Hemingway

I have always had a deep appreciation for the writing of Ernest Hemingway. Recently however, I have written a paper for a College Writing II : Literature on Hemingway. The incites gain from writing this paper have only deepened and enriched my love of Papa Hemingway and his work.

The assingment was to analyse the style of a author of story or poem that is discussed in our textbook and then to argue wether this work was indictative of the authors style or a departure from the style. 'Hills Like White Elephants' was the only Heminway story in our book, my only other choice that interested my was a short story out of Dubliners by James Joyce. Initially, I wanted to do the analyses of Joyce's style but quickly realizing the inconsitentcy of style between Dubliners and Joyce's later work I found this unsatisfactory.

What really struck me as the paper lay completed before me, was the main stylistic and thematic components of Hemingway's work.

Stylisticly his prose is suprisingly like good poetry, the loading of the prose is such that the work seems symplistic untill a deep and thurogh understanding(grokking) has taken place. Heminway does not tell you how to feel about a character or situation, but instead presents the characters and situations in such a cold and objective way that we develop our own feelings for them. This more approaches the Truth of a situation, Truth is realative to the observer, a Truth that Hemingway observed might be different than a Truth that I might observe nearly 80yrs after the fact. There is a certain intellectual honesty in this.

Thematically, Hemingway uses a dualistic conflict between meaning and non-meaning('nothingness'). His characters struggle to find meaning during a struggle that is often doomed to failure, the lesson is that failure or defeat is acceptable, but humiliation or loss of dignity is not. Many times Hemingway uses violence or violent situations to expose this conflict and to raise the tension of the conflict. In each and everyone of our lives' we struggle to find meaning and to overcome obstacles that are set before us, the lesson finally is two-fold:

1. Do not let life bow your head, maintain your dignity. Facing defeat with dignity, gives the struggle meaning.
   
2. We all die in the end. Ultimatly we face the personal violence and darkeness of the confrontation of death and we face it alone. Facing death with dignity, gives life meaning.