Style and Intention in Johnson's Life of Savage

Abstract

Aside from general remarks about its style, most commentary on Johnson's Life of Savage has dwelt on sources and textual matters, perhaps from an unspoken assumption that biography is constrained by fact and therefore not subject to the kind of critical principles allowed to narrative fiction. However, just as Johnson himself led a Life of Allegory, a view demonstrated by Professor Bate, so in writing biography his classical conception of man as a timeless, moral prototype exerts a certain hold on his narrative form: there is such an Uniformity in the Life of Man, if it be considered apart from adventitious and separable Decorations and Disguises, that there is scarce any Possibility of Good or Ill, but is common to Humankind (Rambler 60) *1 Every individual undergoes his own private, fortuitous experience, but when he comes full circle his identity as a member of collective mankind, participating in archetypal experience, is at last manifest. For Johnson it is the art of the biographer to trace through the individual's life to determine its representativeness and then to create a narrative form that evinces this truth of uniform experience. The basic structure of Savage resembles a Greek tragedy or medieval morality play; it has a beginning, middle, and end that