"All this at last I dimly saw, but an autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last instalment missing. We think we write definitively of those parts of our nature that are dead and therefore beyond change, but that which writes is still changing - still in doubt. Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to a mountain of self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and hungry...." (Crisp 222)By reading the last paragraph of Quentin Crisp's autobiography you can sense what the general feeling of The Naked Civil Servant is. It's utterly depressing. Crisp had to endure a lot of hardships during his life, because he is an eccentric homosexual in London before and during the second World War. Apparently, this accompanies bullying by the general public and even violence by the police.
This book isn't actually eye opening. I don't know what Crisp intended to accomplish by writing it. I assume that he just wanted to tell someone his story, but as he says himself:
"Of course the most obvious explanation for my total lack of success was that I was a bad writer." (Crisp 187)There is no uplifting emotion throughout this book. It is written with so much sadness, even though the author does not, I feel, give me enough details to actually show this emotion. He even brushes the harassment by the police off as if it is nothing. I understand that he has been detached from every emotion in his life, simply because his life would have been even harder to bare, but if you want to write a book about you life you have to open up. And Crisp failed to do so.
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