ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to navigate through the central debate to be found in history today, viz. the extent to which history, as a discipline, can accurately recover and represent the content of the past, through the form of the narrative. The deconstructive consciousness not only defines history as what it palpably is, a written narrative, but additionally, and more radically, suggests that narrative as the form of story-telling may also provide the textual model for the past itself. In our contemporary or postmodern world, history conceived of as an empirical research method based upon the belief in some reasonably accurate correspondence between the past, its interpretation and its narrative representation is no longer a tenable conception of the task of the historian. The most basic function of the historian is to understand, and explain in a written form, the connections between events and human intention or agency in the past.
