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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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the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
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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

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156 80 25 10 12 22
157 8
158 10
159 42 16 8 8
160 42 16 8 8
161 131 42 18 11 80
162 81 25 10.6 12 22
163 81 25 11.6 12 22
164 4 Retaken by a privateer, July 1655.
165 10 Sold, 1658.
166 8
167 14
168 10 Wrecked, 1659.
169 6 Sold before Nov. 1658.
170 47 19 10 12
171 14
172 76 24 10 11 20
173 47 19 10 12
174 123 46 17.2 21 64
175 Used as hulk at Plymouth in 1660.
176 12
177 8
178 6
179 Used as hulk at Portsmouth in 1660.
180 10
181 10
182 123.6 41 16.6 18 64
183 72 24 10 11 22
184 6 Sold before Nov. 1658.
185 12
186 74 23.6 9.9 11.6 26
187 16
188 6
189 22
190 60 26.6 11.6 20
191 50 14.6 5.6 5 6
192 5 6
193 5 6
194 50 14 5.6 5 6
195 5 6
196 85 25.6 10 12 28
197 8
198 20
199 72 23 8.6 10 14
200 10
201 12
202 20
203 12
204 124 41 18 20 70
205 109 33.9 15.8 17 44
206 108 35 13.11 16 52
207 1
Thus 207 new vessels were added to the Navy during these eleven years, of
which 121 were on the active list in 1660; besides 22 others still remaining of the
old Royal Navy and 17 more, originally of the same era, which had been used but
had been sold, wrecked, or lost in action between 1649 and 1660. We are told that
‘the principal thing the Long Parliament aimed at was to outsail the
Dunkirkers,’[1359] and the large number of light vessels of twenty-two guns, or
under, shows how earnestly they set themselves to this task. In a few cases the
names of old ships were altered—the Charles to Liberty, the Henrietta Maria to
Paragon, the Prince to Resolution, and the St Andrew and St George lost their
saintship. The Sovereign is, once or twice, called the Commonwealth, but here the
proposed change of name never became an actual one.
In October 1651 the Council of State were considering ‘some encouragement Alterations and
to be given to Messrs Pett for their success in contriving and building of Improvements.
frigates.’ The improvements consisted, we may be certain, in moulding the
under-water section on finer lines, and probably in reducing the height of the hull above water and
lengthening the keel by lessening the rake, fore and aft, and so diminishing the undue proportion the
length ‘over all’ bore to the keel. Such alterations would have tended to abate the pitching, from which
these old ships must have suffered terribly, to have given them a steadier gun platform, and to make
them more weatherly, although from the journal of the Gainsborough it appears that she, at any rate,
was nearly unable to beat to windward.[1360] At first the new frigates, of whatever class, were built
without forecastles, but experience led to the conclusion that they were advisable in the larger ships, it
being found necessary sometimes to run them up at sea, and eventually only fifth- and sixth-rates were
still built without them. But this was an advance on the old system, which had constructed the smallest
vessels on exactly the same plan as the largest. Beyond Pett’s improvements, which really belong to the
period of Charles I rather than to that of the Commonwealth, there was little progress in matters relating
to sails and the better adjustment of weights. Fore and aft sails are still rarely mentioned, and then only
in connection with small vessels, and there is no record of the introduction of any mechanical appliances
calculated to lighten or quicken the physical work necessary in handling a ship. The sail area was still
small for the tonnage, nor, in view of the crankness of the ships, did it appear possible to increase it.
The Sovereign, cut down in 1652, and then of 100 guns and 2072 gross tonnage,[1361] carried 5513
yards of canvas in a complete suit of sails;[1362] in 1844 the regulation equipment for a second-rate of
84 guns and 2279 tons (the Thunderer), was 12,947 yards. Of course the line-of-battle ship of 1844
would be in reality a much bigger vessel than the Sovereign, but the excess in length and breadth would
not alone explain the ability to bear more than double the extent of canvas.
As had been customary for at least 150 years, each ship possessed three boats—long boat, pinnace,
and skiff—which were respectively 35 feet, 29 feet, and 20 feet long in those belonging to second-rates,
and 33 feet, 28 feet, and 20 feet in third-rates. In no list of equipments or stores are davits mentioned.
The long boat was apparently still towed astern; it invariably was in 1625, since the Cadiz fleet of that
year lost every long boat in crossing the Bay of Biscay. How the other boats were now hoisted to the
ship is uncertain.[1363]
Early in the Commonwealth administration John Holland, one of the Navy Shipbuilding.
Commissioners, recommended that the service shipwrights should not be
allowed to keep private yards, seeing that if they were dishonest there was no way of tracing
government timber, or other materials, used for their own purposes, a reason which does not say much
for government methods of supervision. But the state yards were obviously inadequate to the demands
suddenly made upon their capacity, and recourse was necessary to the yards belonging to government
shipwrights and to private builders. In 1650 and 1651 the Pelican, Primrose, Pearl, Nightingale, and
Mermaid were bought in this way, the first at £6, 10s, the others at £5, 8s a ton.[1364] Vessels built in
private yards were subjected to continual inspection at the hands of the government surveyors, and, in
many cases, the materials were supplied by the Navy Commissioners, who only desired such prices for
them ‘as shall be moderate and fit between man and man.’
During 1651-53 Parliament was continually ordering new frigates to be commenced, and the master
shipwrights who possessed building slips seem to have tried to get the work placed in their own yards
rather than in the government ones. In April 1652, when two new vessels were to be commenced, Peter
Pett and Taylor recommended that they should be given out to contract, as there was not enough timber
in the government stores. Whatever may have been the knowledge or sense of duty possessed by
some of their subordinates, the Commonwealth Navy Commissioners were the wrong men upon whom
to try finesse, more appropriate to the preceding or following administrations. All that Pett and Taylor
obtained by their move was an intimation that they, at all events, would not be allowed to compete, and
this was followed by an urgent recommendation to the Admiralty Committee that, as there was in reality
plenty of timber available, the two men should be ordered to proceed with the work at once in the state’s
yards.[1365] On other occasions the London shipwrights combined to put pressure on the Admiralty by
refusing to tender below certain rates, and Edmond Edgar, of Great Yarmouth, based a claim to
consideration on the fact that he had cut in and broken down the combination.[1366] There are several
petitions, like this one of Edgar’s, from shipbuilders, for compensation on account of vessels turned out
from their yards larger than had been specified in the original contracts, and thereby exposing them to
loss. As the Admiralty tried to be just rather than generous in dealing with contractors, we may suppose
that the miscalculations, like those which occurred under Charles I, were due really to ignorance rather
than to a not very hopeful attempt to obtain larger profits by deliberately ignoring instructions. Country
builders, moreover, sometimes worked under difficulties they could scarcely have anticipated when
tendering. Bailey, who built two ships at Bristol, desired the government to authorise him to pay his men
more than two shillings a day, and thus free him from the liability to ten days’ imprisonment and a £10
fine incurred, according to the city ordinances, by those who paid more.[1367]
In accordance with the tendency of the time the decoration of ships was Decoration.
reduced to a minimum. Until 1655 the use of gilding appears to have ceased,
special orders being in some cases given that vessels under repair were not to have any gold used
upon them, and the cost of carved work in fifth-rates was fixed at £45, an amount which was not passed
without serious questioning. In 1655 this severe simplicity was, to a certain extent, relaxed, since, in
August, Richard Isaacson undertook the gilding and painting of two second-rates at £120 each. So far
as the outside was concerned, the figurehead, arms on stern, and two figures on the stern gallery were
to be gilt; the hull, elsewhere, was to be painted black, picked out in gold where carved.[1368] The Navy
Commissioners held that the decoration ought not to cost more than £80, being unnecessary and ‘like
feathers in fantastic caps.’ Figure heads were sometimes exuberant in style. The Naseby’s consisted of
Oliver on horseback, ‘trampling upon six nations.’
The following table gives the equipment in offensive weapons and stores for Relation between Tonnage
typical vessels of each rate; the scale was not implicitly adhered to, but it is the and Guns.
first sign of an attempt to establish a permanent relation between guns and
tonnage such as became afterwards almost invariable. The paper belongs to 1655, but it is not likely
that any material alteration occurred before 1660.[1369] The first establishment of third-rates was 140, of
fourth-rates 130, and of fifth-rates 100 men; these were subsequently raised to 160, 150, and 110 men
respectively:—
Double Barrels
Cannon Demi- Demi- Round
Vessels Culverins Sakers headed of Muskets Blund
Drakes cannon culverins Shot
Shot Powder
Sovereign
1st-rates[1370] Resolution 19 9 8 30 5 2580 720 330 300
Naseby
Triumph
2nd-rates Victory 6 0 24 4 1900 740 203 120
Dunbar
Speaker
3rd-rates Marston Moor 4 2 26 8 2080 670 180 120
Fairfax
Bristol
4th-rates Portland 24 6 8 908 462 100 60
Dover
Pearl
5th-rates Mermaid 18 4 660 260 40 0
Fagons
Cat
6th-rates Hare 8 240 40 14 0
Martin
The Fleets.
