Auto/biography and the work of Michael Ondaatje

This thesis examines the convergence of biography and autobiography in Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family (1982), Coming Through Slaughter (1976), and Divisadero (2007). To analyze this convergence, I study Ondaatje's use of the map as a trope, and his combined deployment of lyrical, confessional, and anticonfessional modes in order to probe the extent to which we can align the author with his characters and narrators.;The first chapter of the thesis discusses how Ondaatje writes autobiography through biography, and how he relates his memoir through a writer/narrator figure. In Chapter Two I investigate the relationship between writing person and place in Coming Through Slaughter, a fictional biography of Buddy Bolden. In Chapter Three I read Divisadero as a kind of fictional auto/biography where Ondaatje meditates on writing one's life through another with the creation of a writer-figure who in many ways resembles the author himself.