Adrian Marino, The life of a Single Man or on the Meaning of Ideological Autobiography

The present study tries to analyse The life of a single man by Adrian Marino from the perspective of the autobiographical genre. However, a close reading of the text’s Foreword reveals certain poetic and stylistic features which render difficult the assignement of genre. Starting from some of the suggestions Philippe Lejeune provides in his Autobiographical Pact, we tried to clear up these aspects through an interpretive reading of the authorial intentions Adrian Marino himself had hinted at in the beginning of the text. Determining the distinct positions of the author, the narrator and the character as related to the events narrated also provides challenging hypotheses in order to define Adrian Marino’s text. Last but not least, we intend to dwell upon the ideological type of the autobiography, which explains the peculiar nature of the text.1