Searching for the Self: Classic Stories, Christian Scripture, and the Quest for Personal Identity

by Adrian T. Smith

The story of Dennett the robot-designer also hints at a broader reason why we often need to revise our personal narrative. This reason surfaced in chapter 11 of this book: the approximate fit between tidy narrative genres and the messiness of the real world. In order to plan our life trajectory, we need a plot. But standard plots are merely ways of entering into conversation with our past, a conversation where our past threatens to have the last word: “While local and broader narrative formats offer familiar or conventional guidelines for how stories might unfold, they do not determine individual storylines. Who and what we are is not frozen in available discourses of subjectivity.”674 This dialectic, between genre and reality, is neatly illustrated by the “narrative elasticity” of the standard recovery template offered in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.675 In the standard AA narrative template, “hitting bottom” is the crucial turning point. Before you can receive help—runs the original script—you must reach a point of total despair, where you realize alcohol is costing you everything, up to and including your very life. However, in later versions of its script, AA modifies its template, as a result of its work among milder alcoholics. AA now recognizes gradations: some alcoholics only hit a “high bottom,” while others hit (the original) “low bottom.” One patient employs an elevator metaphor to capture this relativity. Descent into alcoholism is like a downward trip in an e...