I. Introduction: Grace Paley, "A Conversation With My Father"

II. Augustine as his mother's son: Why does the narrative representation of Augustine's life end with the death of his mother Monica?

III. Genders and languages: Why doesn't the Confessions end with Book 9, since, after all, its narrative representation of Augustine's life does end with Book 9?

IV. Bodies and times: To what degree, and why, can we understand Books 10-13 as an integral part of the Confessions?

A. My father is eighty-six years old and in bed. His heart, that bloody motor, is equally old and will not do certain jobs anymore. It still floods his head with brainy light. But it won't let his legs carry the weight of his body around the house. Despite my metaphors, this muscle failure is not due to his old heart, he says, but to a potassium shortage. Sitting on one pillow, leaning on three, he offers last-minute advice and makes a request.
      "I would like you to write a simple story just once more," he says, "the kind de Maupassant wrote, or Chekhov, the kind you used to write. Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next."
      I say, "Yes, why not? That's possible." I want to please him, though I don't remember writing that way. I would like to try to tell such a story, if he means the kind that begins: "There was a woman. . . " followed by plot, the absolute line between two points which I've always despised, not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.
            Grace Paley, "A Conversation with my Father"

B. "Language is both death dealing and life giving, and Augustine uses different modes of discourse as illustrations of different stages of his spiritual evolution and as emblems of the different selves corresponding to these various stages. . . . hence the need to use a hierarchy of modes (narrative, meditative, and exegetic) to illustrate his soul's progress. " Lionnet, 48-49.

Works Cited:

Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo . University of California Press, 1969.

Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence . Clarendon Press, 1991.

Lionnet, Francoise. Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture . Cornell University Press, 1989.

Paley, Grace. "A Conversation With My Father." in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. Dell, 1975.

Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative . University of Chicago Press, 1948.