One of the things that narrative theory can learn from philosophy is a proper sense of the importance of the future. I have suggested several times already that narrative theory shows a preoccupation with memory, retrospect and the archiving of past events, and has an undeveloped potential to address questions about the present and future. The significance of the notions of ‘anticipation’ and ‘prolepsis’ is that, in different ways, they refer to this relation between the present and actual or possible futures. With philosophy as its teacher, narrative theory can turn its attention to narrative not only in its function as archive, but to the question of narrative as a mode of being.

In Heidegger's account of being, for example, the future is the all important tense. Like Derrida, Heidegger tends to view things normally understood as secondary and derivative as primary and primordial, and so it is with the relationship between time (Zeit) and temporality (Zeitlichkeit) in Being and Time. If, for a moment, we view time as a mind-independent entity and temporality as the experience of time in consciousness, or time within the condition of being, it might normally be assumed that the latter derives from the former. According to Heidegger, there is a conception of time as a series of ‘nows’ which is shared by ordinary people and philosophers from Aristotle to Bergson.