Summary Of Autobiography Of Red By Anne Carson

The title of Anne Carson's book reads: "Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse," which struck me with two very contrasting images. The word "autobiography" implies feelings of truthfulness and reality versus the word "novel", which to me insinuates fiction and to some extent the idea of a tale. From the very title of the book, Carson had me intrigued, and this idea of two contrasting stories/ images stuck with me throughout the book, for good reason. The book itself contains a story within a story, which can come across to us in two separate manners. The first is an Ancient Greek tale, originally told by Stesichoros, which tells us about how Hercules defeated a winged monster named Geryoneis by killing him, his little dog and stealing his red …show more content…
I found it very interesting to see how Carson added her own imagination into the story and how she filled in many blanks for us, and at the same time kept the story current yet true to it's nature. She created an actual relationship between Geryon and Herakles, which blurred the lines between what the reader’s may consider the reality of Geryon versus the fiction of the Ancient Greek tale. I knew the story of Hercules and Geryon prior to reading this novel, so to see how she mixed "reality" and "fiction" was very interesting. She even kept Geryon’s red wings, that we see referenced throughout the book. However, what stood out most for me was when she really made the two texts speak with one another, especially the part of the novel where Geryon writes his biography for school and it is basically the Ancient Greek tale, so to see that Carson introduced this topic to us in this way was very intriguing. It began to appear as if she was using Stesichoros' tale to convey to the reader's Geryon’s view of himself and his outlook on life. His autobiography was quite gruesome, and his teacher even notes this, making him change the ending to his story by marking it "new ending." He made it appear as if simply changing the ending to his written piece, which can be viewed as "fiction", could change his reality, from his