Abstract: Hualing Nie Engle's Images of Three Lives (2007) is the an updated version of her Three Lives (2004). Having kept the main structure of the previous book, Eagle flavoured the new version with small adjustments and addition in the content by way of using some images. As an autobiography by an overseas Chinese, Images of Three Lives is distinctive in its methodological approach to narrative. The most obvious is that by employing a variety forms of narrative perspective and difference of sounds, such as time, intellect, culture and identity, to cast the autobiography into a condensed version of war, exile, emotion as well as a twentieth-century history of the world in cross culture communication. The narrative effect, far beyond an autobiography, leads to a paradigm of polyphonic autobiography. As the narrative progresses, psychological experiences such as resentment and fear which two generations experienced in the war and exile is translated to the twentieth-century worldwide exile motif. From this point of view, female autobiography combines personal life writing with a grand historical narrative.

Key words：Images of Three Lives, autobiography, art of narrative

Zhu Xuchen is Professor in Literature and Law College, Yanshan University, China.  She is member of the Association of Chinese and Foreign Biography and honorary director of Xie Bingying Research Institute. Her research interest is contemporary  Chinese literature, biography studies, overseas Chinese literature, and so on. She has published eleven books such as The Red Sun and Splendid Fall: A Thematic Study of Modern Chinese Female Writers, Aesthetics in Novel Writing, and more than seventy academic papers.