Explorations question #6

Question #6 already -- my how time flies.

In class today I suggested, or at least observed, that Ellison and Augustine are in some ways doing the same thing in their respective books: by writing in a retrospective way, they are recalling past events and imbuing them with a significance that they might not have had at the time. In addition, both write autobiographically, in the first person; the main actor is "I" in each work. That said, Ellison is writing a novel, while Augustine is writing something that purports to be a true record of events (albeit as a confession, not merely as a litany of occurrences). Does this genre distinction -- fictional versus non-fictional memoir -- make a difference? Would Augustine's book have been different as a novel, or Ellison's as a true personal history?