The I

 I was reading Rachel Nevins' Authorship and Betrayal in To Write As If Already Dead when I ran across this paragraph:

Who is this “I” speaking on the page, and what is their relationship to the writer who wants to disappear from the page? As a teacher and as a poet who often writes out of my life, I spend a lot of time thinking about the “I” on the page. I tell my students that the “I” on the page is a persona—a mask, under the cover of which we feel liberated to speak truthfully. Zambreno, quoting Alex Suzuki, writes, “Doesn’t the very act of becoming an author amount to the creation of a public persona apart from one’s personal self? And yet literature itself is where the truest things can be said.” One can disown the “I” on the page—that “I” is not me, it was never me, it is no longer me—because the “I” is a character, not the self. But to draw another character from life (a family member, a friend) and reveal truths through that character is much trickier business.

 Back at Fort Dix, in our writing classes, there was often enough a discussion of using "I" - usually in the context of  memoir writing (a popular style with some of us prisoners). Until now, I had not really thought of the I as a character except, maybe, when thinking of Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op. Could be I give myself too much credit. But what was Somerset Maugham or Collette or Philp Roth doing when they put their names into their stories - an act I found so interesting when I first read The Plot Against America!

The "I" can then a slippery character interrogating the self, the action, the whole story.

And there are some people who may still think I'm intelligent!