The biographer has to dance between two shaky positions with respect to the subject (研究对象) . Too close a relation, and the writer may lose objectivity. Not close enough, and the writer may lack the sympathy necessary to any effort to portray a mind, a soul—the quality of life. Who should write the biography of a family, for example? Because of their closeness to the subject, family members may have special information, but by the same token, they may not have the distance that would allow them to be fair. Similarly, a king's servant might not be the best one to write a biography of that king. But a foreigner might not have the knowledge and sympathy necessary to write the king's biography—not for a readership from within the kingdom, at any rate.
There is no ideal position for such a task. The biographer has to work with the position he or she has in the world, adjusting that position as necessary to deal with the subject. Every position has strengths and weaknesses: to thrive, a writer must try to become aware of these, evaluate them in terms of the subject, and select a position accordingly.
When their subjects are heroes or famous figures, biographies often reveal a democratic motive: they attempt to show that their subjects are only human, no better than anyone else. Other biographies are meant to change us, to invite us to become better than we are. The biographies of Jesus (耶稣) found in the Bible are in this class.
Biographers may claim that their account is the "authentic" one. In advancing this claim, they are helped if the biography is "authorized" by the subject; this presumably allows the biographer special access to private information. "Unauthorized" biographies also have their appeal, however, since they can suggest an independence of mind in the biographer. In book promotions, the "unauthorized" characterisation usually suggests the prospect of juicy gossip that the subject had hoped to suppress. A subject might have several biographies, even several "authentic" ones. We sense intuitively that no one is in a position to tell "the" story of a life, perhaps not even the subject, and this has been proved by the history of biography.
