In this quote, McIntyre is talking about the prisoner of the Château and comparing them to someone characterized from the “Count of Monte Cristo”. “Of course someone may have forgotten or suffered brain damage or simply not attended sufficiently at the relevant times to be able to give the relevant account. But to say of someone under someone description that he is the same person as someone characterized quite differently is precisely to say that it makes sense to ask him to give an intelligible narrative account enabling us to understand how he could at different times in different places be one in the same person and yet so differently characterized.” in this passage McIntyre is explaining how people and their identities are always changing and never the same from birth until death. McIntyre is telling everyone to be held accountable and let people know about your identities or identity before they’re able to create their own image of yourself. The stories that we tell from when we are a child or our younger selves are used to create a narrative in which we can tell people how we became the person we are today. These stories allow us to bond with others and create small families and war communities in which we can share similar stories and/or emotions. These connections that we perform with people allow us to create and form moral identities in which we can learn and decide how to view the world and how to view right from wrong. In his example, he describes the The prisoner of the Château and the Count of Monte Cristo to be two completely different people. That is why he urges the count to be able and tell his story so that we may figure out why the count did the things that he did.
We have family friends that come visit us from time to time. I personally don’t enjoy their company but because they are very close to my mom and dad I have to deal with it. The father of the family is always asking me questions about how I’m doing and what I’m up to in life. It can get really really annoying but it’s even worse when I don’t tell him what I’m up to because he draws his own conclusions. One time I hadn’t talk to him in over a year, and the next time I had talked to him, he believed that I had been to prison. I thought it was just a crude joke, but it’s because I wasn’t communicating with him over the course of that year. He assumed that I had gone to prison because the last time he talked to me, he thought I was in a very bad state mentally. He figured because I hadn’t talked to him in a while that I did something extremely rash but it was up to me to describe my experiences and stories that I had encountered and dealt with over the past year in order to prove that I am myself. And it wasn’t just this experience either, but my friends constantly check up on me to make sure I’m doing OK because if I don’t get back to them for a while they assume the worst has happened. It is my responsibility to inform people and my friends what I am up to in order to update their depiction of my identity.
The Lazy Thinker 