Storytelling and Rorty's public vocabulary Bleak House and Huckleberry Finn

Our identity - our human identity - is posited as primarily a dynamic product of storytelling. Beginning with our earliest languages we are what we tell ourselves we are. The collective genius of our most sensitive storytellers, from the ice-age fireside tales to the various genres of modem literature, has articulated for us our common concerns. Bleak House and Huckleberry Finn provide us with examples of dramatizations of social suffering and injustice which clarify for us what we care about, who we are (our identity) and what we wish to change (our purpose). A neo-pragmatic approach (eschewing all metaphysical concern for humanity) applies the ideas of Richard Rorty to an examination of the impact of these two novels on the public consciousness and the ensuing social and legal reforms. An argument for the origin of human consciousness is made, based on a brief examination of current archeological and paleoanthropological discoveries.