 65, 73–74,
possible/actual dichotomy, 14–17, 96, 117, 155, 272, 281–282, 296, 299,
181–182, 218 303, 306
possible lives, 9, 49, 67 reliability (of the narrator), 184–185,
possible selves, 67, 77–79, 83, 93, 154, 228–230, 251n22. See also unreliable/
163, 172, 301 unreliability
postclassical narratology, 7, 10 Remarque, Erich Maria, 199, 203, 300
Index [ 347 ]
8
4
3
resistance, 20, 25, 34, 100, 103, 119, 189, Rücken an Rücken (Back to Back)
190, 201, 203, 211, 217, 276, 299, (Franck), 152
300, 303 Ryan, Marie-Laure, 51, 131
responsibility, collective, 14, 102, 106,
122–123, 125, 185, 189, 200, Sanyal, Debarati, 217, 231, 250n13,
237, 296 251n29, 252n35
responsibility, taking, 63, 98–99, 180, Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1, 51, 52
185, 195, 200–201, 204, 208–209, Saunders, Max, 183
223–224, 226 Schechtman, Marya, 36, 56, 86n14,
retelling/reinterpretation of narratives, 87n26, 87n28, 206–208, 289
11–12, 34, 44, 55, 62, 64–65, 80, Scheherazade, 1, 168, 281
82, 84, 115–116, 168–169, 172, 199, Schiff, Brian, 32
265, 301, 303–304 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 69, 85n5, 129
Richardson, Brian, 225 Schlink, Bernhard, 150
Ricoeur, Paul Schnurre, Wolfdietrich, 201
on cultural memory, 215n42 Second World War
on “duty to remember,” 96 cultural memory and, 95, 217–218
on the ethical potential of literature, as cultural trauma, 21, 122
104–105, 138, 217, 232 culture of silence and, 122, 165
on ethics of memory, 200 displacement and, 95
on experience as mediated, 45–47 in German literature, 149–150
on fiction as laboratory, 141 novels in response to, 150,
on functions of narrative/storytelling, 206, 216n59
3, 17, 52, 133 perpetrator fiction and, 217–218
on futurity, 53 perpetrator-victim dichotomy
hermeneutics of, 28, 45–46, 47, and, 21–24
85n3, 105 representations of, 22, 122, 146n35,
on Holocaust fiction, 232 150, 218, 226
on horizon of the present/future, 57 storytelling after, 12
“imaginative variations” notion of, 5, traumatic legacy of, 21, 23–24, 146,
79, 96, 98 165, 206
key metaphors of, 144n9 Sein und Zeit (Being and Time)
on mimesis of, 17, 62 (Heidegger), 6
moral/social frameworks and, 13 self-alienating narratives, 276–277
on narrated life, 1, 98, 156 self-interpretations, 11, 18, 66, 68, 83,
on narrative identity, 64, 65 98, 103, 164, 284
narrative imagination and, 20, “self-interpreting animal,” 3, 66
138, 144n7 self-reflexive narratives, 12, 36, 94, 131,
on narrative order, 68 180, 185–186, 202, 206, 219, 227,
narrative/self-responsibility link 245–246, 300, 302–303, 307. See
and, 133 also narrative self-reflection
on past/present linkage, 199–200 self-responsibility, 99, 133
on possibilities in text, 52–53, self-understanding
104–106 autobiographical storytelling and, 101
on the reality relationship of, 182 cultural, 4, 27, 90, 106, 239, 282, 301
Riessman, Catherine K., 76 culturally available narratives and, 171
