Abstract

Life does not offer itself to us, as it were, as a pre-formulated story: it has to be made into stories if we are to experience it in any but the most basic and instinctive manner. And through narratives in interaction we develop the capacity for self-interpretation. Unsurprisingly, narratives make up a large proportion of every language in use. Scholarly interest in the processes of narrative has burgeoned in recent years across a wide variety of disciplines.

The study of literary narratives has a particular importance. Unlike those of everyday interaction, these are highly crafted stories, in which the vagueness, inconsistencies, and arbitrary repetitions and truncations of daily language in use are either absent or used for specific communicative purposes. In this paper, we bring together three complementary points of view to explicate a literary text, Margaret Atwoods' novel Surfacing, which takes the form of an autobiography narrated by an unnamed female. The discussion combines literary approaches to autobiography with linguistic perspectives on first-person narratives. These two approaches are brought to focus on the development of the self in narrative, using the social-psychological concept of Reflective Self Function, which is a person's capacity to apprehend and understand the motives for and influences on his or her own behaviour and the behaviour of others.

One cannot attribute psychological characteristics to a fictional character. Nevertheless, the concept of RSF helps to reveal the motivations underlying the behaviour of the narrator, who initially suffers from post-traumatic stress. As she reflects on the experiences she has been through, she gradually discovers herself as a full human being who has attained reflective knowledge about herself, others, and her place in society. In particular, she understands her personal responsibility for what happens to her.