Design And Truth In Autobiography Analysis

The autobiography – as a genre – conventionally and inevitably deals to some extent with the times of the autobiographer and his association with them; but mainly occupies itself with the individual who is at once its subject and its architect. Ray Pascal in his book Design and Truth in Autobiography (1960) writes that autobiography “involves the reconstruction of the moment of a life, in the actual circumstances in which it was lived, [. . .] It imposes a pattern on life, constructs out of it a coherent story. It establishes certain stages in an individual life, makes links between them, and defines, implicitly and explicitly, a certain consistence of relationship between the self and the outside world” (9). And in doing so the author is free
He became “innocent” again: his past made him accept progressivism. He came comprehend the existence of corruption at the national echelon. Out of these experiences emerged his social philosophy learnt from “life as it is lived” (Autobiography 231). It took him years to understand that history is not what is taught in books but as the strong men behind the scene shape it. It took him sometime to understand the underlying system of corruption but having understood the techniques of corruption he concluded that the blame of corruption should go to people and not the bosses in power. Revolution, two decades of it – Mexican and Bolshevik, the Mc-Nammara Case, World War I, and the advent of Fascism took him through the last excursion of education. His autobiographical persona made it essential for him to remember most of what the schools had taught him were lies to be unlearned. And in doing so he not only records his occupational self did but what it
At the end of his European academic career Steffens found himself as just a struggling student, an “American boob” who wanted to cast off his own ignorance, “I was happily unaware that I was just a nice, original American boob, about to begin unlearning all my learning, and failing even at that” (Autobiography 166). The older myths acquired from his academic training had to be replaced by the new emerging patterns of industrial America. As Stephen Whitefield observes:
The Autobiography records the hunches he stretched into hypotheses, the generalizations he tested and discarded, the attempts to delineate the system. To be sure, Steffens shared the trade’s hunger for facts, yet he was not appeased by nothing-but-the-facts. He traced the pattern of events; building upon his initial exposure of municipal corruption, he sketched the interlocking relations between business and government and then planned the grand coordinates of history. (“Muckraking Lincoln Steffens”