This being the 100th anniversary of the first American edition of “Huckleberry Finn,” it is the perfect time to ask an essential question: Are you a Narrative or an Episodic personality? In other words, do you believe that your life tells a meaningful story? Or do you think that you live, like Huck Finn and every other picaresque hero, from isolated minute to isolated minute—episode to episode—and that far from adding up to a coherent tale, your life is “a tale told by an idiot… signifying nothing”?

Hemingway was correct when he said that all American literature comes from Mark Twain’s classic tale of the runaway boy and the fugitive slave. Hemingway’s own “In Our Time,” a collection of interrelated short stories that portray the episodic adventures of a young boy named Nick Adams, is a model of the genre. Picaresque novels define our national literature: Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer,” William Faulkner’s “The Reivers,” Saul Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March,” Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” John Barth’s “The Sotweed Factor,” Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye,” Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five”—the list goes on and on. Even non-fiction has been influenced by the episodic style. The so-called “gonzo” journalism of a writer like Hunter Thomson, with its adventurous protagonists passing through random events, is the non-fiction equivalent of the picaresque.

But episodic fiction has been dealt a sorry hand of late. Our most popular critically acclaimed novels are pure narratives. Their straightforward storytelling style connects events together in one continuous thruline whose fundamental purpose is to reveal the Big Fated Meaning of life. In the war between Narratives and Episodics, the former are winning hands-down.

A few years ago, the British philosopher Galen Strawson took up those battling world views in an essay that caused quite a stir in philosophical circles—the distinction between Narratives and Episodics is, in fact, his. Mr. Strawson came down heavily on the side of the Episodics. He believes the idea that “human beings typically experience their lives as a narrative or story of some sort” is an insult to the endless possibilities of existence. What really gets his goat is the accompanying notion that you have to be a Narrative to be good, that “a richly Narrative outlook on one’s life is essential to living well, to true or full personhood.” In Mr. Strawson’s eyes, the idea that one’s life is a story is the equivalent of wearing a blindfold and living in a prison cell.

He has a strong point. Episodics do seem to have a firmer grasp of reality’s fluid nature. Rather than experiencing life as a continuous thread of related experiences, Episodics consider their “self” to be in a state of continuous flux. What happened to them a year ago happened to a different person than the person they are now—the past has no bearing on present experience. (“I actually said that? I couldn’t have!”) In this view, Episodics are sober, disenchanted beings, alive to the principle of ceaseless change that drives human existence.