The personal pronoun “I” has slipped into our ways of thinking and literature like an iron bolt. However, the authors Elizabeth Bowen, Christa Wolf and Elena Ferrante--though a generation apart and living in different nations--work to unloosen it in their writing. Their characters are not single, unitary beings with a stable “I”-- but kaleidoscopic in their variety of states of mind and being. They present a multiplicity of “selves” merging with past aspects of self, narrators, characters and themselves as authors.This essay foregrounds their narrative experiments with the “dissolution of self” and examines the lexical and narrative techniques through which they “dissolve” and express their multiplicity as women, authors, narrators, citizens, friends, and, sometimes, spies in selected works
Patricia Laurence (Wed,) studied this question.