The unity of human life

In what does the unity of an individual life consist? The answer is that its unity is the unity of a narrative embodied in a single life. To ask ›What is the good for me?‹ is to ask how best I might live out that unity and bring it to completion. To ask ›What is the good for man?‹ is to ask what all answers to the former question must have in common. But now it is important to emphasize that it is the systematic asking of these two questions and the attempt to answer them in deed as well as in word which provide the moral life with its unity. The unity of a human life is the unity of a narrative quest.

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (University of Notre Dame, 1981), 219.