The object of this book, writes William C. Dowling in his preface, is to make the key concepts of Paul Ricoeur's iTime and Narrativei available to readers who might have felt bewildered by the twists and turns of its argument. The sources of puzzlement are, he notes, many. For some, it is Ricoeur's famously indirect style of presentation, in which the polarities of argument and exegesis seem so often and so suddenly to have reversed themselves. For others, it is the extraordinary intellectual range of Ricoeur's argument, drawing on traditions as distant from each other as Heideggerian existentialism, French structuralism, and Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Yet beneath the labyrinthian surface of Ricoeur's iTemps et rciti, Dowling reveals a single extended argument that, though developed unsystematically, is meant to be understood in systematic terms. iRicoeur on Time and Narrativei presents that argument in clear and concise terms, in a way that will be enlightening both to reader