Paul Ricoeur: History as Narrative

Abstract

The objective of this study is to expose how Paul Ricoeur, the French philosopher and commentator, who propounds that all historical studies are intrinsically a narrative, has founded history as narratives. For Ricoeur, who considers that there is a reciprocity relationship between time and narrative, the narrative creates a universally widespread class of discourse that reveals the temporality of life. Ricoeur argues that the narrative form of the memory, which is related to both the inner life of humans and the collective living, is founded by narration, and suggests that the historical writing is linked to narrative discourse, in other words, history is a narrative. According to him, the historical feature of history generates from its relation to the narrative discourse. For Ricoeur, narrative which is the formative or regulator of time and since it has such a prominent feature of revealing time that it functions as a bridge which links the time/the narrated time and cosmological time and phenomenological time.