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the page” on some stage of our lives, we still face ambiguity and open-endedness.18 In the end, narrative provides us with an analogy for life and how we might understand it, but narrative is not actually life, and life is not actually narrative—nevertheless a narrative understanding can be “an abstraction one uses . . . to understand, and predict, and make sense of, the behavior of some very complicated things.”19 Narrative helps us to connect the expected and unexpected, the intended and the accidental, the successes and disappointments, into a meaningful coherent whole by which we come to understand the selves that we are. We get a better sense of ourselves and others through the stories that we tell, and the stories that we hear—perhaps even when development of those stories is arrested.

NOTES

1. Loyal viewers will be quite familiar with the “On the next Arrested Development . . .” trailers at the end of every episode, which almost never actually happen in the following episode. Show creator Mitch Hurwitz described these in-jokes as “call forwards”—hints of events that hadn’t yet happened.

2. Mark Turner, The Literary Mind: The Origin of Thought and Language (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 7, 12.

3. Anthony Paul Kerby, Narrative and the Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 60.

4. Barbara Hardy, “Towards a Poetics of Fiction: 3) An Approach through Narrative,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 2 (1) (Autumn 1968): 5.

5. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 37–38.

6. John Davenport, Will as Commitment and Resolve: An Existential Account of Creativity, Love, Virtue, And Happiness (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), p. 183.

7. John Lippitt, “Getting the Story Straight: Kierkegaard, MacIntyre and Some Problems with Narrative” Inquiry, 50 (1) (2007): 52.

8. Ibid., p. 49.

9. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 192.

10. Kerby p. 39.

11. Paul Ricoeur, “History as Narrative and Practice,” Philosophy Today, 29 (3) (Fall 1985), p. 214.

12. Turner, p. 5.

13. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 239.

14. Ibid., p. 239.

15. For an interesting study on this idea of unity in human life through narrative, check out Alasdair MacIntyre’s excellent book, After Virtue.

16. Søren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, ed. Howard V. and Edna N. Hong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967–1978).

17. Jeannette Bicknell, “Self-Knowledge and the Limitations of Narrative,” Philosophy and Literature, 28 (2) (2004): 406–416.

18. And as we now well know, the end is never really the end, especially in television. At the very end of that episode, we see a brief cameo from Ron Howard and a foreshadowing of things to come: “No, I don’t see it as a series. Maybe a movie?”

19. Daniel Dennett, “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity,” in F. Kessel, P. Cole and D. Johnson, eds, Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1992).

CONTRIBUTORS

Banana Stand Employee Roster

Deborah Barnbaum is an associate professor of philosophy at Kent State University. She is the author of The Ethics of Autism, as well as numerous articles on clinical and research ethics. She would like to dedicate her contribution in this book to her brother.

Annyong (Hello) Bluth: Which isn’t a name, but the Korean word for “hello.” Annyong.

George Michael Bluth: Frozen banana salesman/child.

Michael Cholbi has written a number of articles in ethics and a book about philosophical issues surrounding suicide. He satisfies his craving for bangers and mash with occasional visits to the Yellow Fang Pub.

Brett Coppenger is a graduate student at the University of Iowa whose research interests include epistemology and the philosophy of science. He has presented papers on the history of the philosophy of science, the epistemological problems of perception,