Blog Post....Narrative and Identity

Well...it looks as if our assigned blogger didn't meet the deadline this week so I'm going to jump in!

Doug's prompt is asking about the relationship between story, narrative, identity, identification, and believability. Dorothy Allison's narrative is very deep and beautifully poetic, and honestly, I'm not sure I understand all of the poetic images/devices she creates but, the more I reread her narrative, the more I understand in piecing together her story with her images (still some parts I'm unclear about). After I read Allison's narrative, I think my first question I needed to answer  was who she was intentionally writing to and what she was writing for.

 Allison starts her narrative by saying that it's her goal as a storyteller is to make her audience believe her story...which makes her writing seem rhetorical in that she is writing for an audience...and it's also published for an audience. However, repeatedly through her narrative, she claims she is writing for herself. On page 450, she tells the story of the last time her stepfather beat her on her sixteenth birthday and how she stood up to him. "It was a story to tell myself, a promise. Saying out loud, 'You're never going to touch me again'...I have told myself that story, the story about a girl who stood up to a monster. Doing that, I make a piece of magic inside of myself, magic to use against the meanness in the world." She claims that she tells herself her story to survive...to me, "surviving" in Allison's context is overcoming being "deeply broken, incapable of love or trust or passion" (450). She is also writing her narrative, this painful and difficult event that is hard to share, for emotional healing. She is also telling her story to disprove the one the world wants to hear, "I tell my stories louder all the time: mean and ugly stories; funny, almost bitter stories; passionate, desperate stories--all of them have to be told in order not to tell the one the world wants" (451). To me, she is saying that her narrative needs to be told to bring her experience of truth to a world of narratives that are not her own. She claims on page 415, that, "I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means." So maybe she is writing her narrative for the sake of her subjectivity in her narrative (she is the only one who knows and understands her experience)  to the other narratives that are not hers?

At the beginning of her narrative, she paints the picture of her telling her story to her sisters. It seems that Allison's family the women have had a tradition of physical, sexual, verbal, and emotional abuse by the men.While Allison is writing for emotional healing, it also seems that she is telling her story to an audience to prove that rape and abuse happens wayyy more than it should (it shouldn't happen at all) and it should not be ignored. It also seems to be told for women, like her sisters, who have been through rape and abuse. Allison's narrative is vulnerable. She is opening up her past to her audience for healing, truth, and clarity. I think that such a narrative encourages others, who have the same hurt, to do the same and start the healing process.

I think one of the primary reasons that Allison's story is so powerful is that she is so vulnerable. She's being vulnerable in retelling her stories to herself, women who endured abuse, and an audience that has not. Her story is huge on pathos in that she tells events of her story in how they happened and how the confusion of her emotions was a part of her narrative. Her story is one of how she overcame. Her story is one that offers the chance for our stories to relate/identify. Even if one hasn't been through abuse, I think pretty much everyone has been in a painful situation that seems difficult to overcome and that our stories can relate to hers because of those situations that we have been in. 

I was thinking as I read Allison's story, of how it blended the binaries that we have been talking about in class in a powerful way. Allison's work is telling a story for the sake of an argument to herself and her audience that she overcame and others can overcome. She makes her argument in a logical way...it is beautifully and thematically structured and she uses her emotional experiences of her narrative to prove her argument. I think people relate to personal experiences more than facts....that's why testimonials are a powerful rhetorical tool. Anyways, how she tells her emotional story is based on the logic of her storytelling and how her story makes sense to her.

I'm not really sure if I answered your question or if I just started to because this blog post seems to be everywhere. I think my main point is this: narratives are powerful when the author deeply identifies with his/her personal story (this creates vulnerability and an emotional identification between author-text) because this identification is one that encourages readers to identify with the text as well. Allison writes so connected to her narrative because she is sharing her identity to her audience....this connection, at least for me, encourages the identity of my narrative to relate my story to hers.