Cather, Hemmingway, and Fitzgerald - Essay Example

?Amanda Corday American Short Story Nicholas Birns 6/30/12 Cather, Hemmingway, and Fitzgerald Paul’s Case, the Hills like White Elephants, and Babylon Revisited all used contemporary writing styles plus they included masteries of the art of narratives. The three authors’ styles were fundamentally shaped due to their past life experience. Hemingway was mostly thought to have acquired his writing styles from his previous war experience. In his story, The Hills like White Elephants, he uses a great deal of dialogue, action, as well as suspense to create the joy in reading it (Hemingway 4). These three traits are also dominant in Paul’s Case as well as Babylon Revisited. The three books also encompass a lot of fiction and imagery. Researchers believe that the three authors discovered how to acquire the most from the least because of their life experience. The stories, because of their respective authors’ life experiences, were in prune language. All three used autobiographical facts in their stories as framing devices about life in general and not only about their lives. For instance, Hemingway uses his war experience and draws them out using what if scenes in The Hills like White Elephants. He uses the “what if” query to ask what if he was taken back to the war front. Thus, he writes in the form of a rhetorical question. The writing styles of the three short stories are also deceptive to the reader. This is a unique style that the three authors all chose to incorporate. For instance, Hemingway and Cather both crafted skeletal sentences so as to make sure that the sentences had a clear understanding. Even though, Fitzgerald used wordy sentences in his work, some of his sentences were short and straight to the point. The three authors also offer a multifocal photographic reality in their novels. Their sentence structure lacked subordinating conjunctions and this created the static of the sentences. The three authors’ style of imagery sets a pile of illusions in their respective stories. The sentences in the three works build on each other, but it is less vivid in Fitzgerald’s Babylon Revisited. The three authors also use cinematic techniques to cut their scenes rapidly so as to progress to the next scenario. This is, however, mostly dominant with Hemingway in The Hills like White Elephants (Hemingway 4). Critics think that this style of writing permitted the person who reads to fill up the spaces left in the story. This totally puts the author in control of the reader. Narrative strength, imagination, as well as brevity, are the main hallmarks of the three books. The authors, in addition, used minimal description, background and explanations of the characters, leaving character maturity to the dialogue in the story. Readers had to pick up facts regarding the characters in bits and pieces, through the lines they speak, clothes they put on and how they relate with other characters. All the three authors used a lot of foreshadowing. They used foreshadowing early in their books to hint what was to come next. The three short stories also revolve around conflict. This refers to the opposition between two or more forces. Conflict could be internal for instance in The Hills like White Elephants, and it can also be external for instance in Paul’s Case and Revisited. The three authors used conflict to add excitement plus to get the attention of the readers. It should also be recognized that the three authors, mostly Hemingway, used the word ‘and’ instead of commas. This application of polysyndeton was to covey immediacy in the three writings. Also, given the reason that the books are short stories, they all encompass one theme each. The writing styles of Cather, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, are uniquely different. Take, for example, the relevance of their titles: Paul’s Case referred to the way Paul’s educator and his father refer to Paul regarding his lack of interest in learning. Babylon Revisited refers to a true experience that Fitzgerald and his family had during the U.S crash of 1929. They compared these experiences to the wars that took place during the times of Babylon. The Hills like White Elephants, on the other hand, refers to high obstacles that people must climb so as to get through their problems in life. This title shows that the young woman who was pregnant had a tough obstacle in her life. Being pregnant at a young age is an enormous challenge, so the girl had to choose between aborting the baby and facing the hurdles of bringing the baby up. The ending of the three books were, however, unexpected. While reading the short stories a reader could be able to predict how the stories would end, but at the end it was the opposites. This was one on the main similarities of the three author’s techniques. Hemingway uses short and crisp sentences in The Hills like White Elephants. He writes with a feeling of mystery in his voice and the short sentences help his points to come out appropriately. Cather and Fitzgerald, on the other hand, write wordy and long sentences that are extremely different from Hemingway’s plus the sentences are vivid. Cather in Paul’s Case uses wordy as well as short sentences to convey her messages. She also uses flashbacks to write her story (Cather 4). Cather, unlike the other two authors, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, is descriptive but still curt in her story. Hemingway and Fitzgerald, unlike Cather, use a lot of adjectives as well as figurative language in their writings clearly to describe scenarios. Their descriptions are extremely poetic owing to the comparisons they formulate as well as the way they break up the descriptions using punctuation marks. Even though, Fitzgerald uses a lot of adjectives and punctuation marks, he also applies free writing styles in Babylon Revisited. One of the major differences among Cather, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, is that Hemingway applies a lot of dialogue in The Hills like White Elephants, unlike Fitzgerald in Babylon Revisited and Cather in Paul’s Case. Majority of The Hills like White Elephants is dialogue, and there are not many scenes that are told by a narrator. Most of Paul’s Case and Babylon Revisited are told by a narrator although some parts are dialogues. This makes the two stories similar in that field, unlike The Hills like White Elephants. The three short stories are, however, similar in that they all do not make the meaning of a sentence seem so obvious. When a person reads the three books, he, or she will be left wondering what the point was when the author mentioned that statement and what were its relevance. The stories of both Hemingway and Fitzgerald are told by the main character, who is also the narrator. Cather, however, uses the third person’s point of view to write her novel, Paul’s Case, and she uses thoughts of the main character instead of telling the story from the third person approach of the omniscient narrator (Cather 5). Cather, in comparison to Hemingway and Fitzgerald, also uses a controversial style of writing. In Paul’s Case, Cather writes in the way that people might talk in their daily lives. This makes the reader see what Cather was thinking in her writing. Even though, Cather uses some fancy language, the story still comes out as a way people would talk in their normal lives. Hemingway and Fitzgerald make their work figurative, but Cather, on the other hand, makes her work natural and it also sounds like someone was writing out what was taking place around his or her life. Hemingway writes in a way that describes matters almost as if he were going through them. He starts The Hills like White Elephants by describing the setting (Hemingway 6). He also goes into detail about the scenario as well as the different aspects of the characters in the short story. This makes the reader feel as if he or she is in the story. His story, The Hills like White Elephants, gives the reader an excellent and vivid imagery of the scene he is talking about, but it, however, sometime goes on and on until it loses its interest. Hemingway still manages to leave the reader in suspense, which is arguably the most impressive part of his writing (Hemingway 6). Hemingway’s story was also more unified in place and time than the two other writings in similar settings and modes. He manages to maintain on setting unlike the other two authors. In conclusion, it is obvious that these three authors’ writings techniques are different and similar in a number of ways. The key aspects in their writings included sentence structure, length, variation as well as position. They also applied sensory details as well as figurative language especially in Hemingway. The three authors also used sound devices such as onomatopoeia, alliteration, rhythm as well as repetition. The tone of the stories were all dull, but what was outstanding is that Hemingway managed to use dialogue to show the dullness of the situation unlike the other two authors who used the third person point of view. Although these similarities and differences seem to be general, it is these small matters that create the significant differences in these three pivotal American short stories. Works Cited Cather, Willa. Paul’s Case. Montana: Kessinger Publishing, 2005. Print. Fitzgerald, Scott. Babylon Revisited: And Other Stories. New York: Scribner, 1996. Print. Hemingway, Ernest. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition. New York: Scribner, 1998. Print. Read More