Blurring distinctions: autobiography and identity in Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines

MANY commentators upon The Songlines (1987) have press outed reservations about the disparity between the book's ambitious intellectual aims and its form as a travel narrative. Unlike greatest in quantity travel writing, The Songlines has a thesis--that all humans are by means of nature migrators or nomads--a claim more appropriate to a scholarly work of anthropology than a travel narrative. single of Chatwin's editors, Susannah Clapp, has written that The Songlines "creaks in trying to make its large statements." (1) She have feelings that when entries from Chatwin's notebooks upon nomadism first appear in chapter 30 "the narrative of the work comes apart and is not at any time ...