At first when reading through this work...I felt like his choice of 3rd person point of view made him seem very narcissistic, cocky, and self-absorbed. Since I knew he was writing this work about himself, choosing to write in third person created a distance between the reader and Henry. I interpreted this distance to come off as snobbery, that Adams was so high and mighty of what he though education was and the amazing story of his education through life was so inspiring and unconventional that he wanted to correct the world in what they interpreted education to be.
As I've continued to read, I've tried to not keep myself limited to my initial reactions to the text so I could try to appreciate other things about it. Now, I can see how choosing a 3rd person point of view can help Adams look back on his life and reflect objectively on his educational experience. Yes, emotions are removed, but that could be a strategy to be able to engage with his experiences in the most unbiased way he could have managed. This type of objective reflection could have led him to being more capable of changing who he was over the years. Because he's taking his experiences from and outside point of view, he can better detect his patterns of change in education he experiences.
I haven't read a lot of autobiographies, much less ones that are in third person, so I think that choosing this POV is an interesting tactic of Adams. The distance I feel from the character is a little discouraging to continue reading, but hopefully I will be able to keep pushing to see past these initial thoughts
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In our groups in class today, we talked about how the nature of autobiographies is to come off as arrogant since the author obviously thinks their life is remarkable in some way. This creates a challenge for authors creating a autobiography to write about themselves in a way that doesn't come off as distastefully arrogant.
ReplyDeleteAs I was reading the book, I thought Adam's was moderately arrogant since he wrote in the third person like he was writing about someone extremely important. I agree with Julia that by the end of the book, I felt that writing in the third person was more beneficial to the theme of the book than making Adams seem arrogant.
As much as I wish this book had more emotions and subjectivity, I understand that that type of informality would completely weaken his aim for the book, particularly his dynamic theory of history. Thus, despite the third person POV making this book less than engaging, in my opinion, it is definitely an important and effective feature of the text and this book would not be what it is without it.
As I was reading this book, I was continuously surprised by how often he said that his experiences seemed normal to him. Was this arrogance? Does it make him seem less credible to assume that every reader grows up in the aura of two former presidents or with the tradition of diplomatic trips to Europe? What was Henry Adams trying to communicate? At first I believed him to be either out of touch with 'normal' Americans or a little condescending (not unlike some returned quad-lingual study abroad students... "oh, you've never visited Milan, Seville, or Paris? how odd..."). However I am now starting to see that Adams used his naivette in the third person (think "private secretary" for 3 chapters or "young boy" throughout the first group) to satirize his situation. Stephen Crane did this in "The Red Badge of Courage" with his main character, calling him "the young soldier" for the majority of the novel. Henry Adams avoided arrogance by satirizing his abnormally political childhood. I thought that was a unique way of tackling the bombastic problems most autobiography authors face.
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