Franklin Today

Every autobiography tells at least two stories. The first belongs to the character whose story is being told, the second to the narrator who tells that story. Oftentimes this second story is kept discreetly out of sight, but the text we know as Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography steadfastly refuses to accede to the convenient fiction that the history it recounts exists independent of the circumstances of its telling. Like a boom mic dipping into the frame, Franklin the writer repeatedly obtrudes, reminding his readers that it is not unfolding reality we are witnessing but a carefully composed representation of it. The superimposition of these two chronologies begins in the thin veneer of epistolarity that accompanies the Autobiography's opening salutation "Dear son," and the reminder that the story of Franklin's ancestry and youth were written while on vacation in England in 1771 (Chaplin 9 [all references to the text of the Autobiography are to this edition]). Franklin only got as far as the establishment of the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1731, but he resumed writing, he tells us, in 1784 (74). Franklin repeats the description of the Library Company before outlining his youthful "bold and arduous Project of arriving at Moral Perfection" (78). He had not written very many pages before again breaking off, resuming "at home, August 1788" (89). These conspicuously staged scenes of writing constitute the text's three parts, to which a fourth is sometimes added, though Franklin does not mark it. Part 4 comprises the final seven pages of his manuscript, which offer a very abbreviated overview of Franklin's diplomatic efforts following his arrival in England on July 27, 1757.