The Hemingway Hero - Essay Example

The Hemingway Hero According to Hemingway Para 2 “we were all at the hospital every afternoon…” it illustrates that soldiers did not go to the war anymore because they were injured. The narrator being among the soldiers, was injured at the knee where they have been receiving treatment through the help of exercising machines. His other colleagues for example include the Italian soldier who had an injured hand.One of the irony includes the wounded major who had little hands like of a baby’s but was still the best fencer in football…“before the war the greatest fencer in Italy” (Hemingway Para 7).

Another irony is when the soldiers go to the hospital to receive treatment but on the contrary, do not trust in cure from the machine “…there was a time when none of us believed in the machines…” (Hemingway Para 16). The other irony exists where the two Italian soldiers wished to be a lawyer and a painter respectively but instead became soldiers“…and one of them was to be a lawyer, and one was to be a painter…” (Hemingway Para 12).According to Hemingway the characters are expected to display heroic values where some however fails to meet the expectations of the family and the society.

In Hemingway Para 23 the major said “…a man must not marry.” It outlines the ideology of how servicemen fear marriage due to the burden of losing their loved ones or their lives while on the job. The term country ironically outlines how the military men are hated by country people while contrarily, they were indeed protecting them“…and sometimes having to walk into the street when the men and women crowd together…the people who disliked us, did not understand” (Hemingway Para 13).

The narrative symbolically uses servicemen to illustrate the challenges they go through during their duties and subsequently the negative and positive perceptions they receive from the countrymen from their actions (Hemingway Para 13). The narrative also explains the medals sometimes the servicemen wish to be awarded as compared to the rewards other citizens attain with minimal effort and suffering “…although I was their friend against the outsiders…and they had done very different things to get their medals” (Hemingway Para 16).

Country has also been used to indicate the patriotism that existed in Italy among certain groups of people “the girls at the Cova were very patriotic, and I found…the most patriotic people in Italy were the café girls…” (Hemingway Para 14). The narrator dislikes the machines due to their lack of evidence in providing cure. The machines were new in the health sector and there was little hope from the soldiers they could perform. The soldiers were expected to act as testees of the new machines “the machines were new then and it was we who were to prove them.

It was an idiotic idea…” (Hemingway Para 19). The soldiers assumed that heroes play football regularly and the machines would not cause any beneficial help to them.Works citedHemingway, Ernest. In Another Country. 1926. Web 26th June 2015