Author(s): Gökben GÃÃLÃ
Starting from the very beginning of his literary career, Christopher Isherwood nurtures his fiction from real life experiences. However his idiosyncrasy does not only come out of producing an ordinary autobiographical writing. He forms a direct relationshi p between art and experience and claims that, “I [he] write in order to find out what my life means and who I am” The act of writing itself is an attempt to make sense and meaning out of his life. By recording personal experience and transforming them into stories, he finds unity and purpose in life. The theoretical framework that I’ve benefited while exploring Isherwood’s fiction thoroughly belongs to personality psychologist Dan P. Mc Adams and his Life Story Model of Identity Theory. Dan P. McAdams argues that personal stories are our identities. Like a novelist, we work on our lives to make sense and meaning out of them. Our experiences, values, beliefs and objectives in life affect the formation of our identities. According to McAdams, identity is a story which has a beginning, a middle and an ending, with a plot, theme and characters in it. Drawing upon the framework of Dan P. McAdams’ life story model of identity, the aim of this paper is to portray the relationship between personal story telling and identity construction in Isherwood’s earl novels and the ones he produced in Berlin. By analyzing Christopher Isherwood’s fiction within the performance of his life story, my intention in this re search is to unravel the formation of the artistic and sexual identities that he constructed in different periods of his life
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