The theory of the narrative self has been analyzed and debated, based on insights provided by the philosopher Galen Strawson and by Sartre in La Nausée.
Roquentin's tirade against life narrative can be interpreted from L'Être et le Néant : if you live your life as a narrative, you condemn yourself to bad faith, to inauthenticity, to renouncing your freedom. The choice posed by Roquentin, "to live or to tell", is decided by Sartre in the direction of life, i.e., of the freedom and contingency of existence, which does not submit to the necessities of narrative. But La Nausée proposes another theory of life as narrative, centered around the character of Anny, whose life story is presented as a poetic, discontinuous narrative, composed of a "sequence of perfect moments", reminiscent in this respect of Proustian writing. Sartre thus denounces the model of the linear life story, which limits possibilities as it progresses, replacing it with a model of the open novel that could be described as "picaresque", according to the narrative device of the crossroads, which is the counterpart of Sartre's ethic of freedom and commitment. In Les Mots, Sartre confesses to the powerlessness that results from this conception of life as narrative: "The appetite for writing encompasses a refusal to live", he writes, in a formula that echoes Roquentin's alternative "to live or to tell". While it is difficult to support the psychological thesis of life as narrative without engaging an ethical thesis that states the morality of this posture, on the other hand it is possible to defend the ethical thesis without adhering to the psychological thesis: this is illustrated by the character of Anny in La Nausée , whose ethic of a "good life" is the result not of the psychological thesis of life as narrative, but of an asceticism carried out according to the model of Ignatius of Loyola.
This "ethical reconfiguration of life", in Ricoeur's words, lies at the heart of conversion writing as practiced by St. Augustine in his Confessions, or of the writings of moralists who conceive of life narrative as self-mastery. In Soi-même comme un autre, Ricoeur proposes a distinction between identity idem and identity ipse , which to some extent overlaps with the distinction Galen Strawson draws between psychological and ethical thesis: on the one hand, the identity of permanence, ontological invariance; on the other, moral constancy, that of the word given, to take up an idea dear to Montaigne, for whom the identity of the self is defined by fidelity to that word. So, for Ricoeur, it is the narrative of the self that links these two aspects of identity, placing them in a continuum despite their possible conflict. This both descriptive and prescriptive discourse, which currently dominates the human sciences and defines man as a narrative being, reflects the emergence of a modern subjectivity linked to the death of God and the empire of the novel: henceforth without transcendence, the temporality of life is conceived in the mode of a narrative organized around a beginning, a middle and an end. It is this redemptive conception of narrative, which contributes to substituting literary life and vocation for religious life, that Sartre rejects, and against which Galen Strawson takes issue.
