The figure of self is closely related to voice and presents many of the same problems. As we have seen already, writing–speech–self metonymies operate pervasively and complexly. The voice is contiguous with language, which is contiguous with thought. The brain is part of the body, which is contiguous with the self – the mind, the soul, the spirit, the character, the personality. But even noticing this abundance of metonymies does not give us a rich enough sense of how we ordinarily bring together voice and self.

As with voice, recent scholarship on writing and the self rests on a strong assumption that most of us hold onto the naïve concept of a unitary, stable, independent core self. Such a self, writing scholars (and others) point out, is a fiction – if a convenient one – that ignores the multiple, fluid, and permeable discourses we actually use to construct our so-called “selves.”