Gibbon's Autobiography: Filling Up the Silent Vacancy

AUTOBIOGRAPHY, as we know from recent studies, does not reveal the truth about a life merely by a literal rendition of its events and circumstances.' Whether we emphasize the form, the language, or the sensibility of the autobiography, we as readers learn what the writer thinks about his past, or at least what he thinks he thinks about it. If we divide the word into its components autos, bios, and graphia, we confront three separate elements: the self, the life, and the writing. An autobiographer concerned not with biography written in the first person but with self-examination reveals a concept of the autos, a particular way of regarding what he takes to be his intrinsic image and those qualities which constitute selfawareness. Even if such an autobiographer cannot satisfactorily define the essence of the self, the very effort of examination and the process of self-inquiry are often themselves central. An autobiographer's notion of what it means to be a self inevitably guides the shape of his book, and his belief in the way the self assumes a particular form allows him to feel wortlhy of autobiography in the first place. In addition to the concept of the self we have the life-events,