A Comparative Analysis of Camara Laye's the African Child, Wole Soyinka's Ake: The Years of Childhood and Ayikwei Armah's Fragments as Autobiographies Using the Genettean Mode

Abstract

This paper identifies four main sub groups of the autobiography namely: the factual autobiography, the fictionalised autobiography, the literary autobiography and the autobiographical fiction as present in many ways in the works of practising writers in the West African sub Region. The last three are glossed as having enough information and literary value to merit an analysis using the Genettean model. Genette's macrotextual classifications of Time, Mood and Voice and their subcategories are used to show the differences between these identified autobiographies. The paper also shows the three works on a continuum from the most factual to the most novelistic.