Assess the genre’s basic features.
Basic Features
A Well-Told Story
Vivid Description
Significance
As you read remembered event essays in this chapter, you will see how different authors incorporate the basic features of the genre. The examples that follow are taken from the reading selections that appear later in this Guide to Reading.
A WELL-TOLD STORY
Read first to enjoy the story. The best autobiographical stories are first and foremost a pleasure to read.
Examine the story to see if it is well told. Does it let readers into the narrator’s point of view, enabling us to empathize with the writer? Does it arouse curiosity and suspense by structuring the narrative around conflict? Does it lead to a change or discovery of some kind? These elements can be visualized in the form of a dramatic arc (see Figure 2.1), which you can analyze to see how a narrative creates and resolves dramatic tension.
Look also to see how dialogue is used to portray people, help readers understand their point of view, and heighten the drama. There are three ways to present dialogue: by quoting, paraphrasing, or summarizing. Quoting dramatizes the dialogue through a combination of actual spoken words and descriptive speaker tags that surround them:
“You stupid kids,” he began perfunctorily. (Dillard, par. 18)
Speaker tag
Paraphrasing reports the content of what was said but doesn’t quote the actual words or use quotation marks:
Ernie said he was going to take a quick look in the cave and invited me to come along. I politely declined. (Ruprecht, par. 5)
Summarizing gives the gist without the detail:
I was read my rights and questioned. (Brandt, par. 19)
VIVID DESCRIPTION OF PEOPLE AND PLACES
Look for descriptions of people and places to see how the describing strategies of naming, detailing, and comparing are used to portray vividly what people look like and how they dress, gesture, and talk as well as to convey graphic sensory images showing what the narrator saw, heard, smelled, touched, and tasted. For example, take a look at Desmond-Harris’s description of people and Dillard’s description of a place:
Naming
Detailing
Comparing
My hair has recently been straightened with my first (and last) relaxer and a Gold ’N Hot flatiron on too high a setting . Hers is slicked back with the mixture of Herbal Essences and Blue Magic that we formulated in a bathroom laboratory. (Desmond-Harris, par. 6)
For more on describing strategies, see Chapter 15.
The cars’ tires laid behind them on the snowy street a complex trail of beige chunks like crenellated castle walls. I had stepped on some earlier; they squeaked. (Dillard, par. 5)
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE
Read finally to understand the story’s autobiographical significance. This is the point the writer is trying to make—the purpose for writing to a particular audience. Notice how writers convey mixed or ambivalent feelings, how they acknowledge still-unresolved conflict, how they avoid making the story seem clichéd or sentimental.
To convey the richness of meaning that makes the event worth writing about, writers tell as well as show
- by remembering feelings and thoughts from the time the event took place:The thought of going to jail terrified me. . . . I felt alone and scared.” (Brandt, par. 17)It was an immense discovery, pounding into my hot head with every sliding, joyous step, that this ordinary adult evidently knew what I thought only children . . . knew. (Dillard, par. 13)
- by reflecting on the past from the present perspective:I mourned Tupac’s death then, and continue to mourn him now , because his music represents the years when I was both forced and privileged to confront what it meant to be black. (Desmond-Harris, par. 9)
- by choosing details and words that create a dominant impression: Brandt, for example, describes her rapidly changing feelings: naïve optimism, fear, humiliation, excitement, shame, worry, relief. This cinematic technique of quick cuts from one feeling or thought to another conveys the volatility of her emotions.