Ernest Hemingway - Research Paper Example

?Three Stories by Hemingway Introduction All Hemingway’s works, his novels, collections of stories, essays and reports taken together form a well-defined unity. They contain certain themes, motifs, plots, types of characters, artistic techniques, which run through all his works. They pass, sometimes changing, transforming, from one book to another. Themes and motifs, originally discovered by Hemingway in essays and reportages of the 1920s, get their full meaning in his collections of short stories. Many features of the style typical for Hemingway-reporter become leading ones for Hemingway-writer. The paper in which Hemingway worked offered reporters the directions to follow to improve their writing: “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative” (cited in Tyler 15). This includes the distance, reflected in a deliberately emotionless manner of narration, the replacement of description by the show to let the reader evaluate his reading, the functionality and thingness of the prose. Every detail fixes the impression of an event in the story or interlude. This also includes character comparisons, unambiguous and even deliberately limited. Hemingway’s Style Like every great writer, he sought and found his own way in literature. One of his main goals was clarity and brevity of expression; he wanted “to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone” (cited in Bloom 74). Hemingway’s famous short and exact phrase became a subject of controversy in literature – whether the understatement really exists. According to Hemingway, it does. It is based on the deep layers of collective consciousness, on the universal categories of culture, which is raised by the artist in his work and which are enshrined in the customs, ceremonies, various forms of folk festivals, folk subjects of peoples of the world. In those early years, Hemingway also discovered his “dialogue” – his characters are exchanging small phrases, accidentally broken, and the reader feels behind these words, something significant and hidden in the mind, something that cannot be expressed directly. All of Hemingway’s works were interpreted and considered in terms of “being lost”, when the main thing is a search for identity, for example, injured by war, which lost its ideals and its place in the world. Therefore, the object of Hemingway’s study was the tragedy of his contemporaries, thrown into the brutal world of wars, murders and violence, alienation of people from one another. His collections of short stories offer the best samples of psychological narration. This paper considers three stories from two collections: The Killers (1927), Hills Like White Elephants (1927), and The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1936). The works of this period defined the main features of Hemingway’s style of and the main type of his characters. All of them are deeply sensitive and really suffering people. However, centuries old Anglo-Saxon and even sporty self-control causes them to talk quietly, biting one’s lip. His characters can be considered as hard-boiled, though some argue that: T. S. Eliot called Hemingway “the writer of tender sentiment, and true sentiment” (cited in Meyers 19). Hemingway’s dialogue is deliberately sloppy and seemingly insignificant. This is just a mask, sometimes hiding the grimace of pain, which in fact must not be shown to others. And anyway, why should he speak of self-evident things? Dialogue, according to Hemingway, is an easy thing for him, but it would be wrong to assume that this is just a naturalistic account of everyday conversations. No, this is a special kind of seemingly artless, but strictly deliberate selection and sharpening. A short chain of not interconnected phrases performs the basic task – to show the decaying ties of shifted and fragmented world, as it is directly perceived by a troubled mind, not, as it is organized later by a cool mind and fit into the traditional forms. The way of expressing information without any explanation of the author reveals the emptiness and meaninglessness of existence of his characters, and simultaneously the tragic significance of life. Restrained, concise, clear and succinct descriptions of phenomena, events and external actions only underscore the helpless doom of people. And against this restrained and dim background sharp moments appear, when the thought and feeling break through as the flow of incoherent words, or as one simple, yet full of explosive force phrase. When Hemingway is able to subdue it all to the realistic selection, the fine-tuned means of the author achieve the desired effect. The Killers A tragic theme of human helplessness in the face of evil sounds in the story The Killers. Hemingway made the narration “scant and restricted almost entirely to externally observable details” (Small 1). In the story two murderers—Erinyes—embody the idea of inevitable retaliation. They are not even cruel, they do their work smoothly. They do not know anything about the person whom they must kill, they are not interested. The place of a small town in the story creates a quiet provincial atmosphere, sets the theme of hopelessness, helplessness and uselessness, ordinariness and anonymity. The Swede, Ole Anderson, who is the aim of the murderers, knows what awaits him, but he was tired of running around and just waits. A strong Chekhovian tone can be felt in the dialogs, which are “ultraspare, even for Hemingway” (Flora 94): ‘I wonder what he did?’ Nick said. ‘Double-crossed somebody. That’s what they kill them for.’ ‘I’m going to get out of his town,’ Nick said. ‘Yes,’ said George. ‘That’s a good thing to do.’ ‘I can’t stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he’s going to get it. It’s too damned awful.’ ‘Well,’ said George, ‘You better not think about it.’ Hemingway’s images are flat, but it’s a kind of antique masks. We know their names, what they do, roughly imagine how they look like. But this is the minimum of information. We have the psychology of the situation, but there is no psychology of the characters. We do not know the motives of the Swede, we know that he was tired of running, but we do not know how it happened and why is he running. The characters have no history, but they do not need it. They live almost in an unnamed place, devoid of individuality, they are random. Only death which finds the Swede is not random. By the way, the story does not say whether the Swede was killed or not. Hemingway is interested in the taste on the lips, which the condemned people feel, and the atmosphere of “nowhere.” What do we know about the Swede’s past? He was a boxer who once made a mistake somewhere (which eventually brought his assassins to him). But Hemingway does not urge to think about it. Hemingway’s characters often have no history. In the stories his characters find themselves “here and now” – they are part of the situation, not vice versa. This forces the reader to closely monitor what is happening, to involve the imagination, which will draw a convex image, so that the