It is sometimes dangerous to trust an author's comments on his own work, but it is sometimes equally dangerous not to trust him. Schooled in the "intentional fallacy," and wary of authorial pronouncements, modern readers are reluctant to accept uncritically even comments which are accurate and illuminating. Such is the case with John Hawkes. In interviews and essays Hawkes insists that critics have over-emphasized the terror and violence of his novels while underemphasizing their comic form and vision. Thus one of his basic concerns in Second Skin was to clarify the general comic intentions in his writing…. [Hawkes defines] his comic method. "I think that the comic method functions in several ways; on the one hand it serves to create sympathy, compassion, and on the other it's a means for judging human failings as severely as possible." (p. 169)
The reader's reluctance to accept an author's interpretation of his own work extends to Skipper as well as to Hawkes. As author of Second Skin Skipper is just as potentially unreliable, and if critics have ignored Hawkes's conclusions about his novel, they have actively disbelieved Skipper's conclusions about himself. Grasping the fashionable critical handle of "unreliable narrator," critics like [Thomas] LeClair and [John] Kuehl argue that Skipper is a villain, lying to himself and the reader. In some cases, certainly, Skipper is unreliable. One of the major functions of comedy, as Hawkes notes, is ironic exposure of character and society. But Skipper is often reliable as well. The problem with comedy is to maintain the necessary ambivalence of attitude. Dale Underwood's description of the comic hero illuminates Hawkes's attitude toward Skipper:
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