It’s all about me.  Autobiography, that is. So how then do I represent me?  There is a lot of talk about the narrating ‘I’ and the narrated ‘I’.  I am telling the story of Darren- but I am not necessarily narrating as the Darren of the story, rather as the Darren of today.  I will, however, sometimes also allow the narrated Darren to be the narrating Darren. Confusing? To put it more plainly, I speak from a vantage point of years and experience.  This is advantageous, but also unpleasant.  The Darren I am representing is a different person, in a sense, and I am responsible for portraying him as he was.  Given that I have changed (as is inevitable if one does not live in a bubble), this depiction of the ‘I’ bereft of the intervening years of trial and error is an odious task.  The onus is on me to adhere regardless to the ‘autobiographical pact’- a term coined by a guy named Phillipe Lejeunne, which means, and I clumsily paraphrase here, to be as honest and open as possible in my portrayal of a Darren I do not particularly like. There are lines of thought proposing that memory is subjective, so why bother attempting to be objectively truthful?  Others assert that all life is a narrative, and there is no need to dress it up as non-fiction.   In the words of Shakespeare, “All of the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players”.  I don’t know if Lejeune would agree. All of this leads me to the image below.  Some visual experiments for the representation of myself, the first row in a non-specific style, the second row in the vein of Chester Brown, and the third row is a humbly sincere imitation of Craig Thomas.