Whats in an I? "Dissonant and Consonant self-narration in Autobiographical discourse"

Abstract

Looking back over our lives, we often start pondering the impact the experiences we recall have had on our current situation. Autobiographical remembering thus entails the reflection of the subject on her earlier incarnations, the younger selves from which the present self has evolved. Therefore, the autobiographical “I” can never be singular, but is necessarily split into more positions, among them the narrating self and the experiencing self. Many authors of literary autobiographies address this division not only explicitly through commentaries on the perceived closeness or distance of one’s past embodiment, but also implicitly in their choice of narrative strategies. The idea of a split between the narrating-I and the experiencing or narrated-I, originating in narrative theory, has proved its usefulness for conceptualizing the split subject of autobiographical discourse. This essay aims to take these models of the autobiographical subject a step further by adopting Dorrit Cohn’s distinction between consonant and dissonant self-narration to explore how authors engage creatively with the different positions of the autobiographical “I,” and how this engagement contributes to the text’s aesthetic qualities.