frame no. 28.

1 may 2015|1129

Self and
Self-Representation
Online and Off
paul john eakin

abstract

Has the Internet produced new forms of

self-expression and even new kinds of
selves? It has certainly promoted new
forms of self-narration, notably brief,
collective, and ephemeral. Identity
formation, however, is more resistant to
change; identity work proves to be not
much different online than off because
cultural imperatives for identity

coherence operate equally in both

environments. Narrative identity is the
signature of that coherence. A deeply
temporal and versatile technology,
narrative is capable of contracting to
satisfy daily digital interventions and
of expanding to measure the life course
that results from increased longevity.

12

paul john eakin

Writing the Self, the title of this special issue of Frame, has a grand
ring to it, but the phrase risks suggesting that selfespecially when
preceded by the definite articleis something thing-like, whereas I
prefer to think of self as an awareness of an unfolding process, a name
we give to a special dimension of consciousness. Used in this way,
self functions as a shorthand for the complicated sense we have of our
self-experience. The writing part of the phraseif we take it
to denote broadly the act of representation in any modeis more
promising. When we write self, however we do itand we do it all
the timewe track the elusive and shifting traces of the person who
bears our name. The self part and the writing part are inextricably
bound together, for when it comes to self, we cannot help but make
what we say we find. This is because, neurologically speaking, memory
constructs anew our past experiencewhether from a moment ago or
years agoin each and every act of recollection.
Pursuing the link between self and self-representation,
Philippe Lejeune asserts that new developments in technologies of
communication have promoted new forms of self-expression: diary in the
case of paper; autobiography in the case of printing. Moreover, he gives
technology the upper hand in this dialogic cultural process: There is
no set I that remains identical throughout the history of humankind
and simply expresses itself differently depending on the tools at hand.
In this case, it is the tool that shapes the craftsman (248). If Lejeune is
right, it is timely to ask whether the advent of the Internet and the social
media enabled by it have in fact produced new forms of self-expression
and even new kinds of selves.1 This is my focus in the first part of this
essay. My hunch, however, is that while the Internet has brought ease
and speed to the way we talk about ourselves, and some new forms in
which to do it, performing identity work online is really not radically
different from doing so offline. For this reason, self-representation on
the Internet cannot be properly understood in isolation from the offline
world, and the key to that understanding is narrative. Because more
and more of us inhabit online and offline worlds at the same time, the
1. For some, includingI intuitthe editors of this special issue, the question has already been
answered and serves as the point of departure for further inquiry.

Self and self-representation

13

second part of this essay features the role of narrative in organizing both
of them. In order to highlight the contrast between the characteristic
brevity of daily online self-narration and the expansiveness of offline
autobiography and memoir, I will consider some end-of-life narratives
that probe the larger, existential meaning of a life.
Communication technologies have changed hugely during my
lifetime. I date from the days of snail mail and the telephone; television
was just coming in when I was in grade school. To compensate for this
generational gap, I open this consideration of self in the digital age
by looking briefly at the lives of two young men who grew up with the
Internet. They used it a lot, and it is also true that it used them.

Betrayal and Suicide at Rutgers

The sad story of two freshmen roommates that ended in disaster for both
unfolded swiftly at Rutgers in the early fall of 2010. One of the young
men, Tyler Clementi, was gay; the other, Dharun Ravi, was not. On
three occasions Clementi asked Ravi for exclusive use of the small dorm
room they shared in order to meet privately with a somewhat older man
(M.B.). Ravi had enabled his computers webcam to operate remotely,
and on the second of these occasions (September 19th) he used it
briefly from a friends room across the hall to spy on Clementi and his
male companion. Immediately afterward, Ravi tweeted, Roommate
asked for the room till midnight. I went into mollys room and turned
on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay (Parker 45).
Clementi read Ravis message the next day. Undeterred, however, by
Ravis behavior, Clementi asked Ravi for the use of the room again a
day later (September 21st). This time Ravi planned a more deliberate
exposure of his roommate. After rigging his computer to accept any
incoming calls automatically, he invited anyone with iChat [] to
video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12 (Parker 48). Clementi
read this tweet and disabled Ravis webcam before receiving M.B. in
the room. Later that night Clementi consulted with others online about
what to do, and he lodged a formal complaint about Ravis invasion of
his privacy. The next day (September 22nd), Clementi traveled to the
George Washington Bridge where he leaped to his death after posting a

