Autobiographical Narrative and Its Analysis - Assignment Example

An Autobiography I was born to work. When I was very small, a toddler still, I would take my toys and pull them apart and work with themuntil I could put them back together. My mother always told me that I would throw huge fits if she attempted to take the pieces from me. I would set the pieces down around me, my little hands twisting and turning to see if I could fix the puzzle that I had created. Sometimes, I would put it back together wrong and I would bang the object on the ground or throw it across the room. Other times, though, I would put the pieces back together and it would work just as well as when I tore it all apart. Even when I was small, I wanted to know how things worked, and I wanted to be the one to fix them. My mother told me that as a small child, other than my fits when I couldn’t get things back together the way they had come to me, that I was helpful and sweet. My greatest joy was sitting on the counter when she would wash the dishes, taking each dish carefully in my little hands and wiping it dry for her. When I was three, she began to give me chores, not because she felt that a three year old needed them, but because my older brother had chores and I felt left out when I wasn’t given a task. It was my job, supervised always, to feed the dogs, to sweep the small porch step out behind the house, and to wipe the keys of the piano that sat in our living room. Every week when I had done my chores, she would give me two coins to put in my little treasure box. I was able to buy my first bike with the coins from that box, or at least, my mother made me believe that I had paid for it. Because of these early years of work and accomplishment, I wanted to work in the world as soon as was possible. When I was seven, I went to my Dad’s friends local electronics store in the town and was fascinated with the variety of wonderful things that I would find there. I begged the manager to give me a job, and he would smile and tell me that I was too young to work for him. This did not dissuade me. I went back to the store frequently, and one day decided that I would help out enough that they would have to give me a job. I would sweep the floor, straighten the shelves, and direct the customers until the manager would finally tell me that I would have to leave. One day, though, he finally relented and allowed me to work for him. I straightened the papers on his desk and he gave me some money for my job. I began going every day after school and the manager would give me a little money at the end of the week. I am pretty sure that it was done out of his pocket, but to me, I had a job. I spent my childhood, when not at school, increasing the number of jobs that I would do. I would work for anyone who was willing to pay me, as well as being helpful to my family and to friends. However, not everything I did was so noble. I was still fascinated with the way things worked and with fixing things. I was compelled to take everything I could find apart. Many times my mother would just throw her hands in the air upon seeing that I had taken apart an appliance in the house. Eventually, though, my father found work for my hands that made me ecstatic and content. One day he opened the bonnet of an old car, smiled at me, and walked away. The car didn’t run. I was thirteen when I began to take the pieces apart and examine them all. I would spread them out on the ground and examine each one over and over until I thought that I understood it. After I would put them back together, I would discover more things that I didn’t understand and take it all apart again. I began to pour over books and manuals trying to learn how the car was suppose to work. I spent two years tinkering with the inner workings of the engine. After I would successfully put together a portion of the car, my father would look it over and if he approved, he would see what he could do to get the parts I needed for the next. I worked on the car for years, spending my spare moments when I wasn’t earning money in other pursuits to study and understand the inner workings of the vehicle. After taking it apart and reassembling it a dozen or more times from top to bottom, improving on this or that, the car was finally finished and my father and I were able to get it running. The week before my fifteenth birthday we started that engine, it was a day that has yet to be rivaled. The moment was like a sigh that ran through my whole body, the accomplishment achieved. What had been a wreck was now a working/functioning model. At the age of sixteen, I found myself ready to work in a more professional and real environment. I sought a job at a Saturday job at Bristol Street Ford, at first back to sweeping floors to prove my worth, but quickly being allowed to start helping working on vehicles in the garage. Eventually, the boss saw in me a talent for engines and asked if I wanted to take an apprenticeship placement on. I had a knack for finding a problem in an engine that others could not see. The days of working with my hands left me tired and satisfied as I found a sense of completion in the achievement of fixing a problem and rebuilding the mechanics of an engine. My Life: A Critique In the autobiographical narrative written by Nadin, a sense of history is presented from the origins of the emerging interest in mechanical workings to the culmination of that interest into a viable activity. The narrative is personalized by references to family members. However, the story of his interest in mechanical objects and in learning how things works lacks a sense of balance as other aspects of his life are not included within the narration. Truly personal revelations are lacking within the story and an emotional context is glaringly missing. The writing does reveal the passion of Nadin, allowing for his true desires to come to the forefront and open up what moves him in his life. According to Eakin, a good autobiography opens the internal self to the world and reveals something (142). In this story, the revelation is clear that Nadin enjoys the inner workings of things, but the reason for that attraction is glaringly lacking. Nadin says that states that “my little hands twisting and turning to see if I could fix the puzzle that I had created,‘ but he gives no insight into what draws him to this activity. One can only presumably infer that the curiosity might be the underlying reason for the display of such a behavior. Moreover, there is also a sense of motivation that is present in the personality of Nadin, which can also be observed explicitly in the writing; but, however, at one point in the passage it is suggested that the author belonged to a not-very-rich family: “I would work for anyone who was willing to pay me, as well as being helpful to my family and to friends.” The motivational force prevalent in the personality of the author could be the repercussion of the circumstances in which he was dwelling in. According to Daniel Cervone and Yuichi Shoda, “Across different circumstances, peoples experiences, and actions are often meaningfully interconnected. People respond consistently across some contexts and display distinctive patterns of variation across others.” Other than this, the story lacks the point of view of his parents, co-workers, and other attached individuals; nor does it at any point emphasizes the relationship between the author and the other individuals within the social framework. Looking at the piece through the dual criteria offered by Smith and Watson, the work does not look at Nadin through the eyes of society, but only through his own eyes (5). As an autobiographical work, the writing tends to be one dimensional and without a sense of the world outside of his own experience. The story that Nadin has constructed about his passion for mechanics and for working toward goals has successfully achieved the balance between background and result. As a consequence, he has achieved the task of the autobiographer to be seen by his audience - to “stand up…and represent yourself”, as Gilmore suggests (19). The story of his love for taking things apart reveals something of the nature of self that Nadin has acquired through the journey of his life. He says that “The moment was like a sigh that ran through my whole body, the accomplishment achieved.” In writing about this aspect, he attempts to tell his audience that something real about himself, even though the emotional context is very restricted. The autobiographical story that is created about a passion for the way in which things work lets the audience in on an aspect of growth that has influenced Nadin’s life. The way in which the story is built from a foundation of early childhood, into the culmination of his passions in adolescence allows for a complete journey on this singular aspect of his story. While some of the emotional context of a memoir is missing, the passion that has developed from an aspect of his personality is clearly related with sound structure. Albeit, as already suggested that the story is only concerned with a singular aspect of the life of the author, but, nevertheless, this particular singular aspect is dealt with in a manner so agreeable that it gives a delightful insight to the associated phase of the author’s life. In relating this aspect of his history, Nadin has revealed a simple truth about his self in the kind of language that it keeps on engaging the reader till the very end. However, in an expanded version of this work, the emotional context of the journey and the point of views of others within his experience would broaden the scope of the work. Works Cited Eakin, P. J. How our lives become stories: Making selves. Ithaca, NY [u.a.]: Cornell Univ. Press. (1999) Gilmore, L. The limits of autobiography: Trauma and testimony. Ithaca [u.a.]: Cornell Univ. Press. (2001) Smith, S., & Watson, J. Reading autobiography: A guide for interpreting life narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Cervone, D. & Shoda, Y. “Beyond Traits in the Study of Personality Coherence.” Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Feb., 1999): 27-32 Read More