reader can relate himself with the characters. Otherwise one will see only a chronicle episode or feel a parable anti-realism of the characters. Hills Like White Elephants Hemingway has a short story entitled Hills Like White Elephants, which tells about the spiritual tragedy of a young girl. The phrase “white elephant”, which is given in the title and repeatedly sounds in the text is in itself a very capacious: it is used to denote the property that is burdensome, the gift, of which one wants to get rid , etc., all of the property, which requires a wasteful care, but has no benefit. The plot of the story develops in such a way that the word “abortion” is not pronounced; in different situations only the phrase “white elephants” appears, highlighting the different facets of its value. The style of the great writer, like the underwater part of the iceberg, hides not only the word “abortion”, but the fear of young girl, who do not realize the pain of not conceived child that was not destined to see the light of world. The dream of the girl of the child is inextricably linked to her dream of happiness and family life, and these properties are genetically inherent in every woman, they are essential purpose and responsibility: to be a parent, the one who gives life, the very name of the first female “Eve” means “life”. For the girl abortion is the collapse of last resort, leading only to continuation of a meaningless life. Hemingway skillfully draws the hills whitening in the sun, scorched mercilessly by the sun, the earth and the green fields and shady stream banks and moving cloud shadows. These contrasting images are full of functional significance. These are the stages of mental state of the girl, which is likened to the scorched earth. Initially, the girl likes the comparison of the hills with white elephants, in the middle of the story this image appears again, but this time there are heartbreaking notes of doubt. In the final part the white elephants reappear, but the girl’s eyes can only see how they go down into a parched valley. Along with the dream of a child the girl loses colors of the world and hopes for happiness: they fade together. The decision—to kill her unborn child—turns into a profound psychological stress; she instinctively knows that she loses the highest value. There is the perception of futility, absurdity, irreplaceable emptiness of life, sense of terrible spiritual poverty. She feels that life will become unstable; it will lose stability, love will turn into a heartless and bitter loneliness. In this life place of genuine values will be ??occupied by fiction. How can one exist in this world, how can one find the real values ??of life, something one cannot lose, that may become the main principle of life? Gloom spreads not only around man, but it imperatively penetrates man himself. And then man has nothing to rely on, no one waits for him. He is powerless before the power of chaos. “It was all nothing and a man was nothing, too…” – a bitter remark of one of Hemingway’s characters from the story A Clean Well-Lighted Place is the best description of the spiritual condition of young woman. The Snows of Kilimanjaro Another story, which gives example of Hemingway’s unique style, is The Snows of Kilimanjaro. This story is also the expression of Hemingway’s creative crisis. The author tells about a certain writer Harry. Once he had lived a full life; he was going to write about what he saw and knew, and what he has no time to write about. He became a man of a rich wife, found himself among wealthy, boring people. With them he drinks all sorts of fancy cocktails, hunts, talks about art, lives in their midst as a spy, who hopes to get away from them when he writes about them. But in fact he had long been a hostage in the enemy camp. And it is more convenient for them that he does not work and by idleness and comfort, by drunkenness and laziness, by sybaritism and snobbery, “by hook or crook” they destroyed his talent. Ahead of him is the worst kind of death – creative sterility. He travels to Africa in the vain hope that he will be able to get rid of the fat in his soul. A vain hope indeed. He is “just a snake with broken back”; he will experience only a tiny scratch on the hunt, blood poisoning, gangrene and death. The story of his dying included echoes of the past (highlighted in italics): he remembers his grandfather and family, frontline comrades, comrades of the pen, those descendants of the Communards, among whom he lived in the Rue Cardinal Lemoine in Paris. And these memories only emphasize his present loneliness. When one reads about recently known facts from the life of young Hemingway and his early newspaper articles, one may involuntarily notice that this is just what Harry would tell, but never told. In this sense, an unusually strong and talented story was still a belated payment of overdue creative bills. The story at first glance is full of hopelessness. However, the death of writer Harry is as if the image of his purification from the defilement; death is liberation from the past. Writer Harry hates those who bent under the blows of fate. And even with a broken spine he is a man alive and changes his skin. It reminds of the internal crisis of Hemingway. For some time he was neither cold nor hot, and here is retribution – he also for some period as if lost his talent. Entangled in the very environment that is condemned by writer Harry, Hemingway could not finish his own novel, a forced and involuntary incoherence of which reflects the complexity and fragmentation of his world no less than deliberate ragged memories included in the story The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Conclusion Short story appeared to be the genre which formed Hemingway’s unique style. Being a reporter Hemingway learned to use a specific journalist language, which makes most of his stories. The principle of iceberg, short dialog, no author’s comment – all these make Hemingway probably most copied writer of the world. The sense of tragedy runs through most of the works of Hemingway’s first decade of work - since the mid-20s to mid-30s. Surrounding reality is perceived by the writer as a mosaic of large and small human tragedies, which embodied fruitless quest for happiness, a hopeless quest for harmony within oneself, solitude among people, attempts doomed to defeat to find enduring spiritual values ??and moral ideal. Bibliography Bloom, Harold. Ernest Hemingway. NY: Infobase Publishing, 2005 Hemingway, Ernest. A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. Retrieved 29.04.11 from Hemingway, Ernest. The Killers. Retrieved 29.04.11 from Tyler, Lisa. Student Companion to Ernest Hemingway. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. Meyers, Jeffrey. Ernest Hemingway: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1997. Flora, Joseph. M. Hemingway’s Nick Adams. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State UP, 1982. Small, Judy. Hemingway versus Anderson: The Final Rounds, “The Hemingway Review”. Volume: 14. Issue: 2, 1995. P. 1 Read More