14

paul john eakin

final message on his Facebook app: Jumping off the gw bridge sorry
(Parker 49). As for Ravi, in March of 2012 he was tried and convicted
of invasion of privacy and bias intimidation for his role in the webcam
spying incidents. This, in capsule form, is Clementis and Ravis story.
Why had these two young lives taken such a disastrous turn when
the formative period of discovery and consolidation of adult identity
in college was just beginning? In an article that he wrote for the
New Yorker in February, 2012, a month before Ravis trial, Ian Parker
investigates this painful story of miscommunication online and off. In
the three weeks they lived together, they barely had a conversation
(43). Parker concludes: In person, [Clementi] and Ravi had
maintained a wary coexistence, and it was built on not discussing what
they knew and said of each other online (47). And they were online a
lotthis is what fascinated me in Parkers reconstruction of their story.
Both men used the Internet and all its resources constantly, logging in
to social media and various forums at any hour of the day or night. Each
of them had checked out the other online before they met at Rutgers:
Ravi had Googled Clementis username to see what he could turn
up, and Clementi, for his part, knew that Ravi had seen his postings
on Justusboys, a gay-pornography site. When they started college in
the fall, online and offline activity were intimately entwined in their
awkward encounters. Parker gives this account of their first moments
alone together in their Rutgers dorm room once their respective parents
had left them to settle in:
As Ravi unpacked, Clementi was chatting [on instant messenger]
with Yang [a female friend]. Im reading his twitter page and
umm hes sitting right next to me, he wrote. I still dont kno
how to say his name. [] You should just start a conversation,
Yang wrote. Like hey, how the heck do I pronounce your
name? [Clementi replies], Thats too funny/your giving me
scripted conversations. (4243)

Where, exactly, is the Clementi-Ravi story unfolding? The instant

messaging between Clementi and Yang that fills the silence between
Clementi and Ravi in their small room challenges any easy demarcation

Self and self-representation

15

of boundaries between online and offline worldsthe one is sitting

right next to the other.
Although Internet communication plays a dark and decisive role in
this story, the content of the various messages and poststhe social
insecurities about what to say and do, how to becomes across as
normal teen talk. Note the hesitations, the embarrassed pauses, the
nervous laughter, the self-consciousness in this characteristic instant
messenger exchange between Clementi and Yang after Clementi had
read Ravis Yay tweet from the first spying episode:
Yang: I would feel seriously violated.
Clementi: When I first read the tweet
I defs felt violated
but then
when I remembered what actually happened
idk
Yang: um
Clementi: doesnt seem soooo bad lol
Yang: dude
Clementi: hahaha
Yang: not only did he peep
he told the entire world about it
Clementi: yah
Yang: you okay with that? (46)

It is striking how skillful this practiced pair are in finding ways

to register tone, to capture affect in their instant messages. If the
speaking voice is missing, they do a good job of making up for its
absenceYangs dude reply to Clementis lol makes me feel I can
hear her say it.
There is also nothing novel about the identity issues at play in this
story. Online resources, however, did provide Clementi with a chance to
talk them through, overcoming an offline shyness that might otherwise
have been inhibiting. This benefit was offset, however, by Ravis
blundering, demonstrating the online worlds potential for harm. The
identity concern Clementi is wrestling with herean online outing

16

paul john eakin

to anyone who might tune in to Ravis tweetmight well have played

out differently were it not for the speed and open-ended nature of the
Internet channels of communication that Ravi used. Ravi may have
been proud of his tech smarts, but he was in way over his head, setting
in motion a series of events that spiraled fatally out of control.

Brave New Digital World?

