| This thesis examines the convergence of biography and autobiography in Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family (1982), Coming Through Slaughter (1976), and Divisadero (2007). To analyze this convergence, I study Ondaatje's use of the map as a trope, and his combined deployment of lyrical, confessional, and anticonfessional modes in order to probe the extent to which we can align the author with his characters and narrators.;The first chapter of the thesis discusses how Ondaatje writes autobiography through biography, and how he relates his memoir through a writer/narrator figure. In Chapter Two I investigate the relationship between writing person and place in Coming Through Slaughter, a fictional biography of Buddy Bolden. In Chapter Three I read Divisadero as a kind of fictional auto/biography where Ondaatje meditates on writing one's life through another with the creation of a writer-figure who in many ways resembles the author himself. |
