SOURCE: Folkenflik, Robert. “The Self as Other.” In The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation, edited by Robert Folkenflik, pp. 215-34. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Folkenflik studies the treatment of alterity and the self in autobiographical narratives from St. Augustine to Jean-Paul Sartre, with primary reference to several Victorian autobiographers.

My title may seem to be an abstract version of Rimbaud's “Je est un autre,” and this is certainly a line to which I will return, but what I have in mind, at least initially, is the moment in autobiography in which the subject perceives himself, or less frequently herself, as another self, a frequent though not inevitable feature of the genre.¹ I will start with Augustine, not simply because he stands at the beginning of the most influential tradition in autobiography, but because he presents the process in a clear-cut and characteristic...