ABSTRACT
Ricoeur's work on narrative identity was produced some forty years later than Sartre's writing and the ensuing linguistic turn in the social sciences is strongly represented in his approach. This brings certain issues to the fore of his intellectual project such as meaning, intentionality, interpretation and understanding', leading to a model of selfhood that privileges a narrative identity emerging cumulatively and intersubjectively, always mediated by others'. Narrative identity invokes narrative time, a time that bridges the fictionalisation of history' and the historisation of fiction', for to answer the question "Who" is to tell the story of a life'. The ethics of narrative identity compel us to understand and affirm each other. Existentialism has been described as being rigorously rooted in everyday experience'. A central theme in existentialist analysis is the significance of temporality as an essential aspect of being human and in particular our understanding of our own finitude.
