Life as Narrative

indeed may not be quite possible. But I have no doubt it is worth a try. It has to do with the nature of thought and with one of its uses. It has been traditional to treat thought, so to speak, as an instrument of reason. Good thought is right reason, and its efficacy is measured against the laws of logic or induction. Indeed, in its most recent computational form, it is a view of thought that has sped some of its enthusiasts to the belief that all thought is reducible to machine computability. But logical thought is not the only or even the most ubiquitous mode of thought. For the last several years, I have been looking at another kind of thought (see, e.g., Bruner, 1986), one that is quite different in form from reasoning: the form of thought that goes into the construction not of logical or inductive arguments but of or narratives. What I want to do now is to extend these ideas about narrative to the analysis of the we tell about our lives: our autobiographies. Philosophically speaking, the approach I shall take to narrative is a constructivist one a view that takes as its central premise that making is the principal function of mind, whether in the sciences or in the arts. But the moment one applies a constructivist view of narrative to the self-narrative, to the autobiography, one is faced with dilemmas. Take, for example, the constructivist view that stories do not in the real world but, rather, are constructed in people's heads. Or as Henry James once put it, happen to people who know how to tell them. Does that mean that our autobiographies are constructed, that they had better be viewed not as a record of what