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 despite ridicule and the bullying he endures due to his 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 sense of self. She spends most of her solitary life allowing the people in her life to define her while at the same time rarely venturing outside of her mind, which only leads to a narrow view of the people around her, with Grealy only seeing them as they are relevant to his life. Grealy's use of cumulative sentences reflects the way she looks at her life, with herself acting as an independent clause and her experiences and the people around her as subordinate clauses that exist only in their relationship to her, relationships he craves due to isolation. you feel it all your life. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Throughout her childhood, Grealy's facial disfigurement left her subject to bullying from her peers, and the feelings of isolation and ostracism she experienced daily followed her throughout her adolescence and adulthood. She develops a strong disgust for her own face and even reaches a point where she "hasn't looked in the mirror for so long that she has no idea what she objectively looks like" (222). By refusing to look at herself in the mirror, an objective representation, Grealy essentially gives up an objective definition of her face, which represents her as a person, in favor of a more distorted self-image: the one she sees reflected in the insults and insults of her peers. She fixates on the fantasy of "living without the great burden of isolation, which is what it felt 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 results in feelings of ugliness and loneliness, so Grealy learns to associate abstract concepts with the reactions of people around her and this connection between her peers and abstract ideas makes her see other people only in terms of how they. make her feel about herself. 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 had to consider only herself and not the people around her, so she became selfish, focusing only on the people and events that affected her. Even when she is finally able to make friends, "they [are] people who [she] spends time with are more than real friends" and she would "never consider showing them [her] private " (192 ). The fact that he hoards 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 identity fail. None of the people around her, however, have “any idea what [they] had just implanted in the deepest part of [Grealy]” with their comments (65). None of the people he interacts with on a regular basis....