Reading Autobiography

The stories and ideas that are passed down to us by our families, the social class to which we belong, the culture of which we are a part — all these things combine to form a symbolic order, the Great Narrative shared by a larger group, resulting in a more-or-less common identity.

The content of someone’s identity depends on the broader group in which they grew up, and particularly on dominant communal notions, the ‘narrative’ shared by the group. Those notions are invariably moral in nature, consisting largely of norms and values that determine the way we view ourselves and others. They are reflected in mores or ethics and,

Humans are not Nature/Nurture. Humans are narrative.

People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different f