THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE HUMAN GAZE IN ANITA BROOKNER'S LOOK AT ME

Abstract

As the title of the novel indicates, the act of writing her story is primarily motivated by the narrator Frances Hinton's narcissistic desire for recognition. Despite the fact that Look at Me is the story of a fictional character and not an autobiography, Mark Freeman's characterization of the features of autobiography serves as a means of understanding Frances's story. Mark Freeman argues that: "Memory ... which often has to do not merely with recounting the past, but with making sense of it ... is an interpretive act the end of which is an enlarged understanding of the self."1 Frances's narrative, on the other hand, is characterized by a complete lack of an understanding of herself and therefore displays, instead of a psychic development, a cyclic pattern that renders the impression that Frances's story is the repetition of the time of which she never speaks, as she tells the reader on various occasions. The cyclic pattern. however, becomes most explicit at the end of the novel where Frances' lack of an understanding of herself points at a future victimization due to the fact that Frances refuses to step out of her assumed passivity. 

Keywords

• SIGNIFICANCE
• HUMAN
• GAZE

References

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9. Walker, Nancy A.: The Disobedient Writer: Women and Narrative Tradition, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1995.