ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the sub sequent chapters of this book. The book examines the issues and implications for political theory which arise from understanding narrative identity as story involving various narrative features by way of the reading of novels, each of which is discussed in terms of various aspects of the narrative construction of identity. It focuses on how identity is constructed, showing how novels allow the processes of narrative construction, its problematic aspects and the effects of that construction, the social and political interactions involved, by way of a reading of E. L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel. Philip Roth's Operation Shylock shows the slipperiness of identity and the possibility of splitting, of multiplicity. The novel's depiction of the difficult idea that one could have a double raises the issue of recognition as necessary for identity, which in turn speaks to the public, potentially political, nature of identity.