Of the large number of prizes passed into the service many had not been
built as men-of-war, and, as soon as the immediate need had ceased, were sold, if only for the
momentary relief the money thus obtained gave the harassed treasury. In one year, ending with October
1654, nine were sold for £6181. Notwithstanding the enormous increase in the strength of the Navy the
Commissioners found it hardly equal to the provision of the over-sea fleets, now required, and the fifty or
sixty cruisers in the four seas which replaced the half-dozen small vessels formerly considered
sufficient, and which number, relatively large as it was, did not succeed in entirely crushing the
enterprise of the Dunkirk and Stewart privateers. The recollection of what commerce had suffered from
piracy must have remained very lively, and, at the close of the civil war, strong summer and winter
‘guards’ were still maintained; in October 1651 there were thirty-six vessels cruising in home waters.
[1371] During the Dutch war every available ship was needed with the fleets, and the Channel was
sometimes so devoid of protection that two prizes, taken off the Land’s End in December 1653, were
brought up Channel to Flushing without, during the six days occupied in the voyage, and of which one
was spent in lying to off Dungeness, meeting a single English man-of-war.
When peace was made with Holland the protective cordon round the coasts was renewed, and
increased rather than decreased in strength during the last years of the Commonwealth. To illustrate the
way in which the ships were employed one station list for May 1659 may be quoted.[1372] In the Downs,
12, of 232 guns; watching Ostend, 3, of 70 guns; off the mouth of the Thames, 2, of 12 guns; between
the Naze and Yarmouth, 2, of 34 guns; off Lynn Deeps, 2, of 20 guns; between Yarmouth Roads and
Tynemouth Bar, 3, of 66 guns; on Scotch coast, 2, of 52 guns; with the mackerel boats, 2, of 24 guns;
with the North Sea boats, 1, of — guns; in mouth of Channel, 4, of 76 guns; between Portland and
Alderney, 2, of 26 guns; on Irish coast, 3, of 50 guns; on convoy service, 8, of — guns; and 6 others
have not their duties specified. The large increase in the effective of the Navy diminished the necessity
for hired merchantmen, and the need became less as the Dutch prizes were refitted for service. The
caste feeling which divides the professional from the amateur fighter was beginning to be strongly
marked among officers who had gone through the experiences of the civil war, and who by a succession
of events had been retained in the service of the state instead of being returned to mercantile pursuits,
as had been the case formerly on the cessation of warfare. Both these causes helped to do away with
the use of hired merchantmen, although at one time thirty or forty were in pay. Blake desired that not
more than two-fifths of the fleets should consist of hired ships, that they should carry at least twenty-six
guns, and be commanded and officered by approved men. The proportion does not appear to have
risen to this figure even before prizes became plentiful, and so eager was the government to adapt
suitable prizes that it did not always wait for legal condemnation, and sometimes found itself compelled
to make terms with the injured owners when the ship had been used and sold out of the service. After
long efforts the owners of the Golden Falcon, captured in 1652, obtained, in March 1659, a decree of
the Admiralty Court in their favour; but the vessel had been sold a year before, and the Navy
Commissioners were ordered to pay her appraised value when taken. Nor is this a solitary instance.
[1373]
In 1652 there was a survey of merchant shipping throughout the kingdom, but Merchant Shipping.
the resulting reports have not survived. In December 1653 there appear to have
been only sixty-three merchantmen, of 200 tons and upwards, in the Thames suitable for service; but
the size of these does not show much advance on the tonnage of the previous generation; one was of
600, four of 500, two of 450, five of 400, twenty-five of from 300 to 400, and the remainder under 300
tons.[1374] According to one (royalist) writer both the merchant navy and trade decreased under the
Commonwealth; but the customs receipts directly contradict the latter and inferentially negative the
former portion of his statement.[1375] Store ships and transports were paid for at the rate of £3, 15s 6d a
month per man, the owners sending them completely ready for sea. If a ship was meant to go into action
the state took the risk of loss, paid and provisioned the men, and supplied powder, shot, and any guns
necessary beyond the normal number. When stores were sent out as part of an ordinary trader’s cargo,
the cost of freight was, to the Straits of Gibraltar, from 40s to 44s a ton; to Alicante, 50s to 54s; to
Leghorn, 60s to 64s; and to Jamaica, £4.[1376]
Private enterprise turned naturally towards letters of marque as a lucrative, if Privateering.
hazardous, speculation. In July 1652 letters were restricted to owners able to
send out vessels of not less than 200 tons and 20 guns, but it was soon found out that this limitation
was almost prohibitive. Such privateers were further placed under the direct control of the admirals, and
compelled to keep them and the Council informed of their proceedings.[1377] Afterwards letters of
marque were more charily issued, since it was found that they were competing for men against the
regular service, much to the disadvantage of the latter, the looser discipline and larger chance of prize
money of the privateer being much more to the sailor’s liking. Frequently ordinary trading ships sailed
with letters of marque among their papers on the chance of some profitable opportunity occurring; but
from 1st August 1655 all such commissions were, without exception, revoked, in consequence of the
difficulty their possessors seemed often to find in distinguishing between the ships of enemies and those
belonging to friendly states. Thenceforward, although still at war with Spain, Englishmen acting under
them were to find themselves in the position, and liable to the punishment, of pirates.
Besides the losses of the Commonwealth Navy in the ships, from 1649 Caroline Ships lost or sold.
onwards, noted in connection with their names in the preceding list, the
following vessels of the old Navy were lost or sold; as well as various prizes dating from the civil war,
and merchantmen bought during the same period, not here entered:—
Bonaventure, lost in action.

Charles, wrecked.
Crescent, broken up.
Defiance, sold.
Garland, lost in action.
Greyhound, lost in action.
Happy Entrance, burnt at Chatham.
Henrietta, sold.
Henrietta Maria, burnt in West Indies.
Leopard, lost in action.
Mary Rose, wrecked.
Merhonour, sold.
Nicodemus, ”
Roebuck, ”
1st Whelp, ”
2nd Whelp, ”
10th Whelp, ”
The Bonaventure, Garland, and Leopard were lost to the Dutch, but the two former were burnt and
sunk when fighting under the Dutch flag in July 1653. The Merhonour, Defiance, and 2nd Whelp, all
three long laid up as useless, were handed over to Taylor in 1650, at a valuation of £700, in part
payment of his shipbuilding bill; the 1st Whelp was used for some time as a hulk at Deptford, and the
10th Whelp remained in commission till 1654. The Greyhound was blown up in action with two
privateers, in 1656, by her captain, Geo. Wager, when she was boarded and practically taken by 100 of
the enemy, who went up with her.[1378] The Henrietta Maria and Happy Entrance were burnt by accident
in 1655 and 1658; the Mary Rose was wrecked off the coast of Flanders in 1650, and the Charles off
Harwich in the same year.
Whenever ships were lost on the British coasts the authorities did their best to recover the stores,
and, in the case of the Charles, men were still engaged in 1660 patiently fishing for her guns. At first
Bulmer, a man whose name has been mentioned under Charles I as an inventor in connection with
maritime matters, was employed, but it was not until May 1657, after seven years of search, that he
triumphantly announced that he had discovered her exact position. He was succeeded by Robert Willis,
described as a diver, who was more fortunate in that he did at last recover at least two brass guns, for
which he was allowed 20s a cwt. As the Admiralty had been for eight years at the expense of a hired
hoy and the wages of the men occupied in work, it might have been cheaper to have allowed the guns
to remain under water. The methods used are not alluded to, but, as the diving-bell was described by
Bacon in the beginning of the century, it must have been a well-known appliance; and Bourne had
described a diving dress on the modern principle in 1578.
One other man-of-war, the Phœnix, belonging to Badiley’s squadron, was captured on 7th September
1652 by the Dutch off Leghorn, and gallantly retaken in November by eighty-two volunteers, under
captain Owen Cox, who boarded her at daybreak while at anchor amidst the enemy’s fleet. Cox did not
disdain to eke out the lion’s with the fox’s skin, since, in the afternoon, he hired ‘a bumboat or two with
good wine to go aboard and sell it cheap;’ the Dutch were consequently keeping a careless watch, but
fighting continued below for two hours after the ship was under way. Cox further promised £10 to each
man with him, but this was still unpaid in June 1653, and he then tells the Council of State that the men
‘persecute him to fulfil his engagement’; and Badiley wrote that ‘since their exploit they are very
turbulent and disorderly.’ Cox was granted £500 for his good service;[1379] he was killed in the action of
July 1653, while still in command of the Phœnix.
