The boxer-hero as literary tragic figure: A study in contemporary relocation

Abstract

Alexander Solzhenitsyn declared in his Nobel Prize speech that literature best conveys the life experience of humans from nation to nation, from century to century. It is to that record that future generations will go to discover the mythos by which a given society endures. Heroism is the special prerogative of no single era. True, Periclean Greece and Elizabethan England- to name only two- provided the terrain, especially in their literature, for heroism to flourish. This study has sought to locate a single modern counterpart to one of classical tragedy's staple figures, the warrior-hero. It has found him, in new guise in the boxer-hero of contemporary literature. The contemporary relocation of this concept is illustrated in the selected works of seven American authors who published their novels, short stories, and plays during the period 1925 to 1969. For the purpose of this study the literary heritage of Ernest Hemingway becomes a transitional force. Hemingway draws heroic fervor from ancient sources while making his heros subject to the peculiar "lostness" of this century. Chapter II of this study follows the linkage, through selected examples in Hemingway's work, between sport and the hero. It chronicles the interpenetration of both by the tragic sense. The Cuban fisherman-hero of Hemingway's novel, The Old Man and The Sea, becomes for this thesis a prototypical sports hero serving to represent one enactment of the tragic warrior hero relocated in a modern setting..