What Is Narrative Identity, Really?

Someone asks how you ended up doing what you do. You have about four seconds to decide where to start.

You pick a beginning — a course you dropped, a person you happened to sit next to, a job that fell through at the right moment. You skip eleven years without mentioning that you skipped them. You arrive at a line you have used before, and it lands, and the conversation moves on. Nobody notices that you just performed a small act of construction. Neither do you.

That construction has a name. Narrative identity is a person's internalized and evolving life story, integrating the reconstructed past and the imagined future to provide life with some degree of unity and purpose (McAdams & McLean, 2013). It is not a record of what happened to you. It is the account you have built out of what happened, and it is doing work whether or not you ever inspect it.

Where the idea of narrative identity came from

Before the 1980s, psychologists did not usually set the word identity next to the word narrative (McAdams, 2018). Identity belonged largely to Erikson, who across the late 1950s and early 1960s described it as a configuration — an integration of childhood identifications, aptitudes and social roles that gives a life a sense of inner sameness and continuity. Erikson also wrote that the person who has identity becomes able to selectively reconstruct the past so that it seems, step for step, to have been planned. That is a story-shaped claim with the word story left out of it.

McAdams has described the moment the two ideas met. After teaching a graduate seminar on self and identity in 1982, he asked his students what an identity would look like if you could see one. A theory, with axioms? A circus, or maybe a symphony orchestra? Nothing fit.

Months later he began playing with the idea that it would look like a story, and in 1985 published a model of identity built like one — setting, scenes, characters, plots and themes (McAdams, 2018). The book-length version, The Stories We Live By, came eight years later. Related conceptions were surfacing across the social sciences all through that decade (McAdams, 2011).

Not the story you tell at a dinner party

The purpose is different. Stories told purely to entertain a listener typically contain few instances of meaning-making — meaning matters less there than when you are trying to explain yourself to someone (McAdams & McLean, 2013). The anecdote is built to land. The life story is built to account for something.

The job is integration. Narrative identity is a particular kind of story — the story of how you came to be the person you are becoming — and its defining function is to bring things together (McAdams, 2018). It integrates sideways, across the roles you hold at once — why you are sullen with your father and euphoric with your friends. It integrates lengthways too, connecting the person you were to the person you are and to the one you expect to become (McAdams, 2001).

It is also not your memory. In 2018 McAdams put the distinction flatly: narrative identity is not memory, it is the story told about memory. The story does not contain everything you can remember, and it contains things memory cannot hold at all — how you picture yourself in ten years, what you believe you will leave behind (McAdams, 2001).

Why your life story rarely gets told in one piece

You have probably never told it. Not the whole thing, not in order, not to one listener in one sitting. The load-bearing word in the definition is internalized — the story is carried, whatever part of it happens to get said out loud on a given occasion.

The research works from pieces too: over three decades it has often focused on a handful of key scenes — high points, low points, turning points — coding those accounts for features such as agency, communion, meaning-making and coherence. Even then the coder sees only the text, while the narrator keeps a private stock of detail, association and idiosyncratic meaning that never reaches the page (McAdams, 2018).

The conventions shaping all of this are absorbed rather than chosen. As children move through the elementary school years, they come to narrate their own experience in ways that conform to their implicit sense of how a story should go, and they take on their culture's assumptions about what a whole life is supposed to contain — birth, family, leaving the family, work, partnership. Habermas and Bluck named that inherited template a cultural concept of biography (McAdams, 2011).

Where narrative identity sits in the self

In 2013 McAdams described the self arriving in three guises, in order. First you are a social actor, from around your second birthday — a bundle of traits, roles and repeated performances. By middle or late childhood a motivated agent is layered over the actor, with goals, values, plans and things wanted. Then, in adolescence and emerging adulthood, an autobiographical author is layered over both: the self as storyteller, working out why the actor does what it does and why the agent wants what it wants.

They line up with the three levels of personality: the actor carries the traits, the agent the goals and values, the author the story. Nothing beneath the author is replaced. You do not stop being an actor when you become an author, which is why the story must keep accounting for a person who behaves in unscripted ways.

This is also why the whole thing starts later than most people assume. Children tell stories constantly. What arrives in adolescence is the capacity to make one life out of them — to argue that early events caused later ones, and to pull recurring themes out of a whole biography. Habermas and Bluck proposed that in 2000, and life-narrative accounts show both markers rising from late childhood onward (McAdams & McLean, 2013). People begin assembling narrative identities in the late-adolescent and young-adult years (McAdams, 2011).

It never stops being rewritten

The word evolving in the definition is not filler. Once the author layer is in place it keeps working, well past emerging adulthood, absorbing expected and unexpected transitions, gains, losses and changed views of who you were. Whether it also gets better at that work is unsettled. There are few longitudinal studies of life stories and no long-term effort to trace narrative identity across decades of adult life (McAdams, 2011). The rise that replicates is the adolescent one.

So the same event can mean two different things to the same person at two different points in time, without either telling being a lie (McAdams, 2018).

Revision is not a failure of the system. It is the system.

What the idea does not cover

It is not a memoir. Coding attends to the content and the structure of the account (McAdams, 2018). Whether you connect events causally, whether you appear as someone who acts or someone acted upon, whether adversity gets a meaning or gets dropped — those are questions about what an account contains. Not about how well it reads.

The equation of narrative with identity is not settled in the field. A rival line of thinking, associated with Gergen and Thorne, holds that personal stories are smaller in scope, less integrative and more ephemeral than the big-story model assumes; that people perform different narratives in different situations; that fragmentation and multiplicity, not unity, are closer to the norm (McAdams, 2011). Raggatt rejects the integrating claim outright, arguing in 2006 that contemporary life is too inconsistent for such consolidation (McAdams, 2011). McAdams concedes real ground here. Few people ever experience full integration, he acknowledges, and where he once argued that identity is a story and only a story, he later wrote that identity encompasses much more — though he holds that people in complex societies still reach for some modicum of unity and purpose (McAdams, 2011).

And it is culturally situated. Stories are told or performed in every known human culture, but the life story as a form of identity may not be evenly distributed. The 2001 formulation is explicit that it describes people living in modern societies (McAdams, 2001), and narrative identity is exquisitely contextualized in culture, its development across societies still an open question (McAdams & McLean, 2013). A description of how identity gets built is not a verdict on any particular life.

Where to notice it

You cannot read your own story from inside it. The parts you skip are invisible to you precisely because you always skip them, and the shape you default to feels like accuracy rather than choice. That is what a structural mirror is for. This project is one, and a mirror has no opinion about what you should do next.

Next time someone asks how you ended up here, listen to your own answer while it is happening. Notice where you chose to start. Notice who is doing things in it and who things happen to. Notice whether the hardest year gets a reason or gets a jump cut.

That is narrative identity, working in real time.

You are allowed to tell it differently.