The Scapegoat's Scapegoat: A Girardian Reading of Across the River and into the Trees

The "pock-marked" writer in Across the River and into the Trees is frequently dismissed as having only biographical significance as Hemingway's thinly veiled caricature of Sinclair Lewis. However, by applying René Girard's theories of persecution and scapegoating, Cantwell's fixation on and victimization of this character is part of a larger pattern of ritualized violence and blame transference that is present throughout the novel. Examining this pattern provides new understanding of Hemingway's often critically dismissed novel, and his other works, as an explication and criticism of how violence and ritual are used to create order in the modern world.