ABSTRACT
Time as we have considered it so far, i.e. in the first two chapters, has been the time that presents itself to consciousness as an object, i.e. time for the self. At the end of chapter two, we sketched an account of what I called 'the time of our plans and aspirations, our achievements and failures, the stories we tell ourselves of our origins', in which some new terms were introduced - unsaturatedness, significance, emerging identity, to which we added the more familiar term 'narrative'. 1 But this remains an account in which the narrator is in an important sense outside his narrative, despite the fact that he may be one of its dramatis personae. In so far as he tells - or writes - a story in which he is a player, in so far as he views himself as enclosed within his narrative, he views himself as just a player alongside the others; he views himself as another. The strain begins to show once our narrators begin to refer to themselves in the first person, once they say 'I'. For then they stand both within and outside the time of their narrative. The grandmother telling stories of her childhood to her grandchildren may add 'that young girl who joined the volunteers was me'. By this statement, she includes her listeners, her grandchildren, in a wider story that is still open, in which they too are participants. Of course this transition from the third person, singular or plural, to the first person, singular or plural, is latent even in the grandmother's recounting of a story told her by another in which she was not a participant, and therefore in which her grandchildren can have no direct personal stake. But surely even here her young listeners must conceive of the unknown players in the recounted story as beings who are capable of saying 'I' and who are, like themselves, both observers and participants in the story of their lives. What we need to do next is to seek an understanding of how it is possible that we can be both observers of time and participants or agents engaged in it.
