Structures of Autobiographical Understanding

Abstract

Abstract This chapter looks into the deep analogies (as suggested by Wittgenstein) between the work of a draughtsman who renders all the relations between the parts of a building perspicuously and the work of the autobiographer who does very much the same in achieving word-borne self-understanding. The chapter then progresses to a discussion of the literary structuring devices we use (of a broadly Aristotelian kind) as “self-architects” in the composition of a “dot-connecting” self-narrative, and the special sense in which the achievement of a stabilized long-arc life-narrative can prove cathartic. And we see here that words of self-description can, when first negotiated and then settled in, function in a way that is more powerful in self-constitutive terms than we might initially have imagined.