Christopher isherwood: A life story dedicated to the act of writing in search of an artistic, sexual and spiritual identity

As an author who attributed a deeply significant personal meaning to writing, Christopher Isherwood's main purpose in fiction was to discover who he really was and what his life meant to him. The act of writing was not something mundane for Isherwood. The raw material of his art was his own personal experience and life story. For this reason, the structure of his many works are autobiographical and self-defining. Therefore, interpreting Isherwood's fiction independently of his life story is impossible. The theoretical framework that strengthens this study is the 'Life Story Model of Identity' theory presented by personality psychologist Dan P. Mc Adams. Beginning from his early career as a writer until the end, Isherwood's motivation for writing was to speak out of his own experiences, making meaning out of them and reflecting them into his fiction. The incidents he went through in life play a critical role in understanding his fiction and, years later, Dan McAdams has provided an ideal approach that helps us to grasp what Isherwood was really doing with his fiction. During my research, what thrilled me most was exploring how the relationship between Christopher Isherwood's life story and his fiction chime with McAdams' claims and observations about life narratives. McAdams claims that personal stories are our identities. Like a novelist, we work on our lives to make sense and meaning out of them. Our experiences, values, beliefs and objectives in life affect the formation of our identities. For McAdams, identity is a story which has a beginning, a middle and an ending, with a plot, theme and characters in it. Drawing upon the framework of Dan P. McAdams' life story model of identity, the aim of this study is to portray the relationship between personal story telling and identity construction in Isherwood's novels. By analyzing Christopher Isherwood's fiction within the performance of his life story, my intention in this research is to unravel the formation of the artistic, sexual and spiritual identities that he constructed in different periods of his life. McAdams notes that there are key scenes in every individual's life story and Isherwood's life was full of with transitions, gains, losses and struggles that stand out as turning points. For this reason this study focuses on three different episodes of his life: London, Berlin and California. The experiences he had in these cities contributed Isherwood's storytelling and help us to reach a better understanding of the fiction he produced these distinct times and places. Starting from his early work All the Conspirators continuing with The Memorial, Mr. Norris Changes Trains, Goodbye to Berlin, Prater Violet, The World in the Evening and finally until his most critically acclaimed novel, A Single Man, it is possible to observe how the identities of Christopher Isherwood have been shaped, changed, developed and integrated into a coherent life story as an author, as a homosexual and as a spiritual individual.