The Autobiography is a spiritual conversion narrative that outlines Malcolm X's philosophy of black pride, black nationalism, and pan-Africanism.[8] Literary critic Arnold Rampersad and Malcolm X biographer Michael Eric Dyson agree that the narrative of the Autobiography resembles the Augustinian approach to confessional narrative. Augustine's Confessions and The Autobiography of Malcolm X both relate the early hedonistic lives of their subjects, document deep philosophical change for spiritual reasons, and describe later disillusionment with religious groups their subjects had once revered.[9] Haley and autobiographical scholar Albert E. Stone compare the narrative to the Icarus myth.[10] Author Paul John Eakin and writer Alex Gillespie suggest that part of the Autobiography's rhetorical power comes from "the vision of a man whose swiftly unfolding career had outstripped the possibilities of the traditional autobiography he had meant to write",[11] thus destroying "the illusion of the finished and unified personality".[12]
In addition to functioning as a spiritual conversion narrative, The Autobiography of Malcolm X also reflects generic elements from other distinctly American literary forms, from the Puritan conversion narrative of Jonathan Edwards and the secular self-analyses of Benjamin Franklin, to the African American slave narratives.[13] This aesthetic decision on the part of Malcolm X and Haley also has profound implications for the thematic content of the work, as the progressive movement between forms that is evidenced in the text reflects the personal progression of its subject. Considering this, the editors of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature assert that, "Malcolm's Autobiography takes pains to interrogate the very models through which his persona achieves gradual self-understanding...his story's inner logic defines his life as a quest for an authentic mode of being, a quest that demands a constant openness to new ideas requiring fresh kinds of expression."[14]
