ABSTRACT
From time to time there re-emerges a thesis about action that, I suspect, seems either intuitively obvious or intuitively absurd. This view is that narrativity is essential to human activity. The view is not simply that narrative happens to play an important role in how people understand, organize, and carry out their lives. The view is stronger, namely, that there could not be so much as human action in the absence of narratives that structure it. Human action is inherently the enactment of a narrative. I have always found this view absurd. The aim of this essay is to demonstrate its vacuity and to indicate a better account of the temporality of action and the role of teleology therein.
