The Education Of Henry Adams: A Non-Person in History

The third-person form of address in The Education signifies an absence of person. Non-person refers first to a grammatical distinction made by Emile Benveniste, who argues that third-person pronouns do not enact the writer's subjectivity and thus are the common mode of historical narration. The second, political sense of non-person applies to the theory of history that structures Adams' autobiographical narrative.