Complaints of piracy, in the strict sense, are very few during this period, and Piracy.
there is not a single reference to the presence of a Turk in the narrow seas. In
face of the Commonwealth Navy there were no more of such incidents as the sack of Baltimore. The
French, Dutch, and Spanish privateers, who kept our men-of-war continually on the alert, and
occasionally overpowered a smaller one, sailed under some sort of commission, either from their own
states or the Stewarts, and did not, therefore, possess that freedom from responsibility which in warfare
soon degenerates into savagery. The owners of the Constant Cavalier, for instance, cruising under a
commission from the nominal Charles II, had to give a bond for £1000 not to injure his allies or his loyal
subjects.[1380] That the Dunkirkers and others found privateering by no means so easy a road to fortune
as it had been in the days of Charles I is sufficiently shown by the number of their captured ships taken
into the national service, besides the loss of many more not considered suitable for that purpose. Their
best opportunity was during the Dutch war, when the cruisers were mostly withdrawn to strengthen the
fleets: but even then the government usually managed to provide convoys for the coasting trade.
English, Scotch, or Irish seamen taken in a privateer were summarily transported to the plantations.
[1381]
In 1656 for some reason, probably the effort to keep the fleets on foreign service at their full strength,
the guard round the coasts seems to have been temporarily relaxed, and the result was that ‘the
Ostenders and Dunkirkers begin to grow numerous.’ On the east coast they were so successful for the
moment that, dreaming hopefully that the old times were about to return, they desired some of their
released prisoners to ‘tell the Protector that while he is fetching gold from the West Indies they will fetch
his coals from Newcastle.’[1382] Oliver was not a safe subject for threats, and their spoon was certainly
not long enough to enable them to enjoy in comfort the meal they proposed sharing with him; at any rate
very shortly afterwards the war was carried into the enemy’s country by the blockade of Ostend and
Dunkirk, and there are no more lamentations about the number of them at sea, or the mischief they
were doing, until the very eve of the Restoration.
The administrative direction of the Navy was, at the beginning of the The Administration:—The
Commonwealth, placed in the hands of (i.) the Admiralty Committee of the Committees.
Council of State,[1383] (ii.) the Committee of Merchants of Navy and Customs,
and (iii.) the Commissioners of the Navy. The second Committee took no practical part in the
administration, was early requested to leave the management to the Navy Commissioners, ‘as
formerly,’[1384] and was dissolved in 1654. Warwick’s second appointment as Lord Admiral was
cancelled by a parliamentary ordinance of 23rd Feb. 1649, and the first Admiralty Committee of the
Council of State took over his duties from that date for the one year for which the Council of State was
only itself existent. This Committee was renewed yearly until the Protectorate, when ‘Commissioners of
the Admiralty and Navy’ were nominated by act of Parliament, and the control of the Ordnance
department was also given them.[1385] Their number varied but was seldom less than twelve or fifteen;
they met at first at Whitehall once a week, during the Dutch war once a day, and, from January 1655,
occupied Derby House at a rental of £100 a year. Following the fall of Richard Cromwell an act was
passed, 21st May 1659,[1386] nominally vesting authority in ‘Commissioners for carrying on the affairs of
the Admiralty and Navy,’ but power really remained in the hands of Parliament to which the
Commissioners had to submit the names of even the captains they appointed.
The brunt of administrative work and responsibility fell, however, on the Navy The Administration:—The
Commissioners, who, so far as may be judged from the letters and papers Navy Commissioners.
relating to them and their work, laboured with an attention to the minutest
details of their daily duties, a personal eagerness to ensure perfection, and a broad sense of their
ethical relation towards the seamen and workmen, of whom they were at once the employers and
protectors, with a success the Admiralty never attained before and has never equalled since. The
earliest Commissioners were John Holland, Thos. Smith, Peter Pett, Robt. Thompson, and Col. Wm.
Willoughby;[1387] the last-named died in 1651, and was replaced by Robt. Moulton, who himself died the
next year. In 1653, Col. Fr. Willoughby, Ed. Hopkins, and major Neh. Bourne, who, besides being a
soldier had also commanded the Speaker, were added to the first four. In 1654 Geo. Payler replaced
Holland, and from then there was no change till 1657, when Nathan Wright succeeded Hopkins. All the
Navy Commissioners, except Holland, had £250 a year, a sum for which they gave better value than did
the members of the Admiralty Committee for their £400 a year; but for 1653 each was granted an extra
£150 in consideration of the excessive and continuous toil of that year.
From the first they adopted a tone towards the Admiralty Committee which would hardly have been
endurable but that it was excused by an obvious honesty, and justified by superior knowledge. Early in
1649 they recommended that the rope-makers at Woolwich should have their wages increased by
twopence a day, but their letter was returned by the Admiralty Committee, probably with a reprimand.
This was not to be borne in silence, so ‘we have cause to resent that we are so misunderstood as to be
inhibited by you to do our duty.’ If the Committee has not itself power to make the order it can move
Parliament, ‘who will not see men want, especially as in the sweat of these men’s brows consists not
only their particular living but also that of the republic.... What interpretation soever may be made of our
actions by those that have the supervision of them we shall not fail to represent the grievances of those
under our charge when they represent them to us.’[1388] On 22nd May 1649 the admirals and captains
at sea were ordered to address the Commissioners direct on all administrative details, thus leaving only
matters of the highest importance to be dealt with by the Admiralty Committee. In some ways the
relative position of superiors and inferiors seems to have been reversed, for, on one occasion, we find
the Committee writing to the Commissioners about a course of action the former had decided on, that,
‘as you disapprove’ of such procedure, it was not to be adopted; and it frequently happened that the
Council of State communicated directly with the Navy Commissioners, ignoring the intermediate
Admiralty Committee.
During the Dutch war a Commissioner was stationed in charge of each of the principal yards—Pett at
Chatham, Willoughby at Portsmouth, and Bourne at Harwich, which last place, in consequence of the
operations on the North Sea and off the Dutch coast, had suddenly sprung into importance. Monk wrote
concerning Bourne: ‘It is strange that twenty ships should be so long fitting out from Chatham,
Woolwich, and Deptford, where there are so many docks ... when there have been twenty-two or more
fitted out from Harwich in half the time by Major Bourne.’[1389] There is a consensus of evidence as to
the way in which Bourne threw his heart into his work, and the success he obtained under difficulties
due to the want of docks and materials at Harwich and an insufficient number of men. Notwithstanding
Monk’s depreciatory reference to Chatham, Pett was very well satisfied with his operations there. A few
months before he had reported to the Admiralty Committee that he had graved nine ships in one spring
tide, without injury to ship or man; ‘truly it makes me stand amazed at the goodness of God in such
unparalleled successes.’
Besides their superintendence of the building, repairing, and fitting out of ships, the purchase and
distribution of stores, the control of the dockyards, and all the diverse minutiæ of administration in war
time, the Commissioners were called upon to maintain the not very rigid discipline of the service.
Hitherto all ranks had been allowed to do much as they pleased when ships were in port, but henceforth
no captain was to leave his command for more than six hours without the express permission of either
the Admiralty or Navy Commissioners, and during any such absence the lieutenant, or the master, was
to remain on board; for the first disobedience the penalty was a fine of one month’s pay, for the second
three months’, and for the third to be cashiered. Similar rules applied to all the officers; and men absent
without leave forfeited a month’s pay. The clerks of the check[1390] were to ‘take an exact account’ how
officers and others performed their duties, and once a week report to the Navy Commissioners, a
regulation which, if loyally obeyed, must have made the clerks popular. The clerks of the check attached
to the dockyards were to similarly watch the clerks on shipboard, and, in turn, report on them once a
week to the Commissioners.[1391] This system was akin to that of the sixteenth-century Spanish navy, in
which the duties were so arranged that each officer was a spy on another; admirable in theory, it did not
suit English idiosyncrasies, and these reports never took any practical shape.
From 2nd June 1649, the Navy Commissioners had occupied rooms in the victualling office at Tower
Hill, but in 1653 they found the annoyance caused by the proximity of the victuallers’ slaughterhouses
there to be unbearable. It was not, however, till the next year that Sir John Wolstenholme’s house in
Seething Lane was purchased for them for £2400, and became the Navy Office for a long period;[1392]
the Treasurer’s, now a quite distinct office, was in Leadenhall Street, and its lease was renewed in
February 1657 for eight years at a rental of £49, 6s 8d a year and a £700 fine. The next request of the
Commissioners was that their number might be increased, as half the members of the Board were
constantly away in charge of dockyards, and for this they ‘desire timely remedy or dismissal from our
employment.’ It has been noticed that three new men, of whom certainly two—Bourne and Willoughby—
were, in their sphere, amongst the ablest administrators who have ever served the state, were in
consequence added in 1653. Besides the Commissioners, Thomas White at Dover, captain Hen. Hatsell
at Plymouth, major Richard Elton at Hull, and major William Burton at Yarmouth, acting as Admiralty
agents, had nearly as much work and responsibility, and executed it as ably, as their more highly placed
colleagues.
