Craig's Response to Freeman

Autobiographical Understanding and Narrative Inquiry by Mark Freeman

Mark Freeman explains the primary base of narrative inquiry is autobiography. He outlines the development of the autobiography through history from the Ancient Greeks who concerned the self to be a part of the community whole, to postmodernism when the self is seen as kind of an invention. He discuss the relevancy of truth as it pertains to autobiography. He believes that the autobiography should move beyond truth or falsity. It is the importance of the perception of the self as seen through history and the poetic artistry of the story that are more significant to pure facts.

This idea brings up the variety of autobiography that are produced today. There are autobiographies that are in reality just promotional material for the author. They are filled with well researched facts and statements that can be held up to scrutiny by readers and critics. Autobiographies like The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama or Pervez Musharraf’s In the Line of Fire are gone over with a fine tooth comb to discredit the books. Facts must hold these books together. These type of autobiographies have to be firmly rooted in fact to survive public opinion.

The autobiographies that lean toward creativity and revealing the human conditioned as seen from experience of the past tend to be more interesting. This type of writing is concerned with uncloaking life’s escapades in a well thought out composition. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road or even Nick Tosches’s The Last Opium Den provide a creative picture of the author that can tell more about the human experience than the straight forward, full of fact autobiography.

Both types of autobiographies have their importance in narrative inquiry in our time. Each has a purpose to inform about a person, yet the creative autobiography tends to provide information for deeper human knowledge.