Summary

In "The Artist as Exemplary Sufferer," the first essay of this section, Sontag considers the diaries of the Italian poet and novelist Cesare Pavese in translation. While Pavese is not a major writer in Sontag's opinion, she believes that he deserves more attention in the English-speaking world and notes that these diaries, written in the years leading up to his death by suicide, are approachable without any preexisting familiarity with Pavese's other works.

Sontag finds the diaries, like all personal journals, to be fascinating because they display a degree of intimacy and transparency rarely found in novels, essays, or poems. As such, the diaries provide the reader with a route to the writer's soul. Sontag argues that a pronounced preoccupation with the soul has persisted in Western culture due to the massive influence of Christian introspection and thinkers like St. Paul and St. Augustine...