In 1655 the salaries of subordinates at the Admiralty amounted to £1740, the secretary, Robert
Blackborne, receiving £250. The first secretary of the Admiralty Committee, Robert Coytmore, had £150
a year, of which £50 was regarded as an extra given on condition that neither he nor his clerk received
fees—a stipulation probably due to a lively recollection of the habits of Nicholas and his successor,
Thomas Smith. The Navy Commissioners had no secretary, and until September 1653 each
Commissioner was allowed only one clerk, at £30 a year—scanty assistance, considering the amount of
work thrown into their hands. From September the number was doubled, and two purveyors were
appointed to assist them in purchasing stores. The total annual cost of the Admiralty, the Navy Office,
and the chief officers of the four dockyards was £11,179, 9s 10d.[1393]
If we may trust a later writer, the sums spent on the Navy Office, which bore only a trifling proportion
to the naval expenses, sometimes reaching a million and a quarter, were not misapplied. Henry
Maydman, who was a purser under the Commonwealth, and Mayor of Portsmouth in 1710, wrote long
afterwards:—
In all the wars we had in the time of King Charles’s exile the Navy Office was so ordered
that a man might have despatched any affair almost at one board ... and with the greatest
ease imaginable, and cheapness too. For their public business was carried on with all
imaginable application, and it was a crime for any one to absent himself from his post.[1394]
So far as the intentions and efforts of the Navy Commissioners were concerned this was doubtless
true, but it is to be feared that the State Papers do not support the implication that money matters were
settled with the same ease as those relating to the routine of daily management, although that, of
course, was an imperfection for which they were not accountable, and over which they had no control.
To the full extent of their power they watched not only over the public interests, but also over those of
the men who, for the first time, seem to have looked up to officials of their position as friends and
helpers. Some of the appeals they listened to are embodied in a letter to the Admiralty Committee.[1395]
We have complaints daily made unto us by poor seamen pressed out of merchant ships
into the state’s service that they are grossly abused by their masters and owners in
pretending leakage, damage, or not delivery of their goods, whereby they keep their pay from
them, meanly taking advantage of the poor men’s forcing away by the state’s press masters
and not having time to get their rights, are by this means defrauded of their wages. We look
upon it as a very great oppression and have therefore thought good to acquaint your honours
therewith.
Shortly afterwards they had to write on behalf of merchants who had trusted them[1396]:—
It is not pleasing to us to fill your ears with complaints, yet we judge it our duty, while
entrusted with so great a share of the naval affairs, to again remind you of the emptiness of all
the stores.... We have not been wanting in obtaining supplies by means of fair promises, and
now we are hardly thought and spoken of by those who cannot obtain their money.
In one instance the ‘fair promises’ resolved themselves into a bill for £400 on account, which, said the
recipient, ‘has hitherto done me no more good than an old almanac.’ It has been remarked that the
position of all who were in the service of the state became more difficult as time passed, and money
became scarcer and scarcer towards 1660. When, in 1658, the Navy Commissioners were obliged to
pay—or promise—prices from 30 to 50 per cent. above the market standard, it may be supposed that
their situation had its own discomforts.[1397] Besides guarding the material interests, they had to review
the moral conduct, of their subordinates, and they were evidently shocked to be compelled to report to
the Admiralty Commissioners that captain Phineas Pett, clerk of the check at Chatham, was the father of
an illegitimate child. On another occasion Willoughby was inquiring whether a boatswain possessed two
wives.
After the resignation of Richard Cromwell Parliament interposed more directly in naval affairs, and the
Commissioners exercised less authority; on one occasion the agent at Chester, who went on board a
man-of-war to muster the men, was refused an opportunity to perform his duty, and told, in answer to his
threats, that ‘the power of the Navy Commissioners was not as formerly.’ A fact so plainly put must have
been generally recognised, and accounts for the comparative disappearance of the Commissioners
from the papers of the last year of the Commonwealth.
From 1st January 1651, Richard Hutchinson replaced Vane as Treasurer of The Administration:—The
the Navy under circumstances noticed on a previous page. He began with a Navy Treasurer.
salary of £1000 a year, in lieu of all former fees and perquisites, and the
appearance of his name in the State Papers is almost invariably associated with requests for higher pay,
or melancholy wails about the amount of work thrown upon him by the wars in which we were engaged.
For 1653 he was allowed an extra £1000;[1398] not satisfied with this he petitioned again in December,
and so successfully that, by an order of the Council, he was to be given, in 1654, £2500, and a further
£1000 for every £100,000 disbursed in excess of £1,300,000.[1399] That this man, who was merely a
glorified clerk, who was never required to act on his own initiative, and whose work demanded neither
energy, foresight, nor talent, should have received over £2500 a year, while the Navy Commissioners, to
whose organising genius was mainly due the rapid and complete equipment which enabled the English
fleets to be of sufficient strength at the point of contact, were rewarded with £250 a year, and a gratuity
of £150 for one twelvemonth, is one of those incidents which interest the impartial student of forms of
government. From January 1655 his pay was fixed at £1500 a year, with £100 commission on every
£100,000 issued above £700,000; a year later he tried to get this commission doubled, and to have it
allowed on his first three years of office, ‘I having much larger promises at the time.’[1400] A remark like
this, the ease with which he obtained his almost annual increments, and the fact that he was appointed
in spite of Vane’s opposition, taken together, lead one to suspect that he must have had some potent
influence behind him.
Among officers, captains were the class who gave most trouble throughout The Commonwealth
these years, the number tried for, or accused of, various delinquencies yielding Captains.
a much higher percentage of the total employed than that afforded by the men,
or by officers of any other rank. This was, perhaps, largely due to the rapid promotion necessitated by
the sudden increase of the Navy, commanders being chosen mainly for professional capacity, and, if
considered politically safe, few questions were asked about their religious or moral qualifications. Many,
again, had risen from the forecastle, and possibly brought with them reminiscences of the habits existing
in the Caroline Navy: others had been privateer captains, an occupation which did not tend to make
their moral sense more delicate. Professional honour was not yet a living force, and, in some orders
issued by Monk to the captains of a detached squadron, the threat of loss of wages as a punishment for
disobedience came after, and was obviously intended as a more impressive deterrent than, the disgrace
of being cashiered.[1401]
With one offence, however—cowardice—very few were charged; after 1642 few men wanting physical
courage were likely to force their way to the front. George Wager, who chose to blow up the Greyhound
rather than strike the English flag, had been a boatswain; Amos Bear, a boatswain’s boy; Robert Clay, a
carpenter; Heaton, a trumpeter’s mate; Badiley, Sansum, and Goodson, cabin boys; and doubtless
close inquiry would reveal many more examples. Four days before the execution of Charles the Navy
Commissioners wrote to Portsmouth, and presumably to other naval stations, ‘to entreat’ those in
charge to take care that all officers appointed were well affected to the Parliament, and authorising them
to suspend any suspected ones on their own responsibility.[1402] But the government was not
unforgiving; two of Rupert’s captains, Goulden and Marshall, commanded state’s ships,[1403] and
officers who had deserted in the mutiny of 1648 were received back into the service of the
Commonwealth. The following list, in all probability by no means complete, will show the large number
of captains whose conduct came under observation, and the character of their misdemeanours:—
Name Accused of Result
John Taylor Ordered to enter into recognisances to

Anth. Young Neglect of duty in action of come up for judgment if called upon.