Ritivoi, Andreea, 86n15, 101, 119, 121 European, 209
Rorty, Richard, 13, 26, 120–121 Holocaust and, 209, 239
Rothberg, Michael, 22, 23, 33, 113, literature and, 29, 103–104, 106
144n4, 244, 245, 254n52 narrative hermeneutics and, 98–99
[ 348 ] Index
narrative’s contribution to, 4, 35, 77, as sense of the impossible, 287,
98–107, 301 296, 306
narrative self-reflection and, 99, as situational, 67
103–104 sense perception, 5, 44–45, 57, 58,
narrative unconscious and, 18 61, 108
possibilities and, 45 Shuman, Amy, 166
storytelling and, 98–107 sideshadowing, 50, 193, 222, 251n24
Strawson on, 2, 55–56 “Signposts of Fictionality” (Cohn), 181
traumatic experience silence
and, 114, 121 culture of, 35, 161, 165–170, 171,
understanding the other and, 196, 208
268–269 “double wall” of, 122, 165
Semprún, Jorge, 218 in Falling out of Time, 286, 293
sense-making practice(s), 2–3, 12, 48, 53, (his)stories of, 37, 112, 305
82, 93–94, 107, 111, 112, 144n11, victims/victimizers and, 112, 196
223, 304, 307 Silverman, Max, 33
sense of the impossible, 280, 287, 293, Simon, Claude, 94
296, 306 Smith, Ali, 118
sense of the possible social imaginary, 20
as an aspect of ethical, narrative and social interaction
historical imagination, 93–96 Brockmeier on, 124
culture of silence and, 171 dialogic process of, 75
(dialogic) storytelling/narrative narrative identity and, 67
practices and, 2, 52, 93, 96–97, 170, narratives in, 49, 117, 295
259, 284–285, 302 self as performed in, 72, 73, 76
differences of (within social in social media, 102
worlds), 16–17 storytelling as, 117, 294
diminishing/expansion of, 2, 4, 14, 35, social media, 59, 73, 100, 102–103
37, 89, 90–91, 97, 105, 119, 142– Socrates, 98
143, 154, 156, 157, 167, 171, 266, Sontag, Susan, 7, 43–44
278, 284–285, 300, 302, 306–307 Sools, Anneke, 67
ethical potential of narratives and, 14, space of experience, 16, 33, 58, 94,
89, 90–97, 142–143, 170 128, 184, 189, 194, 198–199,
in historical/actual worlds, 17, 94, 179, 209–210, 303
181, 183 space of possibilities
identity and, 14, 32, 67–68, 119 autobiographical narratives and, 205
imagining the perspective of the other in Les Bienveillantes, 220
and, 220 culturally mediated narratives
of moral agents, 4, 16 and, 171
Morson on, 5 dialogical, 2, 278, 296
ontological, epistemological, ethical, for different parts of population, 300
and social aspects of, 91 ethical universe as, 14
perspective-awareness and, 302 expansion and diminishing of, 2, 15,
“possibilitarians” and, 90 35, 293, 299, 302
real possibilities and, 5 gender system and, 153
relationship between narrative historical world as, 2, 16, 94, 150,
unconscious and narrative 167–168, 182–183, 211, 219, 222
imagination in, 18–20, 91 intersubjective world as, 90
sense of history as, 13, 35, 179, 184, moral agents in, 149, 194, 304
210, 248 “moral space” as, 98
Index [ 349 ]
0
53
space of possibilities (cont.) understanding others through,

