ABSTRACT
The structure of an autobiography is inevitably defined to some extent by the temporal shape of a life. Even the most modernist texts whose techniques of fragmentation and simultaneity play freely with chronology still have time as a basic reference point, and it is this consciousness of 'our life in time and our mortality that generates much of the impulse to write autobiography'. The structure of such a traditional autobiography has as its basis the 'authentic' memories of the writer which he/she uses as stepping stones in the tracing of the plot, deliberately arranging them into a temporal sequence even though this denies their simultaneous coexistence in the present consciousness of the narrator. The basic structure of the Histoire is, then, chronological and teleological, purposeful and determined, to fit in with the way a man is said to live his life, and George Sand is certainly writing within this tradition.
