The article discusses selected works by the Western Canadian writer
Robert Kroetsch (1927–2011) within the context of the biography battles
which peaked during the 1990s. Kroetsch played a critical role in the
formation and honing of a distinctive Prairie literary tradition in
Canada, and we discuss a series of his poetic and other works published
from the 1970s to 2010 which resonate with concerns raised within
life-writing and life-writing criticism in the nineties. We focus on the
almost obsessive concern with the relationships between self and other,
and the seemingly contradictory denial of a stable self which mark the
life writing debate of the decade; both evident in all of Kroetsch's
writing. Raising the relation between space and selfhood to the fore,
the article argues that Kroetsch's work not only questions our ability
to know another through writing, but even to know the self. At the same
time, we argue that the glimpses of a seemingly stable, autobiographical
self that emerge in his writings speak to the seductiveness of gaining
insights into the machinations of another person's mind, tempting
Kroetsch again and again to ponder writing “an autobiography in which I
do not appear”.