Edm. Chapman Nov. 1652 [1404]
B. Blake
Thos. Marriott Embezzlement, 1652 Not known
John Mead ” 1653 ”
John Best Drunkenness and ” [1405]
cowardice, 1653
Wm. Gregory Embezzlement, 1653 ”
Jon. Taylor Signing false tickets, 1653 ”
Thos. Harris Neglect of duty, 1653 Cashiered
Jas. Cadman Killing one of his crew, 1653 Suspended for 12 months
—— Neglect of convoy duty, Not known[1406]
1653
Jas. Peacock Embezzlement, 1653 ”
Sam. Dickinson
” 1654 ”
Val. Tatnell ” 1654 ”
J. Clarke ” 1655 Cashiered
—— ” 1655 Wages suspended
Robt. Nixon Cruelty, 1655 Not known
J. Seaman Drunkenness, 1655 ”
Fr. Parke Theft from prizes, 1655 ” [1407]
Alex. Farley Drunkenness and ”

embezzlement 1656
J. Jefferies Embezzlement, 1656 Fined £60[1408]
Thos. Sparling ” 1656 ” £160
J. Lightfoot Fraud and violence, 1656 Not known[1409]
J. Smith Embezzlement and ”
drunkenness, 1656
Rich. Penhallow
Making out false tickets, Amount to be deducted from his wages
1656
Jas. Cadman Embezzlement, 1656 Fined[1410]
W. Hannam Cowardice, cruelty, and Not known
incapacity, 1656
John Best Drunkenness, 1656 ”
Robt. Nixon Cruelty and embezzlement, ” [1411]
1657
Hen. Powell Embezzlement, 1657 Severely admonished
—— Drunkenness and Not known
blasphemy, 1657
J. Vasey Drunkenness, 1658 Charge withdrawn[1412]
— Davis Selling prize goods, 1658 To refund
Robt. Saunders Came home without leave, Cashiered
1658
Thos. Drunkenness and theft, Not known
Whetstone 1658
Rowland Bevan Embezzlement and carrying ”
cargo, 1658
—— Carrying cargo, 1659 ”
Pet. Foote. ” 1659 ” [1413]
Robt. Kirby Drunkenness and theft, ”

1659
—— Carrying cargo, false ”
tickets, 1660
It is curious to find that, in 1657, two ex-captains, Mellage and Baker, were in prison as Quakers. In
cases of embezzlement the sentence of a court-martial, where ascertainable, appears to have been
usually confined to fining the accused the value of the stores stolen, or stopping the amount from his
wages. The custom was commencing of trying commanders, who lost their ships by misadventure,
before a court-martial, instead of accepting their explanations, or holding an informal investigation at
Whitehall, as had previously been done; and once a captain was sent before a court because his ship
went ashore, although she came off without damage.[1414] This must be almost the first occurrence of
that form of inquiry. Log books were now compulsory, and were sent up to the Navy Commissioners on
the return of the ship; by an order of 2nd Feb. 1653 an advocate, who conducted prosecutions in courts-
martial, was attached to the fleets. It will be noticed how often drunkenness is an article in the foregoing
charges, and this weakness seems to have been common in all ranks, from captains down to ships’
boys. Among these naval papers there are very few indications of the existence of Puritan fervour or
even of ordinary religious feeling; the great mass of men and officers aimed at pay and prize money,
gave strenuous service when the former was punctual and the latter plentiful, and became heedless and
indifferent when they failed. Sailors have been always much more interested in their material prosperity
in this world than the prospects of their future welfare in the next. Nor does the rule of the saints appear
to have spiritualised the proverbial hard swearing of the service.
It is, however, from this period that dates that sense of solidarity among Inception of Class Feeling.
officers and men which is at once the sign and consequence of an organised
and continuous service. Hitherto the permanent executive force in peace time had consisted of a few
subordinate officers and some 200 or 300 shipkeepers, many of whom were not even seamen. When a
fleet was prepared, the ships were commanded by captains for whom sea service was only an episode,
and officered and manned by men who came from, and were immediately sent back to, the merchant
service on the completion of their cruise. But between 1642 and 1660 every available English sailor
must have passed a large portion of those years on the state’s ships; and the captains and officers were
kept in nearly continuous employment, with the result of the formation of a class feeling, and the growth
of especial manners and habits, characteristic of men working under conditions which removed them
from frequent contact with their fellows. The numerous notices in Restoration literature of the particular
appearance, modes of expression, and bearing, stamping the man-of-war officer—references never
before made—show how rapidly the new circumstances had produced their effect.
When captains showed themselves so ready to steal it might have been The other Officers.
expected that officers of lower rank would follow, and even improve upon, the
pattern set them, but this did not prove to be the case. Although, of course, there are many flagrant
cases recorded, the number of officers charged with fraud or theft is not only relatively less, considering
the much larger aggregate employed, than under Charles I, but also absolutely smaller for any equal
series of years. Experience, gained during the civil war, had led to closer inspection and the introduction
of safeguards which made theft neither so easy nor so free from risk, and further precautions were taken
under the Commonwealth. Embezzlement by a captain could not be prevented, it could only be
punished: but the regulations which made it easy for him might make it difficult for his gunner or
boatswain. The first step, taken in 1649, was to raise the wages of those officers who were in charge of
stores, a measure recommended long before by Holland and every other reformer. In 1651 the Navy
Commissioners were directed to consider how the frauds, still numerous among officers, might be best
dealt with, and this was probably the cause of an order the next year that sureties should be required
from pursers, boatswains, and others for the honest performance of their duties.[1415] These sureties
were usually entered into by two persons, and were sometimes as high as £600.
That some such method was necessary, at least with the pursers, is evident from the following
catalogue of their ‘chief’ abuses, drawn up by the Navy Commissioners in 1651:[1416] (1) They forge
their captains’ signatures; (2) make false entries of men; (3) falsify the time men have served; (4) sign
receipts for a full delivery of stores and compound with the victualling agents for the portion not
received; (5) do not send in their accounts for one voyage till they are again sailing; (6) charge the men
with clothes not sold to them; and (7) execute their places by deputy while they stop on shore. The
principal reforms suggested by the Commissioners were that bonds should be required, that stewards
should be employed for the victualling, that pursers should in future sail as clerks of the check, with
limited powers, and that all their papers should be countersigned by the captain. These measures were
all adopted, but a further recommendation that a pillory should be erected near the Navy Office for their
especial use was not, apparently, acted upon. When one purser openly declared that he cared not how
the seamen starved if he could ‘make £500 or £600 a year out of their bellies,’ it was full time to apply to
his kind the treatment exercised by governments on such dangerous idealists as constitutional
reformers.
The Commissioners had set themselves a hard task in the inculcation of honesty, for that sentiment
which still regards lightly cheats on a government was strongly against them. When Dover was
searched, in 1653, large quantities of stolen cordage, sold from the ships, were discovered, and Bourne
found that ‘these embezzlements are so common that the people declare that they think it no wrong to
the state.’ Still in the long run they were more successful than their predecessors had been, and the
trials for embezzlement became fewer after 1653. Their treatment of the pursers had the best results,
judging from the small number of those officers who came up for judgment; these gentlemen did not at
all like the new rules and at first mostly refused to sail as clerks of the check. For reasons unknown,
unless it was that they had become more trustworthy and that the new system was in some respects
cumbrous, the clerks were abolished in 1655 and the pursers reinstated in their old powers, pecuniary
guarantees in the shape of the bonds still being required from them.[1417] It must have been a very new
and unpleasant experience to some of these men, who many of them remembered the free hand they
were allowed before 1640, to find themselves before a court-martial for acts they had come to look upon
as natural to their places. One steward attempted to evade an accusation of embezzlement by declaring
that the rats had eaten his books; he might have improved his defence by producing some of the
victuallers’ ‘salt horse,’ and showing that his books, being tenderer and more nutritious, were more likely
to tempt the rats. In the trial of another we have some account of the mode of proceeding. The prisoner,
Joshua Hunt, was tried under the twenty-eighth article of war before Lawson and twelve commanding
officers, and was himself sworn and examined. By the twenty-eighth article the character of the penalty
is left to the decision of the court, and Hunt was given the option of making restitution or of undergoing
punishment. In making his report, Monk remarked that the prisoner had only been found out in that
which most stewards did, and that he would be sent up to London to give his friends or sureties the
opportunity of making amends; if they failed to do this he was to be returned to the fleet for corporal
punishment at the decision of a further court-martial.[1418] This form of sentence was very frequent, and
gunners, boatswains, and stewards were ordinarily fined the value of the stores stolen, and committed
to prison until it was paid.
The wide discretion left to the courts-martial led to great inequality in the sentences, especially when
an example could be made without losing the stores or their money value. A carpenter was tried for
theft; he confessed to the intention, and partly to the act, but returned the articles before arrest. He was,
however, ordered to be taken from ship to ship in the Downs, with a paper describing his offence affixed
to his breast, the paper being read at each ship’s side, to be thrice ducked from the yardarm, and to be
cashiered. Obviously it was more profitable and less dangerous not to stop halfway in theft. In 1653 is
found a rather remarkable sentence: Wm. Haycock, carpenter’s mate of the Hound, was, for
‘drunkenness, swearing, and uncleanness,’ ordered, among other things, ten lashes at the side of each
flagship. Haycock has the distinction of being the first recorded victim of the form of punishment which
afterwards developed into the devilish torture known as ‘flogging round the fleet.’ It became
comparatively common during the reign of Charles II.
At Chatham, in 1655 the authorities appear to have discovered and broken up a gang of receivers, of
whom one had an estate of £5000 obtained from thefts from the ships and yards. A hoyman, Dunning,
confessed to having conveyed 500 barrels of powder from the men-of-war at Chatham and Deptford
within four years. When pressed for particulars, he exclaimed, ‘Alas! shall I undo a thousand families?
