“My true self, my character and my name were in the hands of adults, I had learnt to see myself through their eyes, I was a child, this monster they were forming out of their regrets.” — Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mots Jean Paul Sartre’s conception of the child as “the monster formed out of…regrets” throws into question the bildungsroman-esque that the reader encounters in most instances of autobiographical writing. If, during childhood, the self is formed from not only the regrets and expectations, but also from the passed-down familial histories and family dynamics among the adults in the childhood home, then it is insufficient to have a tunnel-visioned look at the development of one’s personality solely through the first-person narrative of the autobiographer-protagonist. In this paper, I suggest that in lieu of the narrow focus of autobiographical writing on the author’s self alone, an overstepping of the genre to include biographical sketches of peripheral characters in the life story locates the self in a more dialogic, heteroglossic relationship with the world outside the self, and acknowledges that the self is not limited to the figure of the author-protagonist alone. To this end, I examine Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006), and Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family (1983) as instances of autobiographical writing, focussing mainly on the childhood years, where the author-protagonist paradoxically steps away from the limelight in order to root the childhood self within halfremembered apocryphal memories, gossip-laden accounts from other people, and more specifically, relationships with their elusive father figure and their varying complicated relationships with him. Is the autobiography then really an instance of isolated, self-centred work, or is the “finished” persona that the autobiographer presents to us really a communal act, pieced together from the fragments of other lives that briefly touch the author-protagonist’s, and create an autobiographical subject out of them?
Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