To lay out some current views of digital identity, I draw on a
multi-disciplinary collection of essays edited by Anna Poletti and
Julie Rak, Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. In her
survey of postmodern identity theory, Helen Kennedy revisits debates
in cultural studies about the concept of identity. She cites the work of
theorists such as Stuart Hall and Gilles Deleuze for whom the problem
with identity is that it implies stability and stasis (31), in contrast
with their postmodern view of identity as fragmented and fluid. Such
either/or polaritiesidentity as either fixed and stable or fragmented
and fluidstrike me as inadequate to address the complexity of
identity experience; they fail to capture how identity can change over
time and yet in some way remain recognizably the same.
More pertinentand revealingto a consideration of identity
in the digital age is Kennedys discussion of anonymity, which seems
to Sherry Turkle and other media commentators to offer users an
opportunity for identity experimentation online. Kennedys own research
on ethnic minority women using the Internet in the UK, however,
points up the disconnect between the theories she is reviewing and
the identity experience of ordinary people, people like Clementi,
Ravi, and their friends. She found that her subjects showed no signs
of wanting to hide their gender and ethnicity and so benefit from the
possibility of anonymity that cyberspace offers them (33).2 Kennedy
urges academics not to lose sight of the real struggles of real people
(39). As the Rutgers story reminds us, online and offline may
be crude markers when it comes to understanding the continuum of
self-experience today.
Media theorist Rob Cover offers another forceful corrective to
postmodern views of the Internet as a space of untrammeled freedom

Self and self-representation

17

for identity experimentation.3 Investigating the representation of

subjectivity on Facebook, Cover discerns not freedom but constraint:
the social networking tools of subject performance provide limited
scope for playing out an identity in accord with anything but the most
simplistic and simplified discourses articulating only the most limited
normative choices (66). Covers analysis of social media is informed
by Judith Butlers theories of performative identity, based on the idea
that identity and subjectivity is an ongoing process of becoming, rather
than an ontological state of being, whereby becoming is a sequence of
acts that retroactively constitute identity. Online social networking
behavior, Cover argues, is as performative as real life acts, and just
as equally implies a stabilized core inner self behind the profile (56).
Moreover, when we engage in identity work online, we are responding
to an older, ongoing cultural demand that we process our selves and
our actions into coherence, intelligibility, and recognizability, and thus
disavow the instability of identity (5657). For Cover, this online
identity work is, effectively, not dissimilar from the identity work of
having a conversation whereby a subject relates narratives of selfhood,
desire, experiences, recent actions, and tastes. Embracing Foucaults
view of a disciplinary society of surveillance, Cover reads identity
practices both online and off as rule-governed: we police each others
subjecthood for coherence []. Conflicting or unrecognizable selves
narrated outside the restrictive norm or stereotype demand explanation
(59). For Cover and Butler, it is the cultural imperative for coherent
identity, not postmodern theory and its celebration of fragmented
identity, that is calling the shots online and off.
If Internet identity is not distinctively different from identity offline,
but continuous with it and subject to the same cultural pressures, what
can we say of the forms that express it online? To pose the question
in this way risks suggesting that one can distinguish between self and
self-expression, whereas in fact identity and its representation are
2. Lisa Nakamuras treatment of race in connection with online identity confirms the limitations of
conceiving of the online world as a space where offline identity factors can be set aside.
3. See, for example, Smith and Watson, who note that for some commentators online identity, as
virtual, seems unbounded, purely a matter of choice and invention among avatars, rules, and
subject positions (8283).

