The opposition between the organic life story , characterized by narrative continuity and progression, and the episodic life story , a framework for the discontinuity of the self, overlaps with the canonical distinction between, on the one hand, autobiography, the grand life story on the model of Rousseau's Confessions , and, on the other, the self-portrait, an episodic narrative made up of micro-narratives centered on pieces of life in the manner of Montaigne. It can also be compared to Coleridge's distinction - which he borrows from Schlegel - between the organic work , whose development is conceived on the model of arborescence and illustrated by the formula "Such as the life is, such the form", and the mechanical work , whose creation responds to an artifact, close to engineering techniques, on the model of the poems of Baudelaire or Poe.
Following Strawson's opposition between diachronic and episodic beings , we proposed to classify the experiences of identity described by Montaigne, Stendhal and Proust as episodic, while observing the presence, in these three authors, of narrative moments that reveal, at the very heart of discontinuity, the permanence of the self. We have thus identified three themes, three types of narrative episodes that constitute so many objections to the thesis of the discontinuity of the self that these works present: these are the moments when the narrative speaks of shame, death and the desire for love.
In the case of moments of shame, the narrator's present self is in solidarity with the past self that experienced it. The case of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is exemplary: the episode of the theft of the ribbon in Confessions reveals a consciousness still charged with the feelings that agitated Rousseau as a child, in a persistent guilt, as if shame stopped time in its tracks. Admittedly, the Confessions reflect a diachronic, narrative spirit that does not characterize Montaigne, Stendhal or Proust. However, these authors recount episodes of shame that are just as striking, and whose analysis makes it possible to identify a core of coherence, a unity of the self that transcends time and discontinuity: shame is a feeling that refuses the principle of prescription.
Stendhal evokes some humiliations, for example when he misspells the word ça in front of his cousin, but the shame has been swallowed: "I am another man", he writes at the end of the episode. The formula here goes beyond the literary cliché of conversion, the inner revolution of a being, to simply designate the forgetting of what one has been. There are many other examples in Stendhal's work of the absence of lasting shame: we might cite the account of the narrator's fiasco with the beautiful Alexandrine in Souvenirs d'égotisme, or the episode of the arranged duel, in which the story dramatizes the sense of shame the young man felt at the time, but insists that all trace of his remorse, however profound, has now disappeared: "As I write this, I feel as if I were passing my hand over the scar of a healed wound". The image of the scar, a sign of recognition from self to self, reveals a discontinuity. These examples show that Stendhal sees the recollection of past moments of shame as a necessary part of the traditional narrative; even if these episodes have left a lasting impression on him, the conclusion he draws from them indicates that shame and remorse are ephemeral.
