  More troublesome, though, is the status of the narrative unity claim. Is it descriptive or prescriptive? If descriptive, asserting that  selves simply conceive themselves as unified over their lives within  a narrative structure, then it seems false. As Galen Strawson points  out, some people (and he claims to be one) are  “Episodics,” those who have “little or no sense  that the self that one is was there in the (further) past and will be there in the future,” and thus “are likely to have no  particular tendency to see their life in Narrative terms”  (Strawson 2004, 430). In addition, this observation bodes ill for the Kantian, insofar as it asserts the possibility of practical agency  for those who do not view themselves as diachronically  unified, i.e., unified practical agency may indeed not be a practical necessity. On the other hand, if the narrative unity thesis is  supposed to be prescriptive, urging that people  ought to view themselves as unified over time within a narrative structure, then it poses no threat to descriptive, disuniting theories of identity like reductionism, for it would have to allow that life-long unity may simply not occur. Indeed, if the account is prescriptive, then it actually makes more sense to consider persons to be disunified, if what they ought to strive for is greater unity.  If unity were a given, such striving would be unnecessary. (For somewhat similar considerations, see Williams 2007.)