Shall I undo so many? I did not think you would put me upon it to do so!’ Finding that this appeal,
instead of silencing, only whetted his examiners’ curiosity, he had at last to name eighteen ships whose
gunners had given him powder to remove.[1419] The Admiralty employed detectives of their own to find
out thefts, but on more than one occasion these men turned thieves themselves. The aforesaid Dunning
bought a cable from one of them; another was found ‘to have unduly abused his trust,’ but a third was
granted £15 for proving the larcenies of captain Cadman. Sometimes, when the amount was small, the
Admiralty, instead of bringing offenders to trial, deducted the estimated value of their embezzlements
from wages;[1420] evidently punishment was very uncertain in extent, but the practical impunity of former
times could no longer be reckoned on.
In some few instances the Admiralty had to deal with difficulties of another nature among the officers.
Richard Knowlman, a gunner, and described as a Quaker, wrote to the Commissioners that he had
served by sea and land from 1641, and was still willing to continue in any other capacity, since ‘I would
be free to act against all deceit ... for I see most men, especially those in the navy and of most rank and
quality, are corrupted.’ Knowlman could not have expressed less respect for the average official had he
enjoyed access to the State Papers, but on the whole his was one of the very rare eras when such
doubts were unjust. Another master gunner had, for two months, refused to fire a gun, ‘lest blood might
be spilt,’ and a third insisted on preaching to the crew of the Fame, who by no means appreciated his
amateur ministrations. In three instances chaplains are found accused of drunkenness, but their
presence on board ship was not invariable, and their influence appears to have been very slight. One
was tried for forging Monk’s signature.
The habits of half a century were not to be at once overthrown, but after 1655 The Commissioners’
references to thefts became far fewer; and the Navy Commissioners could Success.
congratulate themselves on having done much to extinguish customs which
had gone far to destroy the vitality of the former Royal Navy. The want of trust, that long experience had
shown to be justifiable in gunners, carpenters, and boatswains, who had been, and were still to a certain
extent, treated as officers, may have been one reason why lieutenants were now always attached to
ships, except fifth- and sixth-rates. Another may probably be found in the growing demand for scientific
seamanship, an accomplishment the former class had little opportunity of acquiring. Whatever the
cause, the effect was to thrust the gunners and their compeers lower down in the social scale, to lose
them that respect on shipboard they had hitherto possessed, to lessen their authority, and so quicken
the downward movement. We are told that, a generation later, it was as usual to strike them as to strike
the men, and that they had to ‘fawn like spaniels’ on the lieutenants to retain favour or position. The
lieutenants must have been found much more satisfactory; in the whole series of papers relating to this
period there is no instance of one being tried by court-martial, and only one in which such an officer got
into any trouble. His captain put him in irons, but the reason is not given. Lieutenants were occasionally
appointed to the naval service in the reign of Elizabeth, but the Dutch war may be taken as the period
where their position became permanent. In June 1652, Sir Wm. Penn, then vice-admiral, writing to
Cromwell, gave expression to the unanimous desire of his colleagues that such a rank should be
allowed in all ships carrying 150 men.
Another difficulty the Commissioners had to contend with was the forging of seamen’s tickets, an old
form of crime which grew in extent with the employment of so many more men. The Navy
Commissioners, in advance of their time, recognised that the only legal penalty, death, was too severe,
and practically prevented any punishment.[1421] The Navy department was not the only one which
suffered from these forgers, who were all more or less connected with each other; in the same year
forgeries of public faith bills to the amount of £115,000 were discovered. Some of these men were in
league with clerks in the Navy and prize offices, and obtained the necessary papers and information
from them. At a later date one of the gang confessed, when in prison, that the total of the public faith bill
and other forgeries was nearly £500,000.[1422] In 1656 a new plan was tried: ‘to prevent the many
frauds and deceits formerly practised,’ the Commissioners were ordered to send the Treasurer, daily or
weekly, an abstract of all the bills or tickets they signed authorising payment of money. Subsequently the
Admiralty Commissioners obtained power to themselves commit offenders to prison. Nicholas
Harnaman, for instance, was sent to Bridewell with hard labour ’till further order,’ for counterfeiting
tickets.[1423]
Officers’ pay was raised in March 1649, and again in 1653, after which latter Officers’ Pay.
date there was no alteration.[1424] It then stood per month at:—
1st Rate 2nd Rate 3rd Rate 4th Rate 5th Rate 6th Rate
£ s d £ s d £ s d £ s d £ s d £ s d
Captain 21 0 0 16 16 0 14 0 0 10 0 0 8 8 0 7 0 0
Lieutenant 4 4 0 4 4 0 3 10 0 3 10 0
Master 7 0 0 6 6 0 4 13 8 4 6 2 3 7 6 [1425]
Master’s mate or pilot 3 6 0 3 0 0 2 16 2 2 7 10 2 2 0 2 2 0
Midshipman 2 5 0 2 0 0 1 17 6 1 13 9 1 10 0 1 10 0
Boatswain 4 0 0 3 10 0 3 0 0 2 10 0 2 5 0 2 0 0
Boatswain’s mate 1 15 0 1 15 0 1 12 0 1 10 0 1 8 0 1 6 0
Quartermaster 1 15 0 1 15 0 1 12 0 1 10 0 1 8 0 1 6 0
Quartermaster’s mate 1 10 0 0 10 0 1 8 0 1 8 0 1 6 0 1 5 0
Carpenter 4 0 0 3 10 0 3 0 0 2 10 0 2 5 0 2 0 0
Carpenter’s mate 2 0 0 2 0 0 1 16 0 1 14 0 1 12 0 1 10 0
Gunner 4 0 0 3 1 0 3 0 0 2 10 0 2 5 0 2 0 0
Gunner’s mate 1 15 0 1 15 0 1 12 0 1 10 0 1 8 0 1 6 0
Surgeon 2 10 0 2 10 0 2 10 0 2 10 0 2 10 0 2 10 0
Corporal 1 15 0 1 12 0 1 10 0 1 10 0 1 8 0 1 5 0
Purser 4 0 0 3 10 0 3 0 0 2 10 0 2 5 0 2 0 0
Master Trumpeter[1426] 1 10 0 1 8 0 1 5 0 1 5 0 1 5 0 1 4 0
Cook 1 5 0 1 5 0 1 5 0 1 5 0 1 5 0 1 4 0
When Parliament began the rapid construction of new ships some of its Guns and Ordnance
members may have had misgivings about getting the crews to man them, but Stores.
few probably anticipated the future difficulties in procuring the guns wherewith
to arm them. Geo. Browne, for so many years the royal gunfounder, was still almost the only maker, and
his works were unequal to the increased demands.[1427] In March and April 1652, when war appeared
certain, 335 guns were immediately required to equip only part of the Navy,[1428] but the authorities
were already reduced to such straits as to be compelled to send searchers about London to try to find
ordnance.[1429] A month later some of the inland strongholds were disarmed, and 84 brass and 544 iron
guns thus obtained; the sale of ordnance taken in prizes was strictly prohibited, and, in the course of the
year, guns were hired at ten and twelve shillings each a month. In December the ordnance officials
announced that 1500 iron pieces, weighing 2230 tons, at £26 a ton, were required, the same number of
carriages at from 21s to 31s 3d each, 117,000 round and double-headed shot, 5000 hand grenades at
2s 6d each, 12,000 barrels of corn powder at £4 10s a barrel, and 150 tons of breechings and tackle at
£50 a ton.[1430] To meet these wants they had in store only 121 guns and 34,000 rounds.[1431] In
February 1653 the contracts were made for these guns, but, very soon after they were entered into, the
officials saw that the deliveries would be at ‘a vast distance from our pressing occasions,’ for not only
was the Tower empty but the ports were also destitute of munition, and, at Portsmouth, they were in
April ‘at a stand’ for powder and shot.
All that Browne and Foley could promise was to deliver 140 guns in October, 190 in February 1654,
254 in June, 230 in October, and 86 in June 1655; but, as 500 were still to be sent in on old contracts,
their engagements could hardly be relied on. Fifty tons of shot and 5000 hand grenades they promised
for June, 50 tons in September, and 100 more by March 1654. In the meantime ships intended to serve
as armed merchantmen were actually waiting uselessly for 117 guns, which the Ordnance department
could not procure anywhere.[1432] The immediate outlook for powder was no better, since there was
instant demand for 2780 barrels and only 500 in store, while the contractors were only bound to supply
660 barrels a month. Here, however, the further prospect was more favourable, as there were many
powder-makers at work and the government could purchase quantities at Hamburg.
