ABSTRACT
To say to him “change yourself” means to demand that everything should change, even the past.
—Nietzche Who am I? At some point all of us have asked this question, looking for answers in all the obvious places: Am I a product of my environment, my genes, my family or my friends? Part of who we are is defined by our past and our memories of our past. Using a narrative framework, people can express their diverse and complicated identities through the stories they tell. With one story people can communicate their past, present, and future. They can describe their goals, their loves, their philosophy of life, and the moral guidelines they follow. Through this system, people can string together several categories of self-representation into a single tale or multiple stories that they share with others. To create these identity narratives, people must be able to access a vast network of information about their lives. Thus, memories play a vital role in the search for self. Clearly, memory and narrative do not encompass the entire definition of self. James (1890) and Neisser (1988), among many others, have argued that the self is composed of a variety of information garnered from several sources. Nonetheless, the remembered self becomes the basic fabric of self that is communicated to others and used to plan for the future.
