Narrative and Becoming elaborates a transcendental empiricist concept of narrative. Against the
established consensus of narrative theory it argues for an understanding of narrative as fundamentally
nonhuman (instead of human), unconscious (instead of correlated to consciousness) and expressive
(instead of representational). While narratology has hitherto conceived of narrative as mind-dependent,
ideal representation, Narrative and Becoming conceives of it as mind-independent, expressive reality.
What is at stake is thus the ontological status of narrative.
Expressivity here has to be understood in its Deleuzian sense and names the ontogenetic and
morphogenetic relation of the transcendental and empirical realms: according to Deleuze the empirical
has a transcendental dimension from which it emerges. The transcendental is thus generative of the
empirical. At the same time, the transcendental only exists as implicated in the empirical; it is an aspect of
the empirical itself. The relation between the transcendental and the empirical is thus topological and
immanent. In this topological ontology of immanence difference is the transcendental principle generative
of and implicated in empirical differences. The differential narratology expounded here thus holds that
there is an ontologically constitutive but hidden transcendental dimension to empirical narratives. Much
of postmodern and contemporary fiction explicitly showcases this relation of the transcendental and
empirical. Narrative and Becoming accordingly traces this relation by means of providing close readings
of a number of contemporary North-American fictions: Ana Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986), Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist (1999), and Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000).