Posted by Jock on February 02, 2012 at 04:25:32 user Jock.
In Reply to: Re: problem with dates posted by Dave Thewlis on January 31, 2012 at 08:41:40:
Discrepancies like this can provide an insight into an author's own experiences and intentions.
Nikolai Tolstoy, who wrote Patrick O'Brian: The Making of the Novelist, uses this technique
to disentangle the real from the fictional in O'Brian's past.
In the case of the SA/SD 'gap' this, together with the signposting of a deep water cruise at the
end of SA, suggests that in AR's own mind, PD was not originally supposed to be meta-fictional
(the elaborate introductory section at Lowestoft would fit in with this) and was to have taken
place in a summer holiday between SA and SD.
Perhaps, the cruise just got too ambitious to be realistic and the meta-fictional explanation in SD
contrived by AR, late in SD's genesis, to get over the difficulty?