vale paia

The resultant book, though cuboid and linearly numbered in physical structure, serves as the channel for an amorphous cycle of narrative fragments which simultaneously construct and deconstruct the reader's conception of autobiographical 'authenticity' and truth (56). As one fragment explains, 'When I pretend to write on what I have written in the past, there occurs in the same way a movement of abolition, not of truth'.

Thus, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes is an 'anti-autobiography' in the sense that its text aims to diminish the idea of a cohesive, linear account of a definitive self, in favor of an inconsistent subject (86) who is dispersed (143) as a set of fictive personae (120) which seek to create 'neither a text of vanity, nor a text of lucidity, but a text with uncertain quotation marks, with floating parentheses' (106).”