Original scientific paper

Autobiography and the Question of Identity

Predrag Finci orcid.org/0000-0001-7702-6899 ; Rosa Freedman Centre, London, UK

Abstract

Every activity reflects the identity of the person who is engaged in it. In an autobiography a multiple identity of the autobigrapher is displayed. It discloses everything that a person is or was. And no other can do it better than the person in question. In an autobiography, the writer is searching for himself, his own identity. In the identity question of the autobiography , the person asks what has been the crucial event in his or her life. Autobiography is awareness of the self. Memories and experience develop and shape a personal conscience, they attest the awareness of the personal identity, identity which is not a given, but is ever evolving. It is only through remembering and experiencing that a person simultaneously develops the imaginary reality of the past and evolves into what he or she is. Every personal story consists of the experience of that particular person, experience that is not only a personal one, but also experience involving a particular culture, language, education, and contact with others… An autobiography is a text in which a writer develops his own identity, displays his “identity card” and retouches his own image. When writing an autobiography, the writer reinvents his own identity, his own self. In every creative work the creator creates himself, as well. In every biography it is possible to recognize many relevant philosophical issues, from the question of identity to the question of representation of a subject, especially those written by philosophers. By deciding to write in the first person singular, a philosopher expresses his sensitivity, confirming that the philosophy he embodies belongs to him, affirms that he is personally responsible for what he claims in his work, that is certainly not an apersonal, divine sentence or a tale of an anonymous folk sage, but his own quintessential sentence. A subject speaks. This is Ego Cogito that becomes personality, the I of the writing. Authorship. A philosophical work is an identity card of a philosopher. In an autobiographical text, the author discloses, develops, affirms and defines his own identity, but in the end his personal I is not his own I, because his I becomes a protagonist of a personal story. The writer of an autobiography becomes I of the text, in the end.

Keywords

autobiography; self; personal; text; identity

Hrčak ID:

82486

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/82486

Publication date:

21.3.2012.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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