What Are We Reading When We Read Autobiography?

Abstract

In this statement Oliver Sacks makes as bold a claim for the function of self narration in our lives as any I have ever encountered. His observation was prompted by the plight of a brain-damaged individual suffering from severe memory loss. Be cause the patient, Thompson, could not remember who he was for more than a minute or two at most, he spent his waking hours in frenetic self-invention, seeking to construct new identities to take the place of old ones that he forgot as soon as he created them. For Sacks, Mr. Thompson's condition exposes identity's twin support ing structures, memory and narrative: what is this man without his story? I keep re turning to the nagging conundrum that Sacks proposes in his meditation on this disturbing case, a radical equivalence between narrative and identity, and I want to make another pass at its meaning in this essay, armed with insights derived from the recent work of the neurologist Antonio Damasio. Before turning to Damasio and his theories about the place of self and narrative in the structure of consciousness, how ever, I'd like to suggest the social implications of this Sacksian notion of narrative identity. This narrative is us, our identities?surely the notion that what we are is a story of some kind is counterintuitive and even extravagant. Don't we know that we're more than that, that Sacks can't be right? And our instinctive recoil points to an important truth: there are many modes of self and self-experience, more than could possibly be represented in the kind of self-narration Sacks refers to, more than any