Forthcoming in Brian Schiff, Elizabeth McKim & Sylvie Patron (eds), Life and Narrative: The Risks and Responsibilities of Storying Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. On the Use and Abuse of Narrative for Life Towards an Ethics of Storytelling Hanna Meretoja choing Friedrich Nietzsche’s analysis of how history can be either beneficial or harmful for life, the title of this essay indicates my aim to delineate a framework for an ethics of storytelling from the perspec- tive that narrative in itself is neither inherently “good” nor “bad” for life—but it can be either or both. Over the recent years, the debate on the ethical signifi- cance of narrative for human existence has been one of the liveliest in the field of interdisciplinary narrative studies, but as several theorists have argued “for” or “‘against” narrativity, the debate risks suffering from a dichotomous fram- ing that neglects the complexity of the ethical issues involved in the relation- ship between life and narrative. Against the backdrop of this debate, I would like to argue here for the need to acknowledge both the ethical and the violent potential of storytelling, and be as attentive as possible to their different di- mensions. In order to adequately take into account the complexity of these ethical is- sues, it is important not only to reflect on them in theoretical terms but also to consider the ethical dimension of narratives in the concrete situations in which they are used and abused. Every ethical situation is singular; hence, there are limits to the extent to which they can be considered in abstraction. This is one major reason why “the imaginative variations proper to fiction” are a crucial form of ethical inquiry: “The thought experiments we conduct in the great laboratory of the imaginary are also explorations in the realm of good and evil.” (Ricoeur, 1992, p. 148) By creating literary worlds in which moral agents act in concrete situations in relation to others, novels have the specific means to explore the ethical complexities of the impact of narratives on our lives. E