Autobiography is a mode of theological investigation; it is also Merton's via negativa, a way of sundering and reconstituting, a way of purgation and integration. The voluble eremite draped with the mantle of enclosure redefines silence through the power of words. He lives, as he would have it, in the "belly of paradox", and he invites the reader to travel with him on his peregrinatio, his "going forth into strange places", in order to better understand the mystery of the "I". He will explore the dread region of the Shadow—both exterior and interior—and the cadaver minutely dissected for public show will be none other than himself.

Merton's autobiographical writings may smack of rank exhibitionism, and undoubtedly the lonely child of Montauban, Cambridge, and Columbia can be divined at the very heart of many an emotional and spiritual maelstrom, but there is, more importantly, a luminous, grace-suffused honesty about Merton's self-disclosures which continues to engage the interest of mature and critical readers.

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