18

paul john eakin

mutually interdependent. Because we construct our selves whenever

we engage in self-narration online or off, the qualities of identity and
the properties of its representation are two different faces of a single
phenomenon of self-experience. I pose the question nevertheless
to highlight the forms of Internet expression, and some of them are
novel. In the day of the selfie, a huge amount of self-expression is
pouring out online. While the Facebook profile is doubtless the most
characteristic form of identity expression on the Internet today, it is by
no means the whole story. How to bring the huge and expanding variety
of personal narrative forms on the Internet to heel? To sort them out,
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson propose a useful distinction between
two kinds of online sites: protocol-driven sites, which have elaborate
formats, driven by algorithms that dictate how users organize what they
tell or present themselves, and user-authored sites, which observe
some protocols but are looser and may be minimal (89). If Facebook
is the archetype of the protocol-driven site, the Six-Word Memoir
may stand for the user-authored site. Laurie McNeills investigation
of this popular feature of the online blog-a-zine Smith parallels the
findings of Cover concerning Facebook. Users may be authors of their
mini-memoirs (144), but McNeill demonstrates that the online space
they occupy turns out to be just as rule-governed as the protocol-heavy
Facebook page. Online narrative forms turn out to be constrained by
generic conventions in much the same way as those offline.
Where do the rules for producing the Six-Word Memoir come from?
Some are provided by the site itself. According to McNeill, the sites
design and activities [] indicate particular norms in place that guide
memoirists in what they choose to narrate and how they should engage
with other writers (152). By commenting on particular memoirs, the
community of users complements the sites built-in controls on life
writing behavior, helping to groom new members and police violations
(154) of community norms. McNeill shows how the Internet inflects the
playing out of genre in a novel fashion, setting up a requirement to
show and tell and read and respond to online lives (151). In this way
Internet life writing becomes a collective act, in comparison with the
individualistic aura that typically accompanies memoir offline. McNeill
makes a convincing case that new forms of life writing are emerging in

Self and self-representation

19

response to the needs of the digital life narrator. I call these forms
auto/tweetographies, she writes, short installments of life narrative,
which share moments, experiences, and lives in miniature, and which
will be updated or replaced regularly [] with new material (149).
In this view, digital life writing is likely to be brief, collective, and
ephemeral.

Narrative and Technologies of the Self

Brief, collective, and ephemeralMcNeill may be right that the
auto/tweetographies she describes do indeed satisfy the needs of the
digital life narrator, but if they do, that may be cause for concern. As
novelist Zadie Smith sees it, When a human being becomes a set of
data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. For Smith, a
huge gulf separates People 2.0the socially networked selves of
users onlineand her traditional idea of the Person 1.0a private
person, a person who is a mystery, to the world and [] to herself.
Smith worries that 2.0 people [may] feel their socially networked
selves genuinely represent them to completion (5960). Are Smiths
misgivings about Internet identity justified? A major factor contributing
to the impression that social networking identities are flat or reductive
may be the diminished role given to narrative in creating them, in
contrast to the offline world where narrative remains the dominant
identity technology.
Before addressing the role of narrative in the creation of identity
online and off, it makes sense to ask what we mean by technology
when we speak of technologies of identity. Michel Foucaults expansive
conception of technologies of the self is instructive. Foucault sought
to identify specific techniques that human beings use to understand
themselves (Technologies 18), and he focused on Stoic and Christian
practices of self-examination by way of illustration. Driving his
investigation of the technologies of the self was a large-scale question
that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century: What are we in our
actuality? (Political 145). Exploring narratives role in writing self
today may point the way to answering Foucaults bold question.

20

paul john eakin

Julie Rak and Anna Poletti, the editors of Identity Technologies, launch
their collection with the claim that the idea of narrative may not fit
what identity formation looks like in digital media (11). To support
this view they subscribe to a narrow understanding of narrative as
product, specifically a text of some kind. To the contrary, narrative is
much more than text; it functions as an identity practice, about which I
will say more presently. Moreover, recent work in neurobiology suggests
that narrative may be in fact a mode of perception with the result that
self may be said to exist inside the narrative matrix of consciousness.4
Happily, the editors limited view of narrative is countered by many
of their contributors. Smith and Watson, for example, conceive of
their toolbox for online self-presentation as a series of approaches
to online personal narrative formats (72). Again, Aime Morrison
asserts that there is no questionparticularly since the introduction
of the Timeline interfacethat Facebook and its users are producing
life narratives (127). And for Alessandra Micalizzi, the Internet is both
an identity technology (219) and a narrative technology (220).
So why do Smith, Watson, and the other contributors bring
narrative into play in their consideration of online identity? If online
and offline worlds are as intimately connected as the Rutgers story
suggests, then this move is predictable and indeed inevitable because
of narratives primary role in constructing identity offline.5 Shortly
after the acquisition of language, children are trained by parents and
caregivers to produce brief narratives about their experiences. Through
this memory talk they are introduced to the narrative practices of
their culture; they learn that they are expected by others to be able to
talk about themselves following certain basic conventions. By the time
we reach adulthood, we know how to produce on demand a version
of our life stories that is appropriate to the context. In this way we
become players in a narrative identity system: our self-narrations
confirm to others that we possess normally functioning identities. When

4. See Eakin, Travelling.

5. I should note that in presenting narrative identity I am describing the situation that exists
in U.S. society. I suspect that this reading applies equally to a large number of societies in
the West.

