作家ニック・アダムズの「沼地」 : "On Writing" と喪失

概要

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Ernest Hemingway was a writer who was extremely self-conscious about the position of an author in a story and some of his main characters in his published and unpublished stories are writers. The posthumously published story "On Writing" assumes the existence of Nick Adams as a writer somewhere in between the author Hemingway and the character Nick Adams, which requires the readers to differentiate the writer Hemingway and the writer Nick Adams as his artistic persona. "On Writing" was collected for the first time in The Nick Adams Stories edited by Philip Young. This posthumous short piece was the original ending of "Big Two-Hearted River" and Hemingway replaced it with the present one before the publication of the story. In this original ending Hemingway has the writer Nick Adams recollect what seems like Hemingway's own experience. This self-referentiality as in metafiction should not be reduced to the reading that the story is autobiographical. Rather, the original ending's self-referentiality could be interpreted as a strategy of concealment or control of the obviousness of the story's autobiographical character. For that purpose Hemingway might have invented another writer as his artistic persona and have had the persona compose a story of the character Nick Adams as his alter ego.