Narrative Authority and Identity / 叙事权与身份建构

Definition

Narrative authority and identity describes the struggle over who can produce, circulate, and preserve the account through which a person becomes publicly or privately knowable.

Current Synthesis

《盲刺客》 distributes identity-making power among family expectation, marriage, war, newspapers, attributed authorship, and retrospective memoir. Iris appears differently as daughter, sister, wife, lover, author, public figure, and elderly narrator. None of these positions alone exhausts her, but some have greater power to circulate and define consequences.

Self-narration can contest imposed versions without recovering a pure, final self. Iris writes after memory has changed, Laura can no longer answer, and damage cannot be undone. Narrative agency is therefore real but bounded: it can disclose hidden experience, accept responsibility, and leave another version for descendants, while remaining selective and dependent on whether anyone reads it.

Key Claims

• Identity is shaped by accounts that circulate through family, institutions, media, and art.
• Attribution controls not only ownership but how a person’s desire, agency, and suffering are interpreted.
• Self-narration can resist an imposed identity without becoming a complete or neutral final truth.
• Narrative authority depends on access, safety, credibility, preservation, and audience attention.
• Retrospective telling can acknowledge responsibility even when repair or forgiveness is unavailable.
• Abundant external traces increase the material for identity reconstruction but do not eliminate the need for first-person account.

Evidence

Competing versions of Iris

• Vol.360 盲刺客：爱得稀里糊涂，但咱痛得明明白白啊 contrasts Iris as publicly passive wife with the desiring, argumentative lover and concealed author disclosed by the nested novel.

Misattributed authorship and Laura

• Vol.360 盲刺客：爱得稀里糊涂，但咱痛得明明白白啊 shows Laura’s public identity enlarged by a book she did not write while her own abuse remains hidden.

Late-life manuscript

• Vol.360 盲刺客：爱得稀里糊涂，但咱痛得明明白白啊 treats Iris’s final account as testimony toward Sabrina and as confirmation of her own lived existence.

Counterevidence & Qualifications

Narrative control is not total control over identity. Other people have their own experiences, records may constrain self-serving revision, and an audience may reject or ignore a manuscript. The social-media extension is host analogy rather than a general empirical finding. The principal evidence is fictional and cannot establish a universal theory of selfhood.

What Changed

• Created a framework linking attribution, circulation, retrospective responsibility, and bounded self-definition.

Related Concepts

• Socially Imposed Identity / 集体强加身份 - neighboring case where convergent relationships and labels pressure a person to accept an assigned biography.
• Public–Private Record Gap / 公共记录与私人经验落差 - explains why institutionally dominant accounts can exclude intimate experience.
• Layered Narrative Functional Integration / 多层叙事功能整合 - form through which competing identity accounts are staged.
• Fragmented Memory Narrative / 碎片化记忆叙事 - related refusal of one authoritative past.
• 相信自己的感受 / Self-Feeling Trust - personal reliance on lived discrepancy when external definitions dominate.
• The Blind Assassin / 《盲刺客》 - principal literary case.