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The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself: Difference between revisions
The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself (view source)
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Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory” (Harding ), right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text” (Harding ). Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his angst. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex fictive form to do so. | Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory” (Harding ), right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text” (Harding ). Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his angst. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex fictive form to do so. | ||
Sadly, however, his “final control of the text” (Harding ), as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of the iceberg. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway, | Sadly, however, his “final control of the text” (Harding ), as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of the iceberg. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway, | ||
:Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg (Burwell –). | |||
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