The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead: Difference between revisions

The illustration of Hemingway’s calculus in ARIT encourages an understanding of his earlier narrative structures — arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The experience of trauma in the culture-at-large also privileges a sense of awareness of the past mythic narrative structures of war. Hemingway’s narrative structure of calculus captures the experience of war trauma in ARIT embodies yet transcends previous narrative structures. Hemingway{{efn|Hemingway, in a (1959) introduction unpublished until 1981, examines the progression of his writing career. In this essay written two years before his suicide, he hits on the importance of trauma in relation to his evolution as a writer. Towards the end of the passage meant for a collection of Hemingway’s short fiction, Hemingway writes,

Hemingway captures in this section the progression of his work in relation to the trauma he experienced. The various “woundings” Hemingway experiences contribute “after the damage” depicted is long gone to the creation of narratives, including the oft-dismissed ARIT. These narratives capture a sense of the trauma experienced and remembered by Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway in Across the River and into the Trees reflects the unhinging and play of certain thought-to-be-stable notions of subjectivity and objectivity in his fiction. The evolution of Hemingway as a writer is a result of the trauma experienced and remembered. He observes, “but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it” (10).

Hemingway’s ''Across the River'' and ''Into the Trees'' correlates his experiences and memories of trauma to his fiction.}} offers in the narrative calculus of ARIT a study of change in relation to the experience of trauma as the focus of his fiction, instead of the exploration of the effects of trauma or the spatial experience of trauma. Hemingway writes that Richard Cantwell observes that “[h]e [Gran Maestro] and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die; not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday” {{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=61}}. In this passage, the external observations of the men are characterized as coalescing with the internal impressions of the narrator. The narrative calculus unfolds as Hemingway appears to examine the alterations of the narrative presence via the figure of Cantwell and his experiences of trauma. The presentation and representation of trauma, as an abject awareness and state, represents a variable that enables a narrative evolution in the structure of ARIT. The narrative’s treatment of trauma, which gives voice to an experience that is abject, alters the presentation of person, space, and time in the narrative structure of the novel.

Mailer’s novel adopts narrative strata that also illustrates a questioning of the previous representation of objectivity and subjectivity in war narratives. John Limon observes that NAD displays four levels of narrative influence in the work’s content and structure. For Limon, Mailer’s work reflects the in fluence of World War I—in its modernist meanderings, World War II—in its witnessing, interrogation, and visioning of totalitarianism, Cold War—in the book’s ideology, and World War III—in its prediction and inchoate eschatology {{sfn|Limon|1994|p=134}}.These four elements of influence on Mailer’s text contribute to an understanding of how the “Time Machine” sections operate in the structuring of the narrative. {{efn|The time machine sections notably display the influence of John Dos Passos on Mailer’s writing and textual construction.}} Similar to Hemingway’s treatment involving