28 pages • 56 minutes read
MacKinlay KantorA Man Who Had No Eyes
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1931A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: MacKinlay Kantor
MacKinlay Kantor was born in 1904 and started writing in the early 1920s. He became known for his historical novels set against the backdrops of the American Civil War and World War II. His novel Andersonville (1955), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1956, is his most famous Civil War novel. Kantor’s novel Glory for Me (1945) was based on his Word War II experiences and written in blank verse. It was adapted into the movie The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and won several Academy Awards.
The short story “A Man Who Had No Eyes,” published in 1931, belongs to Kantor’s early series of fiction, which his journalistic writings heavily influenced. As a young man, Kantor used to report for The Webster City Daily News and write columns for The Des Moines Tribune. Between the years 1928 and 1934, Kantor produced innumerable pulp short stories, mostly detective and horror fiction, that were published in popular magazines such as Real Detective Tales and Mystery Stories. These stories were characterized by brisk action, tight plotlines, suspense, and surprise endings. In this context, “A Man Who Had No Eyes”—with its terse language and clever use of coincidence and plot twist—bears the marks of Kantor’s early attempts at writing fiction. The extremely short story is structured to grab the attention of the readers, and the fast-paced narrative, coupled with the shocking ending, makes it a perfect example of one of Kantor’s many suspense stories.
Literary Context: Flash Fiction and the Iceberg Theory
“A Man Who Had No Eyes” is an example of flash fiction, or an extremely short story written in the tradition of 19th- and early 20th-century American short stories. Although the term “flash fiction” was coined in 1992 by James Thomas in the introduction to the anthology Flash Fiction: Very Short Stories, the trend of writing very short stories was popular in the 1920s. Galleon Press anthologized some of these short tales in The American Short Short Story (1933).
Ernest Hemingway was one of the most prominent proponents of short fiction. He used this form in his first collection of short stories, In Our Time (1925). He introduced a style of writing fiction that he called his “iceberg theory,” or “theory of omission.” The iceberg theory describes a writing technique wherein the author purposefully leaves out most of the background details or events of a story to focus on the immediate, surface-level action and increase the intensity of the impact on the readers:
If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing (Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932).
Hemingway was MacKinlay Kantor’s contemporary and literary role model, and both were journalists before they started writing fiction. As a fellow journalist-turned-writer, Hemingway exerted a huge influence on Kantor, and the iceberg style of writing is evident in “A Man Who Had No Eyes.” Kantor intentionally omits major background information, such as Mr. Parsons’s blindness, the Westbury accident, and the setting, to increase the intensity of suspense and to precipitate the plot twist.
