ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 addresses the relationship between fragmented narrative and truth. It begins with the idea of truth as correspondence, arguing that stories, even fragmented ones, frequently involve claims about brute fact which can be meaningfully tested in terms of their correspondence to external realities. Nonetheless, that the grasping together characteristic of narrative is grounded in the ontological rather than the ontic means that narratives as meaningful wholes cannot be tested in this way. The discussion then turns to truth as coherence. Taking narratives as statements, I argue that testing their coherence with narrative understandings of the world is a key way of assessing their truthfulness, even as it carries the risk of truth becoming detached from extant realities. The final part of the chapter addresses truth as disclosure, as presented by Heidegger in Being and Time (2010), arguing that fragmentation has the potential to disclose the essential ungroundedness and unsettledness of being by highlighting the irreducibility of being to the disclosure experienced by any Dasein. Nonetheless, fragmentation also exacerbates the factors which lead to the ‘covering over’ of the unsettledness of being in everyday life, at the same time as impeding the telling of stories which provoke disruptive world disclosure.