Self and self-representation

21

individuals lose their narrative competence, however, as the result of

age or injury, we can become aware of the extent to which the apparently
spontaneous and easy exchange of personal stories in our social
encounters is organized as a rule-governed system. We monitor the
self-narrations of others for lapses, and when autobiographical
memory and narrative competence fail, we may judge the self of such
an individual to be fundamentally compromised or damaged. In the
narrative identity regime, narrative rules function as identity rules.6
This brief account of the narrative identity system we inhabit
dovetails with Rob Covers and Judith Butlers views of identity
performance that I discussed earlier. They stress the cultural demand
for identity coherence, and I would add that the display of narrative
identity functions precisely as the signature of that coherence.
Summarizing Butlers theory of performance, Cover writes: the self is
performed reiteratively as a process in accord with a discursively given
set of norms, stabilizing over time to produce the fiction of a fixed, inner,
essential selfhood, which retroactively produces the illusion that there
is a core doer behind the deed (58). It is narrative that enables us to
capture these endlessly reiterated moments of identity performance,
creating what Ulrich Neisser has called the extended self, the self
existing across time (36).
Narrative is deeply temporal, and we need to ask what happens
to it in digital circumstances. In an Internet environment of posts and
updates, Laurie McNeill points to the miniaturization of life writing, as
in the case of the Six-Word Memoir. This reduction may be symptomatic
of a larger shift.7 Philippe Lejeune believes that the Internet has created
a profound change in life itself wrought through its relationship
with time (249), eroding our ability to fashion narrative identities.
To illustrate the drift of postmodern thinking that would support this
view, he cites the work of sociologist Hartmut Rosa, who asserts that
the conditions of existence are changing so rapidly that parents no

6. For a discussion of memory talk, see Eakin, How 1026; for a discussion of the narrative
identity system, see Eakin, Living 2231.
7. For an extreme reading of this change, see Rushkoff, who contends that we live today in a
postnarrative world (31).

22

paul john eakin

longer have relevant experience to transmit to their children. As to the

children who inhabit this fast-changing world, Rosa claims that they
can no longer develop even the outlines of a life project, and so the
possibility of forming a narrative identity becomes obsolete (25051).
After flirting with this radical assessment of narrative identitys future,
Lejeune concedes that it may be exaggerated. More specifically,
in the case of life writing, while the diary and the letter have been
transformed by Internet practices, autobiographylife narratives long
formcontinues to flourish much as it has in recent decades. Taking
up Lejeunes doubts and Rosas reservations about narrative identity, I
want to answer them by examining a series of end-of-life narratives that
demonstrate why writing self in autobiography continues to matter in the
digital age, and in new ways.

Narrative, Time, and the End of the Story

The Internet is not the only force transforming our relationship with
time. Advances in medicine are promoting longevity, so it may be
challenging to sort out whether our operative sense of time and of the
course of a life is contracting or expanding or both at once. People
2.0, such as Laurie McNeills digital life narrators, may be posting
what they are doing right now and what they did today, while Zadie
Smiths Person 1.0 may be thinking, What have I done with my
life? and What am I going to do with the rest of it? I suspect that
most of us operate in both time frames and play both rolesPeople
2.0 and Person 1.0but it is Person 1.0 who claims my attention
now, and narrative in its longer forms. In Being Mortal: Medicine
and What Matters in the End, Atul Gawande observes that for most
of human history the natural course was to die before old age (32).
Now, however, we may expect to live long enough to face our endgame
at an advanced age, and our adult children may have to face it with us.
Hartmut Rosas notion that parents no longer have relevant experience
to transmit to their children misses this existential situation between
the generations altogether, and I want to look at some relational
autobiographies that precisely target it, illustrating as they do so the
ability of narrative to respond to changes in our life circumstances.

