Nevertheless, most people identify with their narrating self. When they say ‘I’, they mean the story in their head, not the stream of experiences they undergo.

“A man is always a teller of stories. He lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and tries to live his life as if he were recounting them.”

To be a self is to own such a story: to act as a self is to act out of the awareness of this resource of a particular past.