Eye and I: Negotiating Distance in Eyewitness Narrative

Eyewitness narratives promise immediacy, the authority of you-are-there witness to the events of the past. Such narratives, however, whether those by comparatively removed witness-observers or those by more directly involved witness-participants, pose difficult problems of distance. How do the limits and possibilities of eyewitness experience contribute to working through the identity concerns that autobiographies typically engage? Revisiting history in their relational autobiographies, Passage to Ararat and Maus, Michael Arlen and Art Spiegelman look to eyewitness narrative to bridge the gap that separates them from their fathers. In her Holocaust memoir, Still Alive, by contrast, Ruth Kluger takes a darker view, exposing the manifold registers of distance -- linguistic, psychological, epistemological -- that complicate her own and any quest to stand at the eyewitness ground zero of biographical and historical knowledge.