The Blurry Road to Grandchildren

Abstract

This thesis seeks to answer the question how the temporal narrative structure contributes to an interpretation of the author’s life in rock memoirs Bit of a Blur, The Road Beneath my Feet and Things the Grandchildren Should Know. To do so, it first discusses the genre of rock memoir in relation to autobiography as a broader concept, followed by looking at two aspects of Gerard Genette’s theories about narrative temporality: order and duration. These are then applied to the corpus of texts. It finds that variations in temporal structure can be used to directly as well as indirectly stress and reflect the aspects of the narrator’s life that he deems most important, as the theory suggests. Contrary to existing theory, it also finds that these aspects do not necessarily correspond with culturally determined notions of (rock) stardom.