Narrative is at the heart of learning how to live a good live and living that life. It is not an accident that moral matters are illuminated in stories, nor is the explanation for this fitness for purpose merely pragmatic, or a matter of convention. This paper presents a view of the relationship between ethics and narrative that attempts to explain why this is the case.
Many delegates at this conference will be familiar with the power of stories to stimulate rich, ethically-focussed philosophical enquiry with communities of children and young people. To support this argument, I examine Miller’s perspective on lying and its function in art and conclude that Miller’s habit of biographical distortion proved an economically viable method for reaching his readers. I contend that Miller’s real world ability to bullshit enabled him to enliven his texts with an enhanced image of himself in order to successfully market his literary output in doing so, the narrative form constructed out of Miller-the-author’s monetary struggles is shown to directly play out in Miller-the-narrator’s identity. This article explores the significance that author identity held for Miller by re-examining the economic difficulties he faced in attempting to publish. Biographers of Miller have attempted to unravel the intentional misrepresentation in Miller’s novels without fully explaining why the author would choose to dissemble and yet simultaneously state that his works were truthful accounts of his life. Henry Miller has long been an outlying twentieth-century American author, and has often been criticised for the alterations of his personal history in his semi-autobiographical novels.
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