Lillian Hellman Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Pam Bromberg

Critical Essay by Pam Bromberg

Maybe is a more resonant, coherent, and ambitious work than its scattered narrative at first suggests….

If we look at Maybe as a speculative inquiry into the nature of truth and of memory, a way of asking what can we know about another person or our own lives, then Hellman's choice of relatively marginal central figures serves to reinforce her interest in how memory works as well as what it recalls. But Maybe is more than an exercise in epistemology…. Despite, or perhaps because of, their marginality Hellman needs to know who the Camerons were to know herself…. (p. 5)

[The] structural disorder of the narrative may be read as a thematic statement about the tension between the need for order and intelligibility as it conflicts with the desire to find the truth….

Maybe … is nearly as much a self-reflexive study of autobiography as it is the story of...
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