In autobiographical literary journalistic texts, the author functions as an on-page character as well as a real-life human being. According to Lejeune, the author “is not just a person, he is a person who writes and publishes. With one foot in the text, and one outside, he is the point of contact between the two,” (200). In order to maintain authenticity, the two must bear cohesive identity markers, drawing attention to cohesion between the self in the story and the author's own self. So, the autobiographical intent of the text “is the affirmation in the text of this identity, referring in the last resort to the name of the author on the cover,” (200). Hence, a writer, who appears in his/her own text, automatically becomes in contact with the
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Through the formal division of the book into two parts, Mailer seeks to establish an inquiry about the status of genres traditionally polarized as fiction and history, literature and journalism, novel and history. In this sense, if the first part of the work appears to be a novel about the March, Mailer says, because of the fictional techniques employed, on the other hand it also approaches the biography, a kind of autobiographical document that reflects "the author’s memory scrupulous to facts"; according to him, that approach would be history, true story. The second part, "while dutiful to all newspaper accounts, eyewitness reports, and historic inductions available, while even obedient to a general style of historical writing, at least up to this point, while even pretending to be a history (on the basis of its introduction) is finally now to be disclosed at some sort of condensation of a collective novel” (The Armies …show more content…
Here is the key to understanding the choice by Mailer Wolfe called "third-person autobiographical form" (Wolfe 189). It is a form in which the first person disguised in the third person. It is a trick that helps to create sympathy for the character constructed fictionally, distancing it from the author's figure through the use of a first person whose commitment with itself and its positions become the story of the March, as it was told, dubious and self-referential. Instead, assuming the function of “an eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan,” and that is, moreover, “ambiguous in his own proportions, a comic hero" whose category is difficult to establish, the author prevents accommodation of the reader to passive desire to “know” what “really
Through the formal division of the book into two parts, Mailer seeks to establish an inquiry about the status of genres traditionally polarized as fiction and history, literature and journalism, novel and history. In this sense, if the first part of the work appears to be a novel about the March, Mailer says, because of the fictional techniques employed, on the other hand it also approaches the biography, a kind of autobiographical document that reflects "the author’s memory scrupulous to facts"; according to him, that approach would be history, true story. The second part, "while dutiful to all newspaper accounts, eyewitness reports, and historic inductions available, while even obedient to a general style of historical writing, at least up to this point, while even pretending to be a history (on the basis of its introduction) is finally now to be disclosed at some sort of condensation of a collective novel” (The Armies …show more content…
Here is the key to understanding the choice by Mailer Wolfe called "third-person autobiographical form" (Wolfe 189). It is a form in which the first person disguised in the third person. It is a trick that helps to create sympathy for the character constructed fictionally, distancing it from the author's figure through the use of a first person whose commitment with itself and its positions become the story of the March, as it was told, dubious and self-referential. Instead, assuming the function of “an eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan,” and that is, moreover, “ambiguous in his own proportions, a comic hero" whose category is difficult to establish, the author prevents accommodation of the reader to passive desire to “know” what “really