Narrative as the Art of Life in the Context of Ricoeur's Philosophy of Time and a Sample: Mrs. Dalloway

Abstract

Paul Ricouer’s notion of time, which is based on the relation between narrative function of time and human experiences, is conceptualized as narrative time with a specific emphasis in his philosophy. Ricoeur, who comes back to Augustine and Aristotle’s notion of time and handles Augustine’s flux of time and Aristotle’s chronological time together, calls what follows from in this togetherness as concordance discordante. For the soul time where past, future and present penetrate each other appears as discordance in Augustine’s philosophy with an aperiodic process. As for chronological time, it is as time of concordance and harmony against this discordance of time. Time which allows us to be able to see the twofold of time together and mediate them refers to the third time in Ricoeur’s philosophy, that is, “narrative time”. Human experience can be understood, explained and narrated only via this time mediation for him. By comprehension of the concordant unity of discordance, human experience can bring itself into being in narrative time in a meaningful integrity. With the aim of shedding light on the theory of narrative put forward by Ricoeur in Time and Narrative, this article aims to disclose two points: first is to reveal the specific form of experience as a subject to the narrative and by this way assert that the narrative which Ricoeur bases on mimesis can be interpreted as ‘the art of life’. While doing this, I also opt for analysing the theory of narrative with Virginia Woolf’s novel entitled Mrs. Dalloway, which Ricoeur relates to his own time notion in Time and Narrative.