The (fictional) autobiographical subject in push. by Sapphire - Investigating precious's narrating I and narrated I's: an outsider's or an insider's life story?

Resumo

The present essay aims at analyzing the autobiographical subject conceived by
the American writer Sapphire in her novel Push. It is taken into consideration here the fact
that, in an autobiographical text, whether or not it is fictional, the subject who talks about
himself is a kaleidoscopical being. It then means that the individual who writes is not, under
any circumstance, the one who is written about. Therefore, it is the purpose of this paper to
investigate not only the subject who weaves his life narrative, but also the objects of the
narrative: the many stages of the narrator/character depicted in her bildungsroman. Making
use of a deliberately misspelled text, Sapphire engenders the fictional autobiography of a girl
who fights to acquire literacy and sees in education her only chance to get rid of an oppressive
domestic environment. By putting a pen in Precious’s hand, Sapphire is granting her
narrator/character the right to speak not only about herself but also for herself. The real author
is then providing the fictional one with the prerogative of representing herself. In short, this
paper focuses on revealing the Precious who narrates and the other Precious who are narrated
and, in doing so, verify the gap there is between the narrator/character and those who are
rescued from the past by memory and textually reconstructed. In order to do so, critical works
by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Susan Friedman, José Luiz Fiorin, Leigh Gilmore, among
others, were used as theoretical support for the current analysis.