This is the heart of the book for literary scholars. Ricoeur introduces . A character in a story is both idem (a stable figure with a name) and ipse (constantly changing through the plot). Likewise, we narrate our own lives to synthesize disparate events into a coherent whole. The PDF is invaluable here for its detailed footnotes on Aristotle’s Poetics and Augustine’s Confessions .
While the full copyrighted text is typically available through academic libraries or for purchase on platforms like The University of Chicago Press
When Leo returns twenty years later, he is physically unrecognizable. His hair is gray, his skin is weathered, and he speaks with a different accent. If you only looked at his "idem" identity—the stable, physical "sameness" of a thing—you might say he is a different person entirely. But Leo still has the same fingerprint and a shared history; these are the "what" of his identity that stay the same over time.