‘There’s nothing I can do’: Bad faith and the narrative maintenance of ethical identifications

Abstract

It has often been emphasized in narrative sociology that individuals strive to present themselves in a good, ethical light and that they attempt to make themselves the protagonists of their own stories. However, less work has been done on what happens when individuals are confronted with a necessary contradiction in their narrative that conflicts with their subjective ethical positioning. In this article, I use evidence from my qualitative research into the anarcho-punk subculture in Philadelphia (2016) to show that in such a situation, the narrator may use what Jean-Paul Sartre called ‘bad faith’, the denial of personal responsibility or choice, to protect their ethical identification through narrative.