Bits of Autobiography: Radical Deindividualization and Everydayness

This essay focuses on the autobiographical strategies deployed by Ambrose Bierce in response to shifting conceptions of the literary representation of everyday life. I place Bierce at the transition point between nineteenth- and twentieth-century realism, between an understanding of typical experience as comfortably generic and a growing sense that the common story has produced a horrify anonymity. “Bits of autobiography” are fragmentary and hypersubjective narratives that Bierce uses in his attempt to re-individuate by breaking with the repetitiveness that he associates with this latter understanding.