An autobiography is an account of the life of a person who is written by herself. The work is personal, since the author is in charge of exposing the details of his life. It is a literary wording of life experiences.
The main function that the autobiography fulfills is the one to allow to see the vital experiences of the author from its own perspective. It is a literary genre that lies on the border between literature and history.
Autobiography Henry Ford.
The definition that best fits the autobiography is that of the French writer Philippe Lejeune:"a retrospective narrative in prose that a real person makes of his own existence, while emphasizing his individual life. In particular on the history of his personality ".
One of the main features of autobiography is the author's identity. He is a character and narrator.
An autobiography will always be written in the first person, where the"I"abounds throughout the story. It tells the experiences and experiences of the author, his important events and also the tragic events.
We use what is known as the autobiographical pact, which is the contract between author and reader, where the author agrees that all his autobiography is truthful.
This pact is what allows one to distinguish between an autobiography and an autobiographical novel, where the facts are based on the life of the narrator, but do not have to be perfectly truthful.
Through an autobiography, the author literally writes his life and the changes that have occurred with his personality and his way of being through time. It is narrated in prose and we must take care of the details since it is a literary text
Main features of the autobiography
The autobiography must cover certain points
You can include all the information that is considered important. It has to be personal, including essential information such as name, age, date of birth, place of residence, etc.
Within the personal information that is included it should be mentioned to the family that you have, the brothers and sisters, the people that mark the important things in your life.
In addition it should include the academic information that the author has received, place of studies, the achievements and prizes received...
It is a non-fiction writing
The autobiographical pact is established between the author and the reader, where everything that is related is true.
The writer in this work has absolute freedom in which he expresses his ideas or feelings about the events and how they influenced him.
It relates the life of the author
It can be considered a totally intimate confession in which the author narrates his most personal secrets.
It analyzes all the facts that happened during a life, and in many cases to put them in perspective of what it has lived.
The autobiography is characterized by the fact that the author, who is also a narrator, is at the same time the protagonist of the stories that are narrated. The writer is the center of the work as he is telling his own story.
Without fixed structure
The autobiography is characterized by not having a fixed structure. Each writer chooses his own structure, does not need to follow a chronological order to narrate the facts happened.
Formal or informal language
In the autobiography the writer can choose the language he wants to use. You can choose the type of language that best suits you to express yourself and tell your life.
Tone
You can choose the tone in which to write the biography:
- It can be a melodramatic tone where the events that happen to the author are unfortunate.
- A humorous tone where the story is presented from a laughing or comical point of view.
- An ironic tone, where an idea is expressed by saying the opposite, but so that the reader understands that it is an irony.
- Sarcastic tone, where the narrations reflect a lack of respect, where sarcasm is a cruel mockery.
- Heroic tone where the author has a strong personality and emerges from the dangers that arise.
- Nostalgic tone where pleasant experiences are evoked and remembered with a lost happiness.
Focuses on life
The autobiography is used to tell and narrate the whole life of the author. Unlike memories that focus more on a particular stage or event.
For this reason the autobiography is more complete, since it is not located in a limited period of time.
It is not a fixed rule, the author does not always remember all the moments of his life, in addition he can choose which to include in his work or not.
Draw conclusions and learnings
The autobiographies serve to draw conclusions from the lives of the people, they serve as an exercise of interiorization where they discover all the way that they have followed until arriving at the place where they are.
References
- ROSA, Nicolás. The Art of Oblivion: About the Autobiography . Puntosur, 1990.
- PANESI, Jorge. The price of the autobiography: Jacques Derrida, the circumcised. Orbis Tertius , 1996, vol. 1, paragraph 1.
- CABALLÉ, Anna. Ink daffodils: essays on autobiographical literature in Spanish . Megazul, 1995.
- ORBE, Juan Bautista. Autobiography and writing . Corregidor, 1994.
- Page 1 The autobiography and its related genres. Epos: Journal of Philology , 1989, no. 5, p. 439.
- OCAMPO, Victoria. Autobiography . South, 1981.
- GUASCH, Ana María. Visual Autobiographies: From File to Index . .