Self and self-representation

23

Gawande indicts modern medicines failure to grasp the problems of

aging as more than a set of bodily conditions to fix. Chapter by chapter,
he traces the inevitable decline as we age from comparative health
and independence to dependency. The key to managing this process
successfully, he believes, is maintaining a degree of autonomy as our
physical and mental powers diminish. Whatever the limits and travails
we face, we want to retain the autonomythe freedomto be the
authors of our lives. This is the very marrow of being human (140).
Gawande understands autonomy in narrative terms: For human beings,
life is meaningful because it is a story. Unlike the experiencing self
[] absorbed in the moment, the remembering self is invested not
just in recalling the peaks of joy and valleys of misery but also how
the story works out as a whole [] And in stories, endings matter
(238

39). Following from this narrative perspective on aging is

Gawandes stress on what he calls the hard conversation, provoked
by the felt sense of an ending looming into view, never more so than
when our hand is nearly played out. This is when we should be given the
opportunity to express our wishes about dying to our caregivers and to
those we love.
Gawande had several of these frank confrontations with his father.
The first of them is especially memorable, triggered by an MRI scan
that revealed a tumor growing inside his fathers spinal cord: This was
the moment when we stepped through the looking glass (194). Father
and son share this recognition, and in the fathers remaining years
they navigate together decisions about treatment and eventually about
hospice and palliative care. In Gawandes view, the deeper meaning of a
life resides in identifying sustaining purposes outside ourselves, and in
his fathers case, there were severala college he had founded near his
native village in India, his charitable work for the Rotary Clubthat
contributed to a sense that his lifes value extended beyond himself. The
father believed that he was part of a larger story, and the son shares
in this belief. In the moving epilogue, Gawande relates the burial
of his fathers ashes in the Ganges: I felt that wed connected him to
something far bigger than ourselves, in this place where people had
been performing these rituals for so long (262).

24

paul john eakin

In The Final Reminder: How I Emptied My Parents House,

psychoanalyst Lydia Flem shows how the death of parents is
intimately linked to our sense of our own mortality: We knew that
it was inevitable, but, like our own death, it seemed far away, in fact
unimaginable (1). For Flem, this loss brings a new, heightened sense
of vulnerability, for there is no longer anyone behind us. Moreover,
because our parents are the repositories and guardians of our early
lives, their ending can signal our own: in burying our parents, we are
also burying our childhood (2). This apparent break in the lifeline
between parents and children often sets in motion an auto/biographical
project of narrative repair.8 This is the case with Flem. Going through
her parents effects, room by room, closet by closet, drawer by drawer,
overwhelmed by feelings of transgression as she invades what had been
their privacy, she uncovers papers that document her parents lives
during the Second World War and the Holocaust, in particular her
mothers participation in the Resistance, her capture by the Nazis, and
her eventual survival at Auschwitz. This was the untold story (known to
Flem only in fragments) that had darkened her childhood. Determined
to assume the history that had preceded my birth, she writes, I
wanted to release myself from a past that had remained trapped in
their lungs and had prevented me from breathing freely (57). Now, in
speaking these unspeakable things that her parents had wished her not
to know, in writing this book, Flem has the chance to exorcize them.
This is her version of the hard conversation, this one between herself
and her readers. The telling of her death-centered storydeath is
coiled up in usproves to be life-enhancing, a rite of passage, a
metamorphosis (118), crucial to working through her bereavement.
Not everyone is up for the hard conversation, the facing of
our mortality, that Gawande urges and Flem enacts. For New Yorker
cartoonist Roz Chast, it is her parents refusal of the hard conversation
that provides the title for her family memoir, Cant We Talk about
Something More Pleasant? Chasts attempts to get her elderly parents
to talk about their last wishes are futileIt was against my parents

