Narrative Beings

The article I linked to in my last post is fairly interesting:

Once upon a time a philosopher wrote an article called ‘Don Quixote and The Narrative Self’. He commenced by saying: In this essay, I will discuss the question of whether our selves are constituted by narratives, ie stories. Are we like Don Quixote, whose self was created by his reading of medieval romances: are we Homo quixotienses, the narrative self? Or are we rather like the protagonist of Sartre’s novel Nausea, Antonin Roquentin, whose life did not form any narrative unity? Are we in other words rather Homo roquentinenses?

Our identities, created by narratives? That reminds me of a passage from the preface of R. A. Lafferty's The Devil is Dead:

We will not lie to you. This is a do-it-yourself thriller or nightmare. Its present order is only the way it comes out of the box. Arrange it as you will.

Set off the devils and the monsters, the wonderful beauties and the foul murderers, the ships and the oceans of middle space, the corpses and the revenants, set them off in whatever apposition you wish. [...] Build with these colored blocks your own dramas of love and death and degradation. Learn the true topography: the monstruous and wonderful archetypes are not inside you, not in your own unconsciousness; you are inside them, trapped, and howling to get out.

By the way, some people think that Nabokov's Lolita has the best opening for a novel ever, but they're wrong. That honor corresponds to Lafferty's novel.