Autobiography of a Face Literary Elements

Memoir

The action takes place in Spring Valley and the action starts in the 1960s and lasts until the 1990s.

The events are told from the perspective of a first-person subjective point of view.

The tone and mood used in the memoir is a tense one.

The protagonist is the narrator and the antagonist is her illness.

The major conflict is an internal one and is between the narrator's desire to give up and her willingness to fight and survive.

The memoir reaches its climax when the narrator decides to accept her physical appearance and find a reason to be happy within herself and to not wait for others from outside to make her happy.

Lucy mentions how in her teenage years she refused to look in the mirror because she disliked the way she looked. This foreshadows later instances in her life when she will avoid doing various things because of her appearance.

At one point during the memoir, Lucy claims that she no longer cares about her appearance. This is however an understatement because she later goes on to have numerous expensive surgeries in an attempt to fix her face.

The main allusion we find here is the idea that a person's self-worth is deeply liked by a person's appearance.

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One of the main paradoxes we find is that Lucy still decided to undergo dangerous and expensive procedures even after she claimed she was at peace with her appearance and no longer wished to change anything about herself.

Lucy draws a parallel between her own life and the life of her sister. This parallel has the purpose of showing just how much the narrator's life was affected by her disfigured face.

School and the education system is used here as a general term to make reference to the idea of bullying.

We find a personification in the line "it seemed like everyone and everything was watching me: the man dressed in a suit, the young girl holding onto her mother, the dog that stopped to sniff something on the ground to the mailbox across the street."