Stimulating the Readers through Self-portraits in Biographies, Auto-biographies and Memoirs: Study of Hooks and Dillard’s Narratives

Abstract

Biography and Auto-biography make an exposition of closely resembled memories, experiences, identities, embodiment, and agency-based ideas, views, and feelings of an individual. The idealistic explorations of life and lively experiences through narratives stimulate the shrinking nature of an individual with the self-help or the other narratives portrayed in Bell Hooks’s “Talking Back” and “Straightening Our Hair.” Annie Dillard in “The Fixed” narrates human-insects relationship subjects composing the self and stimulating the author’s/narrator’s views to reflect on their past memories to concretize views, ideas and feelings in the practical ground of the real world. Events/incidents exposed in Hooks and Dillard’s narratives based on life, either own or others are examined in this article. Life writers collect information from agencies and self-help writings/materials that also might be in the shadow of identity marker and so it is questioned on the authenticity of life narratives and an autobiographical truth that is to be tested through theoretical applications. Identifying the narrative modes of self-inquiry in different forms of ‘I’ as autobiographical and biographical testimonies in the memoirs is the research objective of this article that helps to find out the gaps and reduce the confusion of readers. Thus, this article tries to study the causes and consequences of stimulating the readers through self-portrait inquisitions in biographies, auto-biographies, and memoirs to which Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s ideas are applicable.