narrative in-betweens and, 302 107–116
narratives in, 2 Strawson, Galen
Nazi Germany as, 179–180, 185, 189– approach to narrative of, 2, 8, 38n2,
190, 211, 219–220, 248 64, 86n7, 99, 196
for non-subsumptive dialogue, 272 Currie on, 86n13
the other’s world as, 132, 143 on experience as unmediated, 56, 64
past/present/future and, 95, 183–184, life/narrative relationship and,
194, 206 8, 31, 68
past world as, 181, 183–184, 206, on narrative self-reflection, 99, 196
248, 300 narrativity thesis of, 55–56, 68, 86n7
of the present, 94, 95, 211, 307 Ritivoi on, 86n15
question-asking and, 272 Schechtman on, 86n14
relational space as, 117 subjectivity
silence and, 167 dialogical conception of, 13, 74–76,
storytelling and, 293, 299 79, 83, 269, 272, 278, 303–304
transformation of, 155–156 Foucault on, 16
Steiner, George, 4 hermeneutic approach to, 43–44, 46
“The Storyteller” (“Der Erzähler”) narrative (and), 20, 41n42, 60,
(Benjamin), 117 65, 78, 81
storytelling relationality of, 272, 282, 303
as art of survival, 1, 35–36, 157– subsumptive narrative practices. See
166, 168, 177n64, 256, 260, 264, also non-subsumptive narrative
280–281, 285 practices
autobiographical, 34, 101, 200, in the Israel-Palestine conflict,
204–212 36, 277
community creation in, 4, 82, 93, 97, the logic of, 12, 306
117–118, 120–122, 124, 172, 307 monological, 116
as cultural self-reflection, 282 naturalizing strategies of, 113
dangers of, 1–2, 12, 14, 27, 89, in the Nazi mythology, 171
97, 112, 116, 125, 131, 133–134, non-subsumptive interpretation
142–143, 258 of, 295
developmental dimension of, 75–76, non-subsumptive narrative practices
100–102 and, 12, 112, 116, 302
evaluating the ethical potential/ as violent practices of appropriation,
problems of, 3–4, 12, 37, 89, 144, 112–113, 160, 277
156, 170–173, 219, 285, 295, 300 Sugarman, Jeff, 31, 88n41
as experientially driven, 106, 126, Suleiman, Susan Rubin, 185–186,
230, 232 213n13, 216n60, 233, 253n44
as form of agency, 292
as integral to motherhood, Taberner, Stuart, 209
160–161, 168 taking responsibility, 63, 98–99, 180,
limits of, 37, 156, 245, 256, 260, 285, 185, 195, 200–201, 204, 208–209,
300, 303 223–224, 226
as a mode of ethical inquiry, 133–142 Taylor, Charles, 13, 20, 26, 63, 66, 75,
narrative-in-between and, 117–125 98, 133
perspective-taking/awareness in, temporality
125–132 of dialogic process, 170
self-understanding and, 98–107 ethical reasoning and, 141
sense of the possible in, 90–97 of experience, 57, 60
[ 350 ] Index
in hermeneutic tradition of understanding, affective
thought, 198 dimension of, 46
of reader engagement, 138–139 understanding others, through
of understanding, 109 storytelling, 107–116
Terdiman, Richard, 33 unequal distribution of agency/
terror, age of, 25, 125, 304 possibilities/vulnerability, 10, 34,
terrorism, 45, 58, 125, 131, 133, 147n44, 40n20, 50, 52, 299, 305
231, 277, 305 unmediated experience, 56–57, 84
textual dynamics, 177n58, 226 unnatural narratology, 239–240, 252n41
theory of mind, 3, 38n5 unreliable/unreliability, 228–230
third-person narrative, 48, 73, 197, Uses of Literature (Felski), 29
202, 209, 218, 229, 232, 259, utilitarian approach, to ethics, 13, 26,
261, 263 40n22, 147n49
Time and Narrative (Ricoeur), 17
time/history, experience of, 60, 114, 157, Van Loom, Rens J. P., 78
190–195, 198, 211, 285 Vassilieva, Julia, 19, 116, 145n28
The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) (Grass), Velleman, J. David, 49, 109
180, 185 Vergegenkunft (past/present/future),
Tolstoy, Leo, 118 195–200
To the End of the Land (Isha Borachat victims/victimizers dichotomy, 273. See
Mi’bsora) (Grossman) also perpetrator-victim dichotomy
as an antiwar novel, 283 Villon, François, 228
dialogic storytelling in, 258–264, violence
284–285 circle of, 122, 238, 276
ethics of relationality in, 282 colonial/racialized, 217, 231
ethos of dialogue in, 284–285 of concepts/language, 108, 109,
Israel-Palestine conflict in, 272–278 145n19, 145n23
narrative agency in, 283–284 conditions of possibility for, 23, 249
non-subsumptive understanding in, destructability and, 37, 282
265–272 emotional, 173
storytelling as survival in, 282–283 experience of, 115
trans-subjective becoming-together histories/legacies of, 24, 34, 37, 113,
in, 278–281 149, 209, 272–273, 275, 301, 305
writing of, 23, 256, 258 mimetic desire and, 223
Tournier, Michel, 238 narrative mastery and, 248
trans-subjective space, 37, 124–125, in present world, 247–248
278–280, 284, 290, 296, 302, 307 sexual, 150, 162
trans-subjectivity, 37, 279 state, 245
trauma studies, 113–115, 151, 177n50 structural, 23, 114, 195
traumatic experience, 114–115, 151, structures of, 50, 81, 96, 100, 102, 112,
161–162, 168, 242, 261, 271, 138, 248
279, 287 webs of, 23, 173, 204, 282
traumatic past, 162, 180, 196, 198, 219, vulnerability, 10, 17, 34, 37, 50, 71, 97,
243–244, 262, 291, 305 136, 234, 255, 262, 281–283, 291,
traumatic realism, 245, 254n52 294, 295–296, 299, 302–306
triple hermeneutic, 62, 87n20, 103,
164, 265 Wajnryb, Ruth, 122
Trump, Donald, 22, 25, 103, 113, 121, Walker, Margaret Urban, 13, 26, 147n47
124, 133 Walsh, Richard, 15
truth value, 15, 181–182, 183–184, 205 Warnke, Georgia, 99
Index [ 351 ]
2
5
3
Weber, Max, 138 in representations of war, 149–150,