8. For extended treatment of this literature, see Miller.

Self and self-representation

25

principles to talk about death (4). Chast admits that she had done a
pretty good job at avoiding all of this herself (22). She hated Brooklyn
and her parents apartment where she had spent an unhappy childhood.
An only child, she had felt excluded from her parents tight little unit
(7), and the caption she supplies for a photo of the three of them when
she was twelve tells it all: Just a few more years, and I am outta here
(180). Her father emerges as sweet, weak, and passive, overpowered by
her domineering mother, an assistant elementary school principal who
was proud of telling other people off with a blast from Chast (34).
Now, as her parents age into increasing dependency hastened by falls
and dementia, Chast is reluctantly drawn back in to cope with their
collapsing lives.
The book she writes chronicles step by step their repeated hospital
stays, their move into an assisted living complex (leaving behind an
apartment crammed with the hoarded accumulations of a lifetime),
and their eventual decline and death. Chast spares us nothing, nor
does she spare herself, owning up to the difference between what
she thinks a devoted daughter should feel and what she really does
feel. Her skill as a cartoonisther ability to compress, to focus, to
highlightmakes the entire memoir an unforgettable and surprisingly
funny hard conversation about contemporary death and dying. Chast
had hoped to stage last words with her mother in which they might
somehow bridge the lifelong distance between them, but her mothers
indifference is devastating. When the conversations had been reduced
to almost nothing (210), Chast recorded her mothers protracted dying
in a remarkable series of ink drawings. There is no color in these
sketches, only the date, and sometimes a brief notation. Her mothers
mouth, which Chast had feared growing up, the formidable source
of the blasts from Chast, remains the focal point of these images, a
dark portal beyond language. This is Chasts unflinching version of the
hard conversation she had never succeeded in having with her parents
while they were alive. In order to tell her story, Chast stretches the
cartoon, a very short form, to cover the span of a lifetime: the cartoons,
which offer close-ups that distil the essence of a situation or a state of
mind, are embedded in a prose matrix, passages written by hand, and
supplemented by photographs. The media blend, none of it drawing on

26

paul john eakin

the Internet, is at once familiar and startling, making this memoir one
of the most original in years.
This essay approaches the Internet and narrative as key identity
resources; we are likely to draw on both when we write self in the
digital age. I am skeptical, however, that the Internet offers the brave
new world of selfhood promised by some postmodern identity theory. To
the contrary, Rob Cover persuades me that identity work is performed
in much the same way online and off; both environments are governed
by the same cultural demand: that we display coherent identities.
Narrative, I argue, is the signature of that coherence. That this should
be the case is hardly surprising given the importance we attach to
cultivating narrative competence in early childhood. As a result, in
most cultures everyone is wired for narrative, so much so that the loss of
narrative competence due to injury or dementia is routinely interpreted
as a loss of identity.
When we go online, we bring to the keyboard this narrative
endowment and our lifelong experience as players in a narrative
identity system. Accordingly, when I speak of the Internet and narrative
as identity resources, I do not mean to suggest that they share an
equivalent function. The Internet is indeed an instrument of change,
shaping the needs of the digital life writer in ways that Laurie McNeill
describes, whereas narrative measures change. It remains the primary
motor of most self-representation because it permits us to track our lives
and selves in passing time.
The late Mark Strand captures our existential situation in a
remarkable poem, The Continuous Life:
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. (21)

Self and self-representation

27

For Gawande, Flem, and Chast it is narrative that measures and honors
the space in between those two great darks. Their stories show
narratives power to give such answers as we can to Foucaults question
about what we are in our actuality. Narratives force as a meaning-making
technology shows no signs of flagging in the digital age.

works cited

Chast, Roz. Cant We Talk about

Something More Pleasant? A
Memoir. New York: Bloomsbury,
2014. Print.
Cover, Rob. Becoming and
Belonging: Performativity,
Subjectivity, and the Cultural
Purposes of Social Networking.
Identity Technologies: Constructing
the Self Online. Ed. Anna Poletti
and Julie Rak. Madison, WI: U of
Wisconsin P, 2014. 5569. Print.
Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives
Become Stories: Making Selves.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1999.
Print.
. Living Autobiographically: How
We Create Identity in Narrative.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2008. Print.
. Travelling with Narrative: From
Text to Body. The Travelling
Concepts of Narrative. Ed. Mari
Hatavara, Lars-Christer Hydn,
and Matti Hyvrinen. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins, 2013. 8392.
Print.
Flem, Lydia. The Final Reminder:
How I Emptied My Parents House.

