The personal pronoun “I” has slipped into our
ways of thinking and literature like an iron bolt. However, the authors
Elizabeth Bowen, Christa Wolf and Elena Ferrante--though a generation apart and
living in different nations--work to unloosen it in their writing. Their
characters are not single, unitary beings with a stable “I”-- but kaleidoscopic
in their variety of states of mind and being. They present a multiplicity of
“selves” merging with past aspects of self, narrators, characters and
themselves as authors.This essay foregrounds their narrative experiments with
the “dissolution of self” and examines the lexical and narrative techniques
through which they “dissolve” and express their multiplicity as women, authors,
narrators, citizens, friends, and, sometimes, spies in selected works.