West (Lagerfeuer) (Franck), 167 161–162, 166
White, Hayden, 8, 57, 72, 94, 212n5 sexual violence and, 92, 162
White, Michael, 18 Women’s March, 103, 144n14
Wiesel, Elie, 196 working through (of traumatic
Wilkomirski, Binjamin, 183 experience), 33, 115, 121, 163,
Winnicott, Donald, 136 177n50, 280
Winterson, Jeanette, 2, 123–124
women. See also Die Mittagsfrau (The Yehoshua, A. B., 257
Blind Side of the Heart) (Franck)
experience of trauma by, 151–152 Zerubavel, Eviatar, 122
[ 352 ] Index

(Explorations in Narrative Psychology) Hanna Meretoja - The Ethics of Storytelling - Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and The Possible-Oxford University Press (2018)

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The Ethics of Storytelling

Explorations in Narrative Psychology

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© Oxford University Press 2018

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

1. Introduction: Toward an Ethics of Storytelling 1

in 2013–​2016, Kaisa Kaakinen, Ilona Hongisto, Mia Hannula, and Riitta

I gratefully acknowledge the permission from publishers to draw on the fol-

Historical Imagination, and Narrative Agency” (Narrative Works 6, 2016,

[2] The Ethics of Storytelling

[Narrative imagination] means the ability to think what it might be like to be

Cognitive scientists have recently sought to provide empirical support

of these skills, long-​term effects could be achieved by regular engagement

[4] The Ethics of Storytelling

TOWARD A NARRATIVE HERMENEUTICS

Hermeneutics refers to theoretical reflection on interpretation. It orig-

focused on interpretation and understanding as the methodological basis

placed hermeneutics in the center of his analysis of existence in showing that

After the existential-​ontological turn of hermeneutics, interpretation

[6] The Ethics of Storytelling

that is rarely thematized but seems to be very different from a hermeneu-

In order to become “historical” experience (rather than mere experience of

What is problematic in this narrow conception is that it ignores the his-

[8] The Ethics of Storytelling

Perspectivism—​the recognition that we always interpret the world from a

[ 10 ] The Ethics of Storytelling

NARRATIVE, AGENCY, AND ETHICS

From the perspective of narrative hermeneutics, cultural models of narra-

in narrative practices that perpetuate and challenge social structures. The

[ 12 ] The Ethics of Storytelling

Ethics explores different ways of responding to the question of how we should

a responsibility as storytellers and should reflect on the intersubjective

An ethics is enabled and invigorated by the capacity for transforma-

The ethos that animates my approach to ethics is that richer awareness

THE ACTUAL AND THE POSSIBLE

[ 14 ] The Ethics of Storytelling

can be verified with observations or documents. But what if reality—​past

[ 16 ] The Ethics of Storytelling

NARRATIVE UNCONSCIOUS AND NARRATIVE IMAGINATION

Language . . . influences . . . our interpretations of what happens to us by pro-

[ 18 ] The Ethics of Storytelling

[ 20 ] The Ethics of Storytelling

BEYOND THE PERPETRATOR–​V ICTIM DICHOTOMY

[ 22 ] The Ethics of Storytelling

[ 24 ] The Ethics of Storytelling

First, narrative ethics is in itself an interdisciplinary area of research,

[ 26 ] The Ethics of Storytelling

Literary Narrative Studies and Ethical Criticism

The hermeneutic ethos implies a commitment to the view that we can

[ 28 ] The Ethics of Storytelling

and rhetorical narratology, which perceive literature in terms of teaching

This book also contributes to philosophy of narrative or narrative philos-

[ 30 ] The Ethics of Storytelling

[ 32 ] The Ethics of Storytelling

Cultural Memory Studies

is mediated and involves an interpretative-​imaginative aspect. Imagination

OUTLINE OF THE BOOK

After this introductory chapter, Chapter 2 expands upon narrative herme-

[ 34 ] The Ethics of Storytelling

in 2013–2016, Kaisa Kaakinen, Ilona Hongisto, Mia Hannula, and Riitta

of these skills, long-term effects could be achieved by regular engagement

After the existential-ontological turn of hermeneutics, interpretation

Perspectivism—the recognition that we always interpret the world from a

can be verified with observations or documents. But what if reality—past

BEYOND THE PERPETRATOR–V ICTIM DICHOTOMY

is mediated and involves an interpretative-imaginative aspect. Imagination

1. “[I]‌l faut choisir: vivre ou raconter” (Sartre, 1978, pp. 61–62).

INTERPRETATION: A NIETZSCHEAN-H ERMENEUTIC APPROACH

A key insight of twentieth-century phenomenological hermeneutics is

According to Marie-Laure Ryan’s definition, for example, in narrative

Some narrative theorists (e.g., MacIntyre, 1984) characterize the future-

The aspiration to explicit Narrative self-articulation is natural for some . . . but in

While the empiricist-

narratively mediated nature of experience—the way in which, as Freeman

structure—it interprets interpretations—although the human sciences

Hermeneutic approaches acknowledge the existential-ontological signif-

[W]‌e do not cease to re-interpret the narrative identity that constitutes us in

I suggest that narrative identity is best understood as a non-essentialist

Narrative identity is a process that largely develops through identifications-

constitutive of identity. As “self-

Such a conception of narrative identity should be distinguished from self-

It is important to acknowledge that co-authorship is linked to narrative

imputed characters—roles into which we have been drafted. . . . Deprive

other people—their versions of what happened and how they experienced

We are born into webs of interlocution or into webs of narrative—from the