In Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy explores the theme of the self and tells the story of her struggle to create a positive perception of herself- even despite the ridicule and bullying she endures because of her disfigured face, the result of jaw cancer. As Grealy matures and begins to create an identity for herself, she struggles to separate the opinions and thoughts of others from her own identity. She spends most of her solitary life allowing the people around her to define her while rarely venturing outside of her own mind, which only leads to a tunnel vision of the people around her, Grealy seeing them only as people around him. they are relevant to one's own life. Grealy's use of cumulative phrases reflects how she views her life, with herself acting as the independent clause and her experiences and the people around her as the subordinate clauses who only exist in their relationship to her, relationships she dreams of due to isolation. she feels throughout her life. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essay Throughout her childhood, Grealy's facial disfigurement subjected her to bullying from her peers and feelings of isolation and ostracization that she experienced daily. followed her throughout her adolescence and adult life. She develops a strong disgust for her own face and even reaches a point where she "hasn't looked in a mirror in so long that she has no idea what she looks like objectively." (222). By refusing to look at a mirror, an objective representation, Grealy essentially abandons an objective definition of her face, which represents her as a person, in favor of a more skewed image of herself: the one she sees reflected in the taunts and insults of his peers. She focuses on the fantasy of "living without the great burden of isolation, which is what it feels like to feel ugly" and allows feelings of ugliness and isolation to become her defining characteristics (177). She allows the people in her life to change her perception of herself. This relationship mirrors that of the independent and dependent clauses in a cumulative sentence with the subordinate clauses – in this case, Grealy's experiences with his peers – adding up to offer a description of the independent clause – Grealy's identity. The ridicule she endures because her disfigurement leads to feelings of ugliness and loneliness. Grealy therefore learns to associate abstract concepts with the reactions of the people around her and this connection between her peers and abstract ideas leads her to see others only in terms of how they make her feel. Grealy has a very self-centered view of the world, unable to see people or events except through how they relate to her. Her constant alienation meant that she only ever had to think about herself and not the people around her, so she became selfish, focused only on the people and events that concerned her. Even when she is finally able to make friends, "these are people she spends time with more than real friends" and she "would never have considered showing them [her] private self" ( 192). ). His hoarding of his own sense of self is ironic, however, given the extent to which the thoughts and reactions of others influence his sense of self. His efforts to preserve his own identity fail. None of the people around her, however, have the slightest “idea of ​​what [they] had just implanted deep within [Grealy]”.