Cumulative Connectedness: Style and Identity in 'Autobiography of a Face' Anonymous 11th Grade

In Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy explores the theme of the self and she tells the story of her struggle to create a positive perception of herself in spite of the ridicule and bullying she endures because of her disfigured face, the result of a cancer in her jaw. As Grealy matures and begins to create an identity for herself, she struggles to separate the opinions and thoughts of others from her own sense of self. She spends the majority of her lonely life allowing the people in her life to define her while at the same time rarely venturing out of her own mind, which only leads to a narrow minded view of the people around her, with Grealy seeing them only as they are relevant to her own life. Grealy’s use of cumulative sentences mirrors the way that she looks at her life, with herself acting as the independent clause and her experiences and the people around her as the subordinate clauses that exist only in their relationship to her, relationships she craves because of the isolation she feels throughout her life.

Throughout her childhood, Grealy’s facial disfigurement leaves her subject to the bullying of her peers and feeling of isolation and ostracization that she experienced on a daily basis followed her throughout...