永遠の現在の探求者 : アーネスト・ヘミングウェイの軌跡
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概要
- 論文の詳細を見る
Ernest Hemingway, compared with other contemporary writers, has a vision much limited. He had to see life through the narrow opening between life and death on account of his close experience of death at the age of eighteen during World War 1. His heroes are always conscious of death. This has been the cause in his early works, for instance, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, that they have no relation with the society in which they live except for seeing it negatively. After creating his heroes, Hemingway must have known that they were not living real lives. The 1930's was, in this sense, the period when Hemingway was trying to create a hero who could find something to justify himself. He took his heroes back to society. But they couldn't understand the relation between their own lives and the society in which they were made to live and were obliged to die in vain, for example, the hero in For Whom the Bell Tolls. As the result, Hemingway lost the sense of the identity of his own heroes and after he had written For Whom the Bell Tolls he kept silence for next ten years. A new hero, Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, who was born laboriously through the writer's agony, stands aloof from death and can live truly as a man in the present. We can find out a universal human being in the life of Santiago. This means that at last Hemingway was able to find his own identity as well as his hero's. As we know, Hemingway was very much interested in Einstein's scientific theory of relativity, in Ouspensky's A New Model of the Universe and in Bergson's theory of time. In The Old Man and the Sea he at last succeeded in considering the world of the fifth dimension shown in Green Hills of Africa in relation to these ideas. In other words, he found out that in order to make his hero live truly there was nothing to do but to place him in a "perpetual now." "Perpetual now" is the only dimension where the heroes of American literature who can't feel the weight of time can live real lives. In this sense, The Old Man and the Sea suggests to us that Hemingway has attained for the first time a level of writing where man triumphs over death.
- 東京女子大学の論文
- 1974-03-01