The Circular Model

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“It is about a reconfiguration of the past in an act of retrospection which first of all aligns a view in the here and now. This story can only be told because both its beginning and end are already known” (Brockmeier, 2000, p. 63).

The circular model is one in which the present will refer back to the past, and the past is brought up in the present. As the autobiographical narrative has a retrospective teleology, “circularity seems to be an inevitable feature of autobiographical narrative” (Brockmeier, 2000, p. 64). In The Time Machine (Wells, 1895), for example, this circular model can be applied outside of the singular autobiographical sense in that it now applies to the entire human race; the devolution of humankind. Another example is the hypothetical story within The Thousand and One Nights discussed in “The Garden of Forking Paths” in which the narrator will eventually return to the night that she is telling the story and will start over in an infinite cycle (Luis Borges, 1941).