Autobiography of an English soldiers in the United States Army

Figure 4.1: Title page from Autobiography of an English Soldier in the United States Army

Teachers can begin by introducing Ballentine's narrative as an example of a multilayered personal narrative that represents genres of autobiography and immigration. 

Personal narrative, as Jonathan Arac argues in The Emergence of American Literary Narrative, 1820-1860, is founded upon displacement paci c voyages, overland journeys to the frontier, slaves' escapes, or immigrant, Atlantic journeys like Ballentine's (76); however, this displacement is not only physical. It also occurs in the relationship between author and reader. 

Readers are urged to know the narrator, while realizing that there is a di erence between the world in which they live and the world in which the narrator lived historically. More speci cally, this di erence pertains to how the narrative functions as a representation of historical experience and how the reader experiences that narrative as they read it (Arac 76). 

This distinction provides a key moment for teachers to help students learn about the internal world of a text. What do certain words, phrases, and experiences mean within Ballentine's narrative? What do they mean in terms of the historical context, and what do they mean to us today? 

By showing students this process of translation, they can learn the complex layers through which literary narratives convey meaning.