While I took the liberty of discussing various typologies of autobiographical narratives in the previous chapter, I do wonder, like Mandelstam (1991), about the songs in the souls of my respondents that were not brought to bear in their impromptu rendition of their life tales. Were the rhythms in their life tales fortuitous or do they offer a partial glimpse into one's consciousness or is it both a chance and an active construction? My penchant is to recognize the boundary line, although not absolute and impermeable, between the lived life and the narrated life. I take my respondents' narratives as their selective representations – both by chance and by choice – of their experiences and my own analysis, in turn, is yet another re-presentation of their life stories and therefore, there are many layers of dialogic relationships. Bakhtin (1981) reiterates frequently that we must never confuse “the represented world with the world outside the text (naïve realism); nor must we confuse the authorcreator of a work with the author as a human being (naïve biographism)” (p. 253). Thus, the immediate reality is that the lived life and the narrated life are indissolubly tied up and are in a continual process of mutual interaction. The disjunction can neither be fused nor torn apart.