ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a practice-based approach to narrative that shows that grasping the unity of a narrative is a way of understanding the world and focuses on narrative unity as a structure of conduct or activity. It describes elements of John Dewey's pragmatist account of problems and their solutions and focuses on Dewey's analysis of problems and their solutions to develop an account of narrative situations. The psychological subjectivism is at odds with the practice-based approach. The chapter describes a non-subjectivist, Heideggerian conception of emotion for Velleman's subjectivistic one. It considers the analysis by grounding the unity of the narrative situations in Heidegger's theory of originary temporality and explores the unity of the plotted structure of events narrated. Narrative unity is the unity of a problematic situation defined by a disturbance to what already matters and the possible forms of resolution toward which the disturbance, as narratively characterized, points.
