Between De‐narrativization and Story‐Selling: From the Paradoxes of Self‐narration to the Concept of Self‐narrative Resistance

Building on Hannah Arendt’s insights, storytelling is presented not merely as a literary form, but as a fundamental mode of human existence and meaning-making. However, as Yuval Harari and Byung-Chul Han suggest, contemporary digital culture has led to a crisis of narration through de-narrativization (the fragmentation of narratives into algorithmic data) and story-selling (the commodification of personal narratives). In response to this crisis, this paper proposes the concept of Self-Narrative Resistance, which examines how individuals actively challenge and reshape their own narratives against imposed structures. Rather than passively conforming to algorithm-driven representation and performative self-branding, individuals navigate and reconfigure their self-narratives as a mode of resistance. Finally, the paper turns to Donna Haraway’s fictional imagination as a way to transcend traditional master plots and rethink self-narration. Speculative modes of identity construction are further explored through fictional imagination, hybrid media, and AI-based reflective interaction—enabling forms of self-narrative that move beyond normative narrative frames, toward figures such as the chimera and the cyborg. By positioning Self-Narrative Resistance as an existential-phenomenological practice, the paper proposes a renewed understand- ing of self-narration—as a fundamental mode through which human beings critically engage with the world, move beyond internalized narrative structures, and create new meaning in life. In this light, self-narration becomes not only a gesture of surviving the digital present, but also a way of imagining the otherwise.