The Watermark of a Self in Narrating the Past: A Study of Autobiographical Memory in Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory

Abstract

Autobiographies are not merely literary productions but mental functions, stories continuously narrated, owned and believed by the self. By broadening the locus of autobiography from literary productions to mental functions, the connection between its Greek constituent parts: autos (self), bios (life), and graphe (writing), can be clarified and new vantage points become possible for studying the self and its narrative framing. In the genre of autobiography Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory stands out in unraveling the ways in which memory speaks the self. The free indirect style voice of narration and bridging the epistemic gap between the past and the present, both innate to the act of remembering, are masterly used by Nabokov. This article, following Mark Rowlands’ approach to memory, studies Speak, Memory in order to explore the narrative structure of autobiographical memory and the constitution of the autobiographical sense of self. Thisstudy argues that in Speak, Memory, the self emerges as a narrative thematic pattern across time by being purported in, and at the same time transcending clusters of first-personal narratives that reconstruct the past.