The life story, modeled on the fictional narrative, gives the illusion of completeness, even as it selects and combines the elements of a life in such a way as to weave a plot that imposes a necessity on contingent facts. Insofar as the life story is always a reconstruction of memory, can we really "write life"? At this stage of our reflection, however, it seems to us that the question would benefit from being reversed: is it possible not to write life? Is it possible to escape the narrative of life? Isn't life a narrative? Indeed, the definition of life as a narrative has become a commonplace in contemporary discourse. So, after denouncing the abuses of personal literature, and then its aporia, we should consider the contemporary apology of the life story, along with the inevitable resistance it provokes.
In an article entitled "A Fallacy of Our Age. Not every life is a narrative" (2004), the English philosopher Galen Strawson argues against what he sees as the dominant theory of our time, indissolubly linking subjectivity and narrativity. In France, the theory of the self as narrative is associated with Paul Ricœur and the conception of the experience of time linked to the form of narrative that he develops in his trilogy Temps et récit. According to this "narrativist" thesis, the essence of man lies in his awareness of himself as a temporal being, endowed with a history: narrative is the means by which he gives meaning to his life, by providing a temporal framework for the contingent events that make it up. The idea that our experience of the self is essentially narrative is dominant among Anglo-Saxon philosophers such as Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre
MacIntyre; according to them, it is the coherence of the self-narrative, the unifying overall point of view, that gives moral meaning to life: there would be no "good life" without narrative unity. Galen Strawson denounces this confusion between a retrospective psychological description, according to which the self is a narrative, and a forward-looking moral, ethical prescription, asserting that narrative apprehension of life is necessary for living well.
Roquentin declares in La Nausée : "A man is always a storyteller [...] he tries to live his life as if he were telling it. But you have to choose: to live or to tell. Yet it's not living one's life as a story that makes Roquentin "nauseous". Sartre's thesis thus balances two opposing positions: on the one hand, alienation from the constraints of storytelling; on the other, the loss of meaning, the existential anguish that arises from the absence of a life story.
