This essay provides an analysis of the art of autobiographical writing and the complexity

related to specifying which place autobiography should hold. Should it be perceived as

literature or, rather, is it just the factual story of a life which is exempt from any touch of
imagination? By story of a life, what is implied is that autobiography focuses not on
information about a life but mostly on insight into the process of the author’s life. As Goethe
asserts, the function of any autobiographical writing is "to exhibit the man in relation to the
circumstances of his time and to show how far they have favored or opposed his progress…"
Shapiro clearly draws a clear-cut between an autobiography and a novel by suggesting that
while the former is intended to be factual, the latter, however, allows room for fiction.
Similarly, a memoir also differs from an autobiography in being exclusively a recording of
memorable events.

The essay also explores the notion of autobiographical writing in an evolutionary way. It
suggests a comparison between old and modern autobiographies and highlights a major
difference between them. Indeed, Roy Pascal, in Design and Truth in Autobiography suggests
that the difference between old autobiographies and modern autobiographies is that the typical
assertion, “This is what I am,” in the former was replaced by “What am I?” in the latter. Yet,
by drawing such a distinction, Pascal focuses so much on what modern autobiographies fail to
do that he ends up downsizing what they achieve. Just like novels in their eye-opening role,
autobiographies serve as mirrors that reflect images of characters that can inspire us, help us
enjoy more the lives we have, or even decide to change our behaviours depending on the
context.

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In the autobiography, each chapter represents an image, but the autobiographer’s aim is not
much to show that the first images displayed are different from the last ones, but rather to
emphasise the common identity that different sections of the autobiography share even though
certain features may not be the same.

Also, a reward for the autobiographer is for the audience to acknowledge that not everything
mentioned in the autobiographical work is pure truth because although the writer recollects
events from experience, certain aspects are bound to be slightly retouched so that the whole
story takes shape. But, of course, this has to be done according to the norms of rigorous
literary writing. And that’s why autobiography is a form of literature.
In the essay, a distinction was drawn between confession and novel. Yet, I think that a novel
may also be viewed as a kind of confession, in the sense that the novelist creates characters,
assigns roles to them, and makes use of those roles to sometimes externalise things that, under
normal circumstances, would be difficult to express. This subtle way of expressing one’s
thoughts is in a way a form of confession.

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The following section of the essay caught my attention, especially the title of Robert Musil’s
novel:

Henry Adams' auto- biography, The Education of Henry Adams, is the twin of Robert
Musil's novel The Man Without Qualities. Both are powerful studies of disorientation
- therefore what follows? That they cannot be true because they are destructive? But
the power and value of the negative vision is equal to that of the positive vision. We
must see ourselves as we are.

Question: In this title, The Man Without Qualities, what may be the main reason for such a
lexical choice, or how to interpret it from an autobiographical perspective, especially when we
know that a man without qualities cannot put together a whole book?

Can it be viewed as some kind of auto-derision? My certitude remains that it is paradoxical.