When Maggie de Vries wrote about her sister’s life in the book Missing Sarah, she was writing from her perspective of, not only who she thought Sarah was, but also who she thought she and her family were. In doing this, not only did she get to know her sister better, she got to know herself better. Almost everyone does this through forming their life narrative, although they might not realize it.
Julie Beck finds that in telling a person’s life narrative and who the person is becoming, the story they are telling becomes a part of them and forms its own identity (Beck’s Article). She quotes David McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, who claims that life narratives aren’t reflections of personality, but rather are the important parts of personality, such as “traits, goals, and values” (Beck). What this means is that people pick what they want to share and how to weave it all together to become a life narrative, and what they pick shows what they care about. Dan P. McAdams points to Shakespeare’s idea of the “social actor,” and that people might choose to focus on these certain parts of their lives, because humans are social creatures and want to get along with other humans (article here). Therefore they mirror and pick up other habits. Maybe this is what causes Beck’s claim, which states that forming a life story can be very complicated because people have multiple “libraries” for things like career, romance, and family, which helps influence what people choose and might not choose if they only had one library. People want to be accepted into each library.
Beck also asserts that life narratives also aren’t usually as perfectly linear as a storybook, as one might expect, because normal lives rarely follow that pattern. However, maybe the storybook helps to bring into being, the model of how life narratives should be. McAdams brings up in his article the idea that everybody wants to achieve something when they do interact, and he groups people into categories like “friendly people.” Maybe that also brings up the idea of the model “friendly person” and how they should behave. However, if you don’t follow the model, as Beck points out, you are stigmatized, which can also help shape some of the values of the categorized person so that they can fit in better.
In this way, life narratives are almost like a personalized mirror or almost an ideal photograph: it reflects to you and others what you want to show. However, even then the author is omitting other important information, although to them it might not seem important. This might cause a knowledge gap for everybody. However, maybe as the author changes the narrative and influences it, the life narrative and its identity is also influencing the author so that they become even more like the identity than before. Either way, it is still always interesting to see how one sees themselves and how others see them. Each person has their own perspective of events, and I wonder how much someone else’s personality can change throughout each retelling of the story.
Workcited:
Beck, Julie. “Story of My Life: How Narratives Create Personality.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 10 Aug. 2015. Web. 28 Feb. 2016.
McAdams, Dan P. “Self and Identity.” NOBA. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Feb. 2016.
