Defining Autobiography

Defining autobiography as a "reflective reshaping of events" is interesting because it almost contradicts the belief that an autobiography is a direct reflection of the truth. However, personally, I would argue that an autobiography can never be fully truthful because it is written by an unreliable author from a limited perspective (their own). Furthermore, autobiographies are generally written with an audience in mind, therefore creating a purpose for the text. When a person writes about their life with a purpose in mind, I believe it causes them to recreate their perspective of events in order to emphasize their purpose for the text, whatever that might be. Additionally, people rarely feel the exact same way about a situation while it is occurring as they do looking back on it after so many other experiences. I believe that this phenomenon is very apparent in the texts of Smith, Equiano, and Douglass. Therefore, in this essay, I plan to show how defining autobiography as a "reflective reshaping of events" is accurate when considering the texts of Smith, Equiano, and Douglass because of both the purpose the men had in mind when recreating their experiences and the amount of time that had passed between each author's actual experiences and the time in which they wrote their narratives.

In his narrative An Account of the Remarkable Occurrences in the Life and Travels of Col. James Smith, James Smith recounts his experiences living with the Native Americans after he was kidnapped as a young adult. During his years with the Native Americans, Smith was allowed to keep a journal, the contents of which composed this narrative. However, Smith's narrative was not written in journal format; rather, it was written in story form. This suggests that some editing was performed by Smith on the content of the narrative, and he himself offers that he had "revised [the journal] shortly after [his] return from captivity" (262-3). Furthermore, Smith did not publish his narrative until nearly forty years had passed since his captivity.