The staff of the Ordnance office was very much larger, proportionately, than that of the Admiralty. It
employed, at yearly salaries, a surveyor, £194; clerk, £215; storekeeper, £216; clerk of the delivery,
£166; master gunner of England, £121; keeper of the small gun office, £66; messenger, £60; two
furbishers, £12 each; and twenty labourers at £21 each.[1433] Its management had mended
considerably since 1640, but the improvement did not avail to save its independence in 1653 when it
became a department of the Admiralty. In February 1654 matters were so far better that there were 2359
barrels of powder and 38,000 round and other shot in hand, but still no guns in reserve. There are no
complaints about the quality of the powder supplied during the Dutch war, but, in 1655 and 1656,
accusations against the makers, who were said to ‘use some sleight to make it Tower-proof on delivery,
but it does not long continue good nor abide change of weather,’ became numerous. All that the
authorities could do was to call upon the manufacturers to make it good, or, if they preferred, take it
back with a licence to export it abroad; 6827 out of 15,098 barrels recently furnished were defective,
and, by an order of 2nd April 1656, the Council gave the contractors the choice between these courses
and being committed to prison. The makers, however, had something to say on their side. Like most
other naval purveyors they had not been paid, and even to get any money on account were sometimes
compelled, under threats of still longer postponement, to repair Hamburg powder at 17s a barrel when
the real price should have been £2, naturally with unsatisfactory results. Some attributed all the mischief
to the Hamburg importations, but most of them seem to have gone into the business without any expert
knowledge, simply with a view of profiting by the sudden demand for war material.[1434]
The form of reparation exacted was manifestly unfair: instead of each maker being required to
substitute good for whatever bad powder he had sent in they were called upon to replace it in proportion
to their contracts. Thus Josias Devey was made liable for 461 barrels instead of the 141 which were
faulty in the number he had supplied, and apparently he would have fared just as badly if his powder
had been excellent down to the last pound.[1435] As some of the manufacturers had delivered 50 per
cent., or more, of inferior quality, the probable explanation of this not very honourable proceeding is to
be found in the fear of the Council that the worst culprits would be pecuniarily unable to make amends if
assessed at their full liability. Wapping seems to have been a manufacturing district, since, in July 1657,
there was an explosion of powder mills, or stores, there which injured many people and damaged 846
houses to the extent of £10,000.
The enlargements and improvements of the dockyards were not as The Dockyards.
considerable as might have been expected in view of the increased number of
ships, and the space required for their accommodation. These requirements were partly met by the
greater use made of Plymouth, and making Dover and Harwich stations where ships might obtain
provisions and minor repairs. Harwich, largely used for a few years in the middle of the sixteenth
century, had been found of some service during the civil war, but the movements of the fleets in the
North Sea, and off the coast of Holland, brought both it and Dover into prominence. The latter port was
not utilised till 1653, and was never very freely used, although the quarterly accounts sometimes
reached £700 or £800; both it and Portsmouth were supplied with stores from Deptford. Bourne, from
the date of his appointment as Navy Commissioner, took up his residence at Harwich, and remained
there till March 1658. Monk’s testimony to his ability and success has already been quoted, although he
had none of the appliances available in the older yards. But in 1657 ground was rented from the
corporation, for a permanent government yard and wharf, on a ninety-nine year lease at £5 a year.[1436]
Plymouth was employed mainly for victualling the ships on the western Channel station, as Dover was
for those eastwards, and, to a certain extent, for repairs, although its exposed roadstead was no
favourite with captains whose vessels were fit to put to sea. Blake evidently did not like it; ‘the
unsafeness and hazard of this road, which to us is worse than a prison, is enough to scare us hence.’
One way of gauging the relative importance of the dockyards is to compare the stores in hand at a
given date. We are enabled to do this for February and June 1659, as follows:—[1437]
Chatham Woolwich Deptford Portsmouth Plymouth Harwich

Anchors 108 129 62 17 13
Masts 356 724 269 498 95 67
Cables 106 29 272 70 42 63
Loads of timber[1438] 1500 322 416 508 [1439] 79
Tree-nails 80,000 122,000 93,000 2000
Compasses 180 144[1440]
Hemp 100 tons 75 tons 63½ tons
Noyals canvas 23,000 yds. 10,600 yds. 2000 yds. 4850 yds.
Vittery ” 1800 ells 25,000 ells 380 ells
Ipswich ” 272 bolts[1441] 5½ bolts
English ” 240 bolts 7650 yds. 370 yds.
Tar and pitch 30 lasts 99 barrels 95 barrels
Hammocks 900 1200 700 2020
Owing to want of money the magazines were very low at this date, but the relation shown here would
doubtless always exist. Harwich and Plymouth can refit ships which have suffered in spars, fittings, or
canvas; Chatham, Woolwich, and Deptford build or repair, while Portsmouth is equipped for all
purposes. Hitherto all masts had been obtained from the Baltic, but in 1652 the government tried the
experiment of sending two vessels to New England for them, and the results were so satisfactory that
henceforth a proportion of masts from the colonies is found in all the lists of dockyard stores. The
English canvas is elsewhere described as west country canvas, and was principally made in
Somersetshire; its manufacture was due to Geo. Pley, afterwards government agent at Weymouth and
governor of Portland, who successfully urged its use upon the Admiralty. It cost 1s 7d or 1s 8d a yard,
and was dearer than French canvas, but considered better.[1442]
In 1653 there was a double dry dock at Chatham, Woolwich, and Deptford respectively,[1443] and one
at Blackwall, probably in the East India Company’s yard; these were the only docks directly belonging
to, or available by, the state. No addition appears to have been made to Chatham yard except the
purchase of a wharf and storehouse adjoining the old dock in 1656.[1444] In October 1653 a contractor
from Chatham was either repairing an old, or constructing a new, dock at Deptford;[1445] and in 1657
some wharves were built there along the waterside.[1446] A new dry dock was ordered for Woolwich in
1653[1447] and completed the next year;[1448] storehouses were built in 1656;[1449] and two years later a
lease was taken from John Rymill, butcher, of London, of one acre of land, known as Chimney Marsh,
on the east side of Ham Creek, ‘next to the state’s yard,’ for ten years, at £4 a year.[1450] The sizes of
the yards may, perhaps, be inferred from the number of watchmen attached to each—Chatham, 32;
Deptford, 18; Woolwich, 16; and Portsmouth, 13.
Portsmouth, if the smallest of the chief yards, became under the Dockyards:—Portsmouth.
Commonwealth one of the busiest and most important. In June 1649 one of five
new frigates was ordered to be laid down there; this vessel, the Portsmouth, was duly launched in 1650,
and, with the doubtful exception of the Jennett, in ‘new making’ at Portsmouth in 1559, was the first
man-of-war of the modern Royal Navy built at that place since the Mary Rose and Peter Pomegranate of
1509 were first floated in the harbour.[1451] The dry dock so often recommended and ordered under
Charles I was, however, not yet existent. It was urged that one-third of the Navy ought to be
permanently stationed at the port, but in 1652 the Commissioner in charge complained that there was
not room for the stores required for the few ships usually there. From a survey of 1653 we obtain, so far
as names go, a statement of the number of buildings in the dockyard; they are upper and lower
storehouses, upper and lower hemp houses, block loft, old rope-maker’s house, office and nail loft,
canvas room, hammock room, kettle room, iron loft, tar house, oil house, sail loft, and top-makers’ and
boat-makers’ house.[1452]
Less than twenty years earlier Russell had found that work done at Portsmouth was 100 per cent.
dearer than at the other yards, but Willoughby had altered that, and now boasted that he could build 20
per cent. cheaper than elsewhere, although all the skilled artisans required in naval work had to be sent
down, there seeming to be as yet no population attached to or living on the dockyard. He desired that
five and a half acres of adjoining ground should be purchased, a rope yard erected, and the whole yard
surrounded by a brick wall 73 perches in length.[1453] Therefore in 1653 and 1654 the Navy
Commissioners were directed to take a lease of an acre and a half of the ground recommended, to set
up a rope-yard, and to build the wall.[1454] In December 1655 Willoughby put before the Commissioners
the difficulty in carrying on the ordinary work, ‘we wanting the benefit of a dock,’ and at this time the
staff, recently reduced in strength, numbered 180 men. In the following April Bourne and captain John
Taylor, a shipwright of Chatham, were sent down to consult with Willoughby as to the best position for a
dry dock which was to be ‘forthwith made.’[1455] On their report an order issued in August that one of
sufficient capacity to take third-rates was to occupy the situation of the existing graving dock, and that it
was not to cost more than £3200, of which the town, presumably in the hope of attracting trade and
inhabitants, was willing to contribute £500.[1456] In November Taylor was instructed to go to Portsmouth
and superintend its construction, but he energetically protested that he knew nothing about dock-
building and would, under such circumstances, only make himself ridiculous. It was therefore put in the
hands of Nicholas Poirson, who signed the contract on 24th November, by which he undertook to
complete it by the following 20th July, for £2100, the government providing the materials and the
corporation £500 of this sum.[1457]
There were still a sufficient number of abuses in connection with the Shipwrights and Workmen.
dockyards, but the flagrant thefts customary under Charles I had been largely
diminished. Members of the Pett family occupied responsible positions in the three home yards, and
either they used their power to ill purpose, or their favour with the authorities was no passport to the love
of their subordinates. In 1651 there was what would now be advertised as a great scandal at Chatham;
all the chief officers, and many of the workmen, were accusing each other of misdeeds in a way which
necessitated a governmental commission of inquiry, empowered to take evidence on oath. The light in
which the Petts were regarded is shown by a remark made by one man to another that he dared not
speak, ‘for fear of being undone by the kindred ... they were all so knit together that the devil himself
could not discover them except one impeached the other.’ The result of the inquiry was a resolution that
all the accused, on both sides, should retain their places, a decision more likely to be due to the
impossibility of displacing experienced officers when war was imminent than to any inability to form an
opinion.
