Norman Mailer’s The Fight

Hemingway, Bullfighting, and the Lovely Metaphysics of Boxing

Abstract

Although Norman Mailer’s The Fight is ostensibly reportage about the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman championship heavyweight boxing match, we learn more about Mailer and his aesthetic and artistic values than we do about either fighter. One of Mailer’s methods for capturing his Zaire experience is to employ Ernest Hemingway as a ghostly father figure, a doppelgänger, both an inspiration and a nagging reminder of his own inadequacies. An intertextual analysis of these two writers demonstrates the way Mailer uses boxing to offer his inflection of Hemingway’s twentieth-century themes.