Fictional narratives and identity change: Three pathways through which stories influence the Dialogical Self

Fictional narratives have the potential to influence people who read, view or listen to them. A body of studies has found that stories can change people’s identity or sense of self. This chapter proposes a theoretical model conceptualizing the impact of fictional narrative experiences on the dialogical self. Three pathways are proposed through which stories influence identity: a personal pathway (through fictional role models and possible selves), a cultural pathway (by offering narrative themes and structures used in interpersonal and intrapersonal self-dialogue) and a reflective pathway (when stories increase self-awareness and help people to adopt or switch between alternative selves or I-positions). The objective of this chapter is to introduce a new model to explain the impact of narrative fiction on the self, grounded in Dialogical Self Theory, which can shed a new light on the processes that underlie this impact.