Multiplicity and conflict in the dialogical self: a life-narrative approach

[Extract] The telling of a definitive life story presents some serious dilemmas (Bruner & Kalmar, 1998; Freeman, 1993). Can one's narrative identity be captured in a single, grand, synthesizing story? Consider your own response to a request to "tell your life story." Taken seriously, the question might prove impossible to answer satisfactorily. Part of the problem is in the singularity and finality of the phrase your life story--as if there could be a definitive account. The phrase presupposes a narrative that is linear, integrated, and coherent, with all the facts about your life neatly tied together with a golden thread, a single narrative voice. I think this assumption is problematic. The story you tell will probably be but one story from a number of possibilities, and therefore the life story could never be encompassed by a monologue. In what follows I argue that the life story is really more like a conversation of narrators, or perhaps a war of historians in your head. This suggests that we must pay close attention to the synchronic, and not just the diachronic, in our efforts to understand the emergence of a narrative identity.