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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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So how do we understand “Snows” and “The Crack-Up” today? Both authors were undergoing a significant and profound transformation—both in spirit and in the psyche. Donaldson suggests there had been an “alienation from self." {{sfn|Donaldson|1980|pp=184}}, which seems plausible. War and the Depression had brought vast amounts of suffering and loss into people’s lives. The actions taken by each author are clear. Fitzgerald commits to be “a writer only,” less the Jazz Age playboy.<sup>21</sup> Hemingway, for his part, decides he will not make Harry’s mistake: he will write the stories. | So how do we understand “Snows” and “The Crack-Up” today? Both authors were undergoing a significant and profound transformation—both in spirit and in the psyche. Donaldson suggests there had been an “alienation from self." {{sfn|Donaldson|1980|pp=184}}, which seems plausible. War and the Depression had brought vast amounts of suffering and loss into people’s lives. The actions taken by each author are clear. Fitzgerald commits to be “a writer only,” less the Jazz Age playboy.<sup>21</sup> Hemingway, for his part, decides he will not make Harry’s mistake: he will write the stories. | ||
Initially, it could appear that Hemingway’s response in “Snows” is more successful in narrative technique, less bound by the particular context of the 1930s, and more timeless as a literary work. That view seems plausible. However, by including Fitzgerald’s other essays from the 1930s to form a wider “autobiographical sequence,” {{sfn|Wilson|1993|pp=11}} his original 1936 articles reveal a mature perspective on that cultural context—the contradictions of America in the 1920s and 1930s—that goes beyond anything Hemingway could have written. | |||
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