Narrative Life Span, in the Wake 17 relation to human finitude and to have discerned the

paradoxical source of narratives immortalizing power in the structure of bios. Moreover,

the connection she makes between narrative structure and the finite structure of
individual life becomes the basis upon which to draw out the importance of singularity in
Greek history, for which historical events are not seen as parts of either an
encompassing whole or a process; on the contrary, the stress is always on single
instances and single gestures (BPF 43).
It might be useful, at this point, to clarify a possible difficulty: Although it can certainly
be argued that Arendts formulationthat the Greeks committed human action to the
memorial structure of individual life spanreflects a broad humanist commitment and
that hers is an attempt to humanize political action on the basis of the individual, her
intention is certainly not to focus on how great men become immortal on the basis of
an individualistic conception of personal biography. Rather, the task of her argument here
is to show how Greek political action retains its singularity in historical discourse by
virtue of being narrated like a human life. As she argues in The Human Condition, in
contrast to an individualistic conception of politics, the basis of actionand all action was
political, took place in the poliswas the human condition of plurality: that men, not
Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world (HC 9). Moreover, for the Greeks, it simply
would have been inconceivable that anyone outside of the polisor, what amounts to the
same thing, anyone not in possession of the potential to act that the being-with and
the plurality of the polis enabledcould be conceived as a human (23ff.). So, rather than
celebrating the individual as the agent of political action, her discussion of the relation
between the structure of the individual human life and that of immortalizing narrative
aims to demonstrate that the emphasis placed on singular instances in Greek historical
discourse is due to its narrative structure, conceived in terms of natality and mortality. 18
On that basis, Arendt insists on the following points: first, that history and poetry were given the task of
inscribing politics into memory; second, that it is through the acting in concert of politics that humans were
able to obviate their own individual mortality; and third, that insofar as political action and human life were
thought to be inseparable, the memorial inscription of politics came to be emblematic of humanness as such. 19
This means that, for the Greeks, memory rids human life of its propensity simply to pass away