The issues of veracity I have just examined obviously are related to issues of writing. The question I want to pose of the texts in my corpus here is: If their authors were “really there” and can be held as dependable, how do they represent what they have gone through? In other words, what conventions of discourse are the authors using when they pass on their reminiscences? Questions of this type are not reserved for literary critics concerned with referential narratives. They are, or should be, equally important for historians, as the data supplied by life stories cannot be exploited without considering the rules that frame that genre. Indeed, experiences do not spontaneously metamorphose into texts just because they are assumedly genuine. They have to be textualized, and the strategies that authors employ during this process must be accounted for because they have epistemological implications. For one thing, some of them entail that the information provided can be verified, while others entail that it cannot; choices in such areas as voice, point of view, and figurative language matter, because they shape the representations of the events that the authors have endured and now are setting out to recount.

The concept of an “experience” that has to be “represented” admittedly must be clarified. By “experience,” I mean here what the Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary defines as “something personally encountered” (409), in this instance, “something that the witness actually lived through” as opposed to the imaginary pasts that authors of fictional memoirs create for their narrators-protagonists.