Text Of Immortality, Myth Of Identity

The present study attempts to explore the narrative aesthetics of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography from the angle of a contextualized narratology. Franklin's Autobiography has become unfailingly attractive to numerous critics for centuries since its first publication. However, the existing criticism focuses its attention either on such generic issues as fact and fiction, fantasy and reality, or on ideological issues like significance for moral education and Franklin's pragmatism, or such issues as the stylistic characteristics. Little attention has been paid to the formal elements of this text itself. On the other hand, though some criticism is ideology-driven with touches upon the issue of Franklin's identity construction, few have attempted to approach that issue from a narratological angle to show how Franklin builds up his myth of identity in his textual world.To redress the balance, the present study endeavors to show some close affinities between Franklin's narrative techniques and his identity construction, that is, between form and ideology. In terms of Franklin's identity, the present study argues that it is a trinity, namely, the professional identity as a fallible PRINTER, the spiritual identity as a poetic WRITER and the cultural identity as a metaphorical FATHER. Franklin interweaves these three identities in a dynamic and evolutive network in the narrative, which are examined respectively in the chapters followed so as to demonstrate its corresponding coherence and consistency as seen in the myth of Franklin's identity.Besides Introduction and Conclusion, this thesis consists of four chapters. Chapter One is devoted first to a macro discussion of how Franklin's three identities come into being through the practical analysis of the sociohistorical contexts, and then to a microanalysis of such narrative element as temporal arrangement, especially frequency and duration. Chapter Two is mainly concerned with Franklin's professional identity as a fallible printer, where unreliability is examined in both the concrete and metaphorical sense. Before analyzing Franklin's narrative "erratum", Chapter Two first ventures to modify the existing model of unreliability in the hope of constructing a theoretical model for the present study and to contribute something new in this field as well. Chapter Three primarily focuses its attention on Franklin's spiritual identity as a poetic writer by way of examining the tense switches between the present and past. The present study tends to regard these frequent switches of tenses in autobiographical texts as a narrative technique and a unique means to construct the identity as a poetic writer as well. Furthermore, some stylistic and rhetoric devices such as exemplification, comparison and contrast, and quotation are also probed into in this chapter to supplement the analysis of the narratological techniques. Chapter Four explores Franklin's cultural identity as a metaphorical father, namely, a national father, by focusing on the narrative situation and commentary in the Autobiography as two chief tactics in revealing how Franklin succeeds in metaphorizing and subliming his professional and spiritual identity onto a cultural level. In discussing the narrative situation, Chapter Four also attempts to make some revisions of the existing models of narrative communication both in fiction and autobiography, and suggests that, no matter what genre it is, any critical model as such should denote both the self-sufficiency and the openness of a text.All in all, through the combination of the narratological approach with the exploration of Franklin's ideology, namely, his self-consciousness in identity construction, this paper hopes to widen the understanding of the existing criticism of Franklin's Autobiography.