A verdade autobiográfica de Boyhood, de J. M. Coetzee

Abstract

This article analyses the specificities of J. M. Coetzee’s Boyhood, book that starts the Scenes from Provincial Life trilogy and breaks the reader’s expectation and the pre-established conventions of a text with an autobiographical origin. First, we will recover two exemplary books of the writing of the self that were paradigms to the future memorialist works: Saint Augustine’s Confessions and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions. After that, we will closely study Boyhood that, due to the Coetzee’s insistence in don’t bind it to a specific genre and for the peculiar stylistic options used in the construction of the book, intrigue readers and specialists in their analysis and fruition.