“he haD neveR wRiTTen a woRD oF ThaT”: RegReT anD coUnTeRFacTUals in hemingway’s “The snows oF KilimanJaRo”
JENNIFER RIDDLE HARDING
Washington and Jefferson College
is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment. WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN: BRIEF THEORETICAL GROUNDING Examination of the counterfactual as a linguistic form has a long history in the study of language, and the consideration of “counterfactual thinking” has more recently emerged as an important area of research in social and cognitive psychology. The “counterfactual” has traditionally been defined in technical terms as a conditional sentence with a false antecedent (see Lewis). I use the term as it has commonly been used by psychologists, to refer to narratives of unrealized alternatives, or what-might-have-been scenarios (Roese and Olson 1). It is important to keep in mind, though, that a counterfactual scenario has both a linguistic and cognitive dimension, a fact that has been investigated at length by cognitive linguists including Dancygier and Sweetser, Fillmore, Fauconnier and Fauconnier in partnership with Turner. As described by Gilles Fauconnier in his book Mental Spaces, speakers typically introduce the counterfactual into discourse by using a specific set of grammatical and lexical forms to indicate that a scenario is counterfactual and not actual; these forms include negatives, modal verbs, and conditional sentences (111-116). The counterfactual scenario departs in some specific and meaningful way from events viewed as actual by the speaker.
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