The yearly salary of the master shipwright at Chatham was £103, 8s 4d, Deptford the same, and
Woolwich £70. The building programme of the government naturally tempted these men to add to their
salaries the profits to be made by having private yards for the construction of men-of-war. Holland
pointed out that this led to the shipwright’s absence from the state’s yard, to the exchange of good
government workmen for bad of his own, and that usually a frigate turned out from a shipwright’s yard
cost the country twice as much as one from a dockyard.[1458] Holland commented on another evil, the
existence of beerhouses in the dockyards, ‘necessary at first, now one of the greatest abuses in the
Navy.’ At least one ‘searcher’ was employed to prevent theft from the dockyards; but, judging from the
small number of such cases reported, the precautions taken or the higher standard induced in the men,
had greatly altered former conditions for the better. In one instance, however, the want of honesty
shown by two men was attributed—it is painful to have to confess here—to their habit of reading ‘histrye
books.’ The wages of shipwrights and caulkers were raised in April 1650 from 1s 10d to 2s 1d a day,
and again in 1652 to 2s 2d; they appear to have been punctually paid to a later date than the seamen,
but in 1656, when they also were beginning to suffer from the emptiness of the treasury and their wages
to fall into arrear, the Council, with the dry humour of officialism, ordered ‘an exact and punctual
inspection and examination’ quarterly of their accounts. By 1658 they had, mostly, twelve months’
wages owing, but their murmurs were not nearly so loud as those of the seamen. Frequently during
1659 they were working half-time or less, for want of materials. In March 1660 there were not 100 yards
of canvas remaining at either Woolwich or Deptford, the contractors would not supply more without
ready money; and we may assume that other necessaries were equally lacking.[1459] During part of
1659 there was only one forge going at Portsmouth, John Timbrell, the anchor-smith, having received
no money for two years, and having been compelled to dismiss his men, being unable to procure iron on
credit. Timbrell was mayor of the town in 1662, so that the Restoration apparently relieved him of his
troubles.
In September 1658 the Happy Entrance was destroyed by fire at Chatham, a mishap attributed to
carelessness on the part of the men at work on her, and the absence of supervision of the superior
officials. This caused the promulgation of an order the following month that no member of the superior
dockyard staff should absent himself without leave from the Commissioner, and he only by permission of
the Admiralty or Navy Commissioners, with a general penalty of dismissal for disobedience.[1460] This
order was to be framed and hung up in each yard. White’s invention of 1634 of iron mooring chains,
noticed previously, was now taken up by the government, and some were laid down at Chatham,
Deptford, and Woolwich for ships to ride at, two to a chain. Mooring places for the use of merchantmen
were granted to White, Bourne and others at a rental of £5 a year.[1461] The dockyard chains weighed 2
cwt. 2 qrs. 14 lbs. to a fathom, cost fivepence a pound, and were guaranteed for two years.[1462] In 1658
a boom was ordered to be placed across the Medway at Upnor, but there is reason to believe that the
order was not carried out.
Among the Commonwealth experiments was that of using the wood and iron Dean Forest.
ore of Dean Forest for the manufacture of iron for the supply of the dockyards
and private purchasers. As a ton of iron could be made there for £3, 10s, and a ton of shot for £4, and
sold respectively at £7 and £9, the enterprise was more profitable than most government undertakings.
[1463] In 1656 the stock in hand was valued at £9446, which stood as net gain, all expenses being
cleared;[1464] but, as Major Wade, who was in charge, thought that one or two hundred tons of iron
thrown upon the market ‘would surfeit the whole country,’ it was rather a book profit than an actual one.
However, from September 1654 to March 1659 Dean Forest supplied the Navy with 701 tons of shot
and 88 tons of iron fittings; and from Sept. 1656 to April 1660 with 2300 tons of timber and 123,000 tree-
nails,[1465] the saving thus effected being alone a sufficient justification of the new department. The
plentiful yield of timber suggested the advisability of building frigates on the spot, and the Grantham was
launched at Lidney in 1654; she was followed by the Forester, and then the Princess remained long in
hand, since Furzer, the master shipwright, was receiving only £2 a week of the £15 necessary to meet
expenses. In October 1659 he wrote to the Navy Commissioners that instead of attending to his duties
he was forced to be away two or three days in the week trying to borrow money.
The following table, drawn up from the Audit Office Declared Accounts, Naval Expenditure.
shows the general expenditure for this period in round figures:—
Amounts
received and
Already owing Victualling Deptford[1466] Woolwich Chatham Portsmouth Wage
paid by
Treasurer
£ £ £ £ £ £ £ £
1649[1467] } 432,000 233,500 149,000 8700[1468] 8786 23,768 5292
1650
1651 446,000 129,000 51,000 10,163 7776 19,089 3783
1652 629,000 238,000 88,000 10,900 8381 22,744 6860 304
1653[1469] 1,445,000 335,000 269,000 12,600 12,500 29,000 13,700 227
1654 1,117,000 450,000 230,000 11,700 13,500 22,500 15,700 225
1655 587,000 466,000 70,000 8700 7600 21,800 7700
1656 791,000 473,000 209,000[1470] 8000 7000 20,000 7000
1657 746,000 506,000 9000 10,300 19,400 6200 311,000
1658[1472] } 1,442,000 714,000 11,800 18,000 25,000 9000 447
1660
1660 1,056,000[1473]
The Commonwealth began its naval administration hampered by a debt of £233,000, and it will be
seen that, with the exception of 1650, during which year the arrears were partly paid off, it steadily grew
in amount. But comparing the national revenue, which had also to support a standing army, with the
sums devoted to the Navy, the wonder seems to be that the debt was not larger. For the financial year
ending 29th September 1657 the total public income was £1,050,000, and of this £809,000 was
assigned to naval purposes; for 1658 £951,000, of which the Navy took £624,000.[1474] The receipts for
1659 were put at £1,517,000,[1475] and the Navy estimates at £848,000[1476].
The strain began to be most seriously felt from 1653, when, in September, the Navy Commissioners
warned their chiefs that £1,115,000 was required before 31st December, without including the cost of
the vessels on the stocks or that of the winter fleet; no provision, they said, had been made for this and
‘we find it necessary to lay before you the daily clamours we undergo for want thereof.’[1477] In October
1654 the Admiralty Commissioners apprised the Protector that the credit of the Government was so
greatly impaired that stores could not be obtained except for ready money; yet £1,117,000 in cash
passed through the Treasurer’s hands in this year. This sum was procured from many sources—excise,
£262,000; treasurer-at-wars, £424,000; customs, £162,000; ‘profits arising by probate of wills,’ £1163;
commissioners for Dutch prizes, £2029; commissioners for prize goods, £44,000; treasurer at Drury
House, £16,000;[1478] Col. Barkstead,[1479] £44,000; from the exchequer, £131,000; and defalcations
and sale of stores, £31,000. Notwithstanding these receipts the Admiralty Commissioners wrote in April
1655 to the Council that they had only been able to pay seamen’s wages, that all other debts remained
unpaid, and that the yards were exhausted of stores.[1480] Straitened as they were, the Council, two
months later, were not deterred from ordering 2000 Bibles for the soldiers in the West Indies, although
the fact that the commissioners of the treasury had to ‘consider’ how they could be paid for seems to
imply that Bibles were no more to be obtained on credit than cordage. On at least one occasion Oliver
appears to have himself advanced £10,000 to the Navy Office.[1481]
The debt increased, but the revenue did not show the same elasticity; all that the Admiralty
Commissioners could do, themselves almost daily invoked by the Navy Commissioners, was to carry on
the appeal to the Council, ‘finding every day a sad increase of the just complaints of several persons for

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The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative

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Books in the Series

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

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,

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