William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow and the Autobiographical Impulse
Like all novels with first-person narrators, So Long is, of course, a novel about an autobiographer, but its unusual structure foregrounds one of the thorniest questions in contemporary literary theory-the question of whether one can make any meaningful distinctions between autobiography and fiction...
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| Published in: | Critique - Bolingbroke Society 2006-03, Vol.47 (3), p.261-273 |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Like all novels with first-person narrators, So Long is, of course, a novel about an autobiographer, but its unusual structure foregrounds one of the thorniest questions in contemporary literary theory-the question of whether one can make any meaningful distinctions between autobiography and fiction. In its representation of an autobiographer driven by an existential imperative to attempt a reconstruction of his past that he knows from the start will fail, Maxwell's novel anticipates the work of scholars such as Phillipe Lejeune, Paul John Eakin, and Angel G. Loureiro, theorists who have attempted to explain why autobiography refuses to die and why they themselves continue to find the genre distinction meaningful. |
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| ISSN: | 0011-1619 1939-9138 1939-9138 |