The theme of friendship flows throughout the paper via a field study into friendship in the rural and remote island communities of the Zadar archipelago. The author explores Derrida’s spirit of friendship and asks: What form of friendship exists? How does it manifest itself? What is its importance to the island’s survival? The study reveals how friendship, in the form of communal friendship, emerges as a fundamental trait amongst the members of these communities and becomes the choice of their survival. As such, it is useful in gaining a better understanding of what drives a sustainable island development. Communal friendship is explored through the ethnography and storytelling. The study emphasises the usefulness of ethnography to a Critical Theory and argues that storytelling and ethnography co-exist, in order to gain an invaluable insight into the intangible aspects of a communal friendship. The author proposes to call this approach ‘an ethnographic storytelling’.