Trans. Elfreda Powell. London:

Souvenir P, 2007. Print.
Foucault, Michel. Technologies of
the Self. Technologies of the Self:
A Seminar with Michel Foucault.
Ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck
Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton.
Amherst, MA: U of Massachusetts
P, 1988. 1749. Print.
. The Political Technology of
Individuals. Technologies of
the Self: A Seminar with Michel
Foucault. Ed. Luther H. Martin,
Huck Gutman, and Patrick H.
Hutton. Amherst, MA: U of
Massachusetts P, 1988. 14462.
Print.
Gawande, Atul. Being Mortal:
Medicine and What Matters in the
End. New York: Henry Holt,
2014. Print.
Kennedy, Helen. Beyond
Anonymity, or Future Directions
for Internet Identity Research.
Identity Technologies: Constructing
the Self Online. Ed. Anna Poletti
and Julie Rak. Madison, WI: U of
Wisconsin P, 2014. 2541. Print.

28

paul john eakin

Lejeune, Philippe. Autobiography

and New Communication Tools.
Trans. Katherine Durnin. Identity
Technologies: Constructing the Self
Online. Ed. Anna Poletti and Julie
Rak. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin
P, 2014. 24758. Print.
McNeill, Laurie. Life Bytes:
Six-Word Memoir
and the Exigencies of
Auto/tweetographies. Identity
Technologies: Constructing the Self
Online. Ed. Anna Poletti and Julie
Rak. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin
P, 2014. 14464. Print.
Micalizzi, Alessandra.
Cyber-Self: In Search of a Lost
Identity? Identity Technologies:
Constructing the Self Online.
Ed. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak.
Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P,
2014. 21728. Print.
Miller, Nancy K. Bequest and
Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parents
Death. New York: Oxford UP,
1996. Print.
Morrison, Aime.Facebook and
Coaxed Affordances. Identity
Technologies: Constructing the Self
Online. Ed. Anna Poletti and Julie
Rak. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin
P, 2014. 11231. Print.
Nakamura, Lisa. Cyberrace.

Identity Technologies: Constructing

the Self Online. Ed. Anna Poletti
and Julie Rak. Madison, WI: U of
Wisconsin P, 2014. 4254. Print.
Neisser, Ulrich. Five Kinds of
Self-Knowledge. Philosophical
Psychology 1 (1988): 3559. Print.
Parker, Ian. The Story of a
Suicide. New Yorker, 6 Feb. 2012:
3751. Print.
Poletti, Anna, and Julie Rak.
Introduction: Digital Dialogues.
Identity Technologies: Constructing
the Self Online. Ed. Anna Poletti
and Julie Rak. Madison, WI: U of
Wisconsin P, 2014. 322. Print.
Rushkoff, Douglas. Present Shock:
When Everything Happens Now.
New York: Penguin Current,
2013. Print.
Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson.
Virtually Me: A Toolbox about
Online Self-Presentation. Identity
Technologies: Constructing the Self
Online. Ed. Anna Poletti and Julie
Rak. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin
P, 2014. 7095. Print.
Smith, Zadie. Generation Why?
New York Review of Books, 25 Nov.
2010: 5760. Print.
Strand, Mark. The Continuous
Life. The Continuous Life. New
York: Knopf, 1990. 2122. Print.

Self and self-representation

29

biography

Paul John Eakin has written

extensively on autobiography and life
writing. His most recent book, Living
Autobiographically: How We Create
Identity in Narrative (Cornell, 2008),
is being translated into Korean and

Portuguese.Last year he published

Autobiography as Cosmogram in
Storyworlds.Eakin is Ruth N. Halls
Professor Emeritus of English at
Indiana University.