The Story of My Life Literary Elements

Memoir

Late 19th-century United States, primarily Alabama and Massachusetts

The memoir is narrated in first-person past tense by Helen Keller, who wrote it as a 21-year-old looking back on her youth.

The tone is generally lighthearted; the mood is positive and uplifting, though it shifts sometimes as Helen recounts more difficult events (e.g., "The Frost King").

Helen Keller is the primary protagonist, and the intangible antagonists are her deafness and blindness, which she must overcome.

The memoir's conflict is Helen's uphill battle towards being educated, despite her debilitating handicaps.

Though it is difficult to find a climax in a memoir, it can be argued that the climax occurs when Helen passes her Radcliffe entrance exams and enters college for the first time. This was something she was working towards her whole life, and Radcliffe marks the pinnacle of her education.

When Helen was a young girl, she proclaimed that she would one day go to Harvard. This foreshadows her eventual attendance at Radcliffe, the women's college affiliated with Harvard University.

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Whenever she discusses literature, Helen makes many allusions to famous writers and poets like Shakespeare, Homer, and Virgil.

See separate section of this guide on imagery.

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Helen personifies the natural world around her very often in her writing; an example of this from Chapter 7 is when she refers to rivers as devious—"devious" is an adjective typically used only to describe people.