Interpreting Our Selves

Abstract

This chapter engages with Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity, to render the self an unstable nexus of meaning, engaged in the ongoing invention and reinterpretation of itself. The complexity of interpreting the self is highlighted through the use of literary metaphors that posit the self variously as author, as interpreter, and as evolving text. The article delves into the field of hermeneutics to undermine the possibility of certainty in self-knowledge, recognizing that no observation or description is free from the effects of the observer’s experiences, presuppositions and projections of his or her personal values and expectations. The chapter argues that, in the edusemiotic sense of interpreting ourselves, we are doubly caught in a hermeneutic circle : initially with the self as the interpreting subject, and subsequently in the resulting interpretation, with the self as the object of that interpretation. Self is, thus, evolving text, albeit with a finite number of possibilities. The interpretive basis of identity involves a dialectical understanding of our selves as simultaneously constant and changing, our life story unfolding like a narrative. It is through interpretation that people give meaning to their experiences of the world, and through interpreting our experiences we become signs enriched with existential meanings. Using the metaphor of life as continuous textuality, this chapter concludes that, through narrative, our ever-evolving self is necessarily located